People We Got To Know in August 2026

Father Joseph Jean-Louis still seems a little amazed that he gets to be a priest at all. He has spent his life going wherever the Church asked him to go, and he has never once treated the privilege as ordinary.

Born in Haiti, he joined the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate as a young man and spent his formation on the move, serving in Colombia, studying in Bolivia, and training in Spain long before he set foot in Florida. He was ordained back home in Haiti in 2003 and came to the United States nearly a decade later. Wherever he has been sent, he has gone, and that readiness is as much a part of him as the collar.

What holds all of that movement together is the Eucharist. Celebrating Mass and preaching bring him a joy he does not try to hide, and he says that every time he lifts the host, he feels the same pull toward the Lord he felt the very first time. He talks about the Real Presence the way other people talk about the love of their life, and he means it plainly. Not long after he came to Christ the King in Miami, he opened a perpetual adoration chapel, twenty-four hours a day, so his community would always have somewhere to pray before the Blessed Sacrament. In a world that has grown comfortable with what is virtual, he wants people to know the difference between that and what is real.

That same conviction is what sent him out again, this time far beyond his own parish. Fr. Joseph was chosen as one of the National Eucharistic Preachers, asked to travel to parishes and dioceses across the country and help people come back to the Eucharist. He does not pretend the work is easy. He calls it a demanding mission, one that asks for real preparation and dedication, and he treats it as simply part of what it means to be a priest.

For all the countries and the miles, what Fr. Joseph keeps returning to is something simple. He still remembers his first Mass as a young priest, holding the host and the chalice and not quite believing that God would let a sinner like him touch the Body and Blood of Christ. Years later, that wonder has not worn off. You can hear it in the invitation he offers to anyone who feels unsure or afraid. Do not be afraid to say yes to Jesus' love.

Fr. Matias Hualpa never planned to be a priest. For most of his life he was an engineer who fully expected to marry and raise a family, and the calling, when it came, caught him completely by surprise. He was, by his own account, a Sunday Catholic, and the first Catholic school he ever walked into was the seminary. The whole turn, he says, came through the Blessed Mother.

Matias was born in San Juan, Argentina, and spent his early career in information systems, including years at IBM and American Express, the job that eventually brought him to South Florida in 2003. Back in Buenos Aires, a young adult group had drawn him deeper into the faith through the Schoenstatt Movement, a Marian devotion whose spirituality he loved, and he kept helping with youth groups once he settled in Miami. It was on a Holy Week trip to a Schoenstatt shrine in Texas that a priest first asked him if he had ever thought about the priesthood. He said no, but the question stayed with him until he finally said yes. He entered the seminary in 2007, was ordained for the Archdiocese of Miami in 2014, and before arriving at Blessed Trinity he spent years at the seminary helping to form the next generation of priests.

In 2023 he was installed as pastor of Blessed Trinity, a small, old community in Virginia Gardens that people once called the open air parish, back in the days when Mass was celebrated under a tent. He has taken to it with real warmth. He carries the Blessed Sacrament through the neighborhood streets on Corpus Christi, throws himself into the annual parish festival, and gives his time to healing ministry and to speaking on behalf of life. But mostly he just likes his people. As he put it before one festival, it is about "a community of people who love to be together," gathered to unwrap the gift of Jesus Christ in each of them. For a man who once had no plans to be a priest at all, it is a fitting place to have landed.

Father Bob Tywoniak is the kind of pastor who is genuinely glad to see you walk through the door. He is friendly, quick with a joke, and warm toward anyone who comes in worn down or unsure they belong. None of us are perfect here, he is the first to say, himself included, and there is always room for one more. "We are faithful," he likes to say. "Come on in."

Public service was almost the family trade. His father served back home in New Jersey as a city councilman and police commissioner, and for a long time Bob assumed he would follow some version of that path, maybe law, maybe elected office. Born in 1957, he had moved to Florida with his family as a boy, and by college he was studying business and pre-law at Stetson University. That is where the plan came undone. On a quiet retreat, he heard what he still describes as an almost audible voice telling him to be a priest. He was ordained in 1983, and more than forty years on, people describe him much the way they always have, less by his titles or his social work credentials than by a plain conviction: faith is something you do, not just something you say.

That conviction has taken real shape for as long as he has worn the collar. Long before Blessed Sacrament, he spent ten years running the child welfare division of Catholic Charities, a trained social worker who liked to joke that God called him to be celibate and then made him "the father of hundreds of kids a year." Over the years he has sat on community boards and a hospital ethics committee and pitched in to feed people who were going hungry. For Bob, the Gospel was never meant to stay in the pulpit. It is something you carry out the door and put to work.

