People We Got To Know in August 2026

Mark Rivituso leads the Catholic Church across the southern half of Alabama, and what catches you first about him is not the size of the territory but how much he lights up at the chance to serve someone. "Every time I have an opportunity to truly serve others, that's truly a blessing," he said with a big smile the day he was named its archbishop, and anyone who has watched him work knows he means it.

Warm, unassuming, and slow to make much of himself, Mark has carried that spirit through nearly four decades of priesthood. The archbishop he succeeded welcomed him as an outstanding bishop, and the high schoolers he once taught still remember a beloved teacher.

That instinct to put people first goes back a long way, to a big, hardworking family in St. Louis. Mark was the sixth of eight children of August and Rosemary Rivituso, and his father, Gus, worked three jobs to keep the family going. His grandmother took him to early Mass on Sundays and helped shape his prayer life, and it was praying before the Blessed Sacrament that he first heard, in his own words, the call from Jesus to become a priest. Even in high school, he already knew where his life was headed.

That calling led him to ordination for St. Louis in 1988, and to decades of service in his home archdiocese as a parish priest, a church-court judge, and eventually its vicar general, before Pope Francis named him an auxiliary bishop in 2017. In 2025, Pope Leo XIV sent him south to Mobile.

For all the titles, what drives him has never really changed. He has never been one to serve from a distance. You are more likely to find him with his sleeves rolled up at a food line or a shelter, meeting people right where they are. He says the first step is not to presume what someone needs but to listen, so