Away from the parish, there is more to him than the collar lets on. He still runs five miles at a time, several days a week, and treats the miles as much like prayer as exercise. He grew up singing and playing the trumpet, and once took the stage in a high school production of "The Sound of Music." He is a longtime fan of "The West Wing," which he thinks captures better than anything else on television just how hard it is to govern. He genuinely likes people, all kinds of them, and has spent much of his ministry in parishes where the pews fill with families from all over.

Through all of it, one thing holds steady. The best part of his week, he has said, is the Sunday liturgy, and everything else makes little sense without it. A line from Mother Teresa, that we are called to be faithful, not successful, has come to mean more to him the longer he has been a priest, especially in the stretches when he built something up only to be moved along before he could see it bear fruit. Ask him what he would most want to be remembered for, and he turns the question around. He hopes people will not really remember him at all, only that being near him felt like being near the love of God, and that afterward they might just wonder, "Who was that guy?"

Bishop Michael Burbidge has spent much of his life around classrooms and young people. Long before he wore a bishop's ring, he was a teacher and a seminary rector, and that love of the classroom never really faded. He has said that if he had not become a priest, he would have wanted to teach in a Catholic school, following the sisters and teachers he grew up admiring.

Warm and unfailingly grateful, he is a man who tends to talk about the people who shaped him more than the offices he has held. He grew up in a close-knit Philadelphia neighborhood of row homes, where everyone walked to church and everyone walked to school, the second son of Francis and Shirley Burbidge. Every single Sunday, his whole family gathered at his grandparents' house for a two o'clock dinner, a tradition he still remembers with real fondness. He calls his upbringing a blessing, and he does not say it lightly.

If there is one thing that has shaped how Bishop Burbidge sees his life, it is the assignments he never expected. Ordained for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, he has said that more than once a new posting caught him off guard, only to become a gift he could not have predicted. He has come to read that pattern as God's hand rather than his own planning, a quiet kind of trust that has carried him from Philadelphia to a decade among the people of Raleigh, a place he came to call home, and on to Arlington.

There is a lighter side he does not always advertise. He is, by his own confession, a big country music fan, partial to Kenny Chesney, and he jokes that he kept this quiet for years for fear his nieces and nephews might disown him. He roots for his Philadelphia Eagles without apology, a loyalty rooted less in the game than in the years of season tickets shared with his father. And he lights up around children in a way that is hard to miss. He still tells the story of pointing to a photo of himself beside Pope Benedict, asking a class of second-graders to name the good-looking one, and hearing every child shout back the pope's name.

The saint he keeps returning to is Thomas More, the patron of his diocese, whose story he loves in both the book and the film that share the title "A Man for All Seasons." What draws him is More's courage under pressure, the willingness to be, as Burbidge likes to put it, God's servant first. Peace and joy, he has said, follow when we stop insisting on our own way and say yes to God's.

Ask Bishop Adam Parker what he expected the priesthood to be, and he will happily tell you he got it wrong. When he was young and first felt the call, he went around questioning every priest he could find about what the day-to-day life was actually like, picturing himself in parishes across the archdiocese for the rest of his life. He laughs about it now. Almost none of it turned out the way he imagined.

That mix of candor and good humor is part of why approachable is the word people reach for first when they meet him, and it holds up across the range of a life that has covered a lot of ground. Parker grew up in Severna Park, Maryland, was ordained for Baltimore, and expected a quiet parish life. Instead his path bent early toward the work of the wider Church. After a few years as a young associate pastor he became priest-secretary to Archbishop Edwin O'Brien, followed him to Rome when O'Brien was made a cardinal, and eventually came home to serve as Vicar General and Moderator of the Curia before he was ordained a bishop. Much of his week now is meetings, committees, and the ordinary business of keeping a large archdiocese running.

But it is the other half of the job that lights him up. Getting out to the parishes and schools, and especially confirming young people, is the part he calls fun. He does about thirty-five confirmations a year and clearly loves being around teenagers, their energy and their questions. That instinct for the person in front of him goes back to the beginning. He started out in a small parish in the mountains of Western Maryland, and of all the blessings and unexpected turns his priesthood has taken since, he says that was the only stretch that ever resembled what he thought being a priest would be. The people there still remember him warmly, and he has never stopped returning to them.

Away from the collar, he is easy company. He is a Ravens fan through and through, with the running joke that the team went to the Super Bowl twice while he happened to be living in Rome, so he has never once been in Baltimore for the excitement. He picked up Italian cooking during his years abroad and makes his own American version of Amatriciana, a peppery Roman pasta. Every year he takes a ten-day hiking vacation, logging fifteen-mile days in places like the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, a habit that started in Switzerland where, as he puts it, he caught the bug. Kayaking the South River is his idea of a good afternoon. And no matter how full the calendar gets, the day starts the same way, with a Holy Hour and Mass he refuses to schedule around, the quiet time he says keeps him grounded. For a man who ended up almost nowhere he expected, he seems entirely at home.

Steven Maekawa leads one of the largest and most remote dioceses in the country, and he wears it lightly. What holds his attention is not how far it stretches but the people scattered across it. Asked what he most looked forward to as a bishop, he did not talk about the size of the job. He said he wanted to meet them, hear their stories, and learn the joys and challenges of their lives.

Prayerful, steady, and quietly tireless, he has carried those qualities through nearly three decades of priesthood, and it is why those who have worked with him tend to describe him not just by his office but by his faithfulness and his readiness to show up wherever he is needed. Long before anyone thought of him as a bishop, he spent years in Alaska and earned a reputation as a devout priest with a genuine love for the place and its people.

He came to the priesthood by way of the drafting table. A fourth-generation Japanese American, he grew up in the Seattle area in a Catholic home, and he was studying architecture at the University of Washington when he met the Dominican friars. Something about their life stayed with him. He joined the Order after graduating, professed his vows, and was ordained a priest in 1998. The years that followed carried him a long way. He served in parishes and at a university Newman Center, led vocations work for the Western Dominicans, and spent about a decade as a chaplain in the Navy Reserve, a role that once took him to Afghanistan. Then came Alaska. As pastor of Holy Family Old Cathedral in Anchorage, he began an outreach to the isolated Yupik and Inuit communities of the Alaskan bush, places cut off from the world by everything but an airfield or a boat landing, and long without a priest of their own. When one of those communities needed him, he was the first to go.

In 2023, Pope Francis named him bishop of Fairbanks, a diocese larger than most countries but home to fewer than twelve thousand Catholics, spread across dozens of parishes, many of them so far-flung they can only be reached by small plane and see a priest just a few times a year. He called the appointment as much a surprise as an honor. His motto, Duc in Altum, means "Put out into the Deep," the words Jesus once spoke to Peter, and they fit a man who has spent his life going out to the places hardest to reach. He has said he cannot think of a more exciting place to serve. For someone who once trained to design buildings, it is a fitting calling, and he is building still, just no longer with brick and stone.

Andrew Bellisario leads one of the largest and most remote territories in the American Catholic Church, and he is strikingly modest about it. What holds his attention instead is the person right in front of him, a way of caring he learned long before he had any title, from his own parents. It is what people who have worked alongside him tend to notice first, not his gifts as an administrator, real as those are, but his warmth, his faithfulness, and what one of them called a shepherd's heart.

That way of caring goes back a long way. He grew up in Alhambra, California, the son of Rocky and Mildred Bellisario, and as a teenager he entered the seminary of the Vincentians, the family of Saint Vincent de Paul, whose work is the service of the poor. He made it his own and never looked back. In the years after his ordination in 1984, he served parishes across California, led his order in the American West, and guided a province of the Daughters of Charity. Through all of it, that calling stayed at the center. His motto says it plainly: Rich in mercy.

All of that California history is what makes the Alaskan chapter so unlikely, even to him. His superiors sent him north to join a Vincentian mission serving Spanish-speaking Catholics. To his own surprise, Pope Francis named him Bishop of Juneau not long after, then the first Archbishop of the new Archdiocese of Anchorage-Juneau. He jokes that he can picture the Holy Father glancing down a list of names and saying, "I want that guy. Tell him to get on out there to Juneau." That work now takes him great distances, by boat, ferry, and small plane, to reach parishes and villages scattered across the state, and he goes gladly.

For all of that, the man underneath the titles has not changed. He treasures his Italian and English roots, tells a good family story, and remains quick to laugh at himself and slow to make much of his own importance. The same spirit keeps him close to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the patroness of Alaska, and to her reminder that God looks not at the greatness of our actions but at the love we put into them. For a man who has built his whole life out of small acts of care, it is a fitting compass. Thinking of the parents who taught him, he returns to the words of Jesus: "Whenever you did that for the least of my brothers, you did it for me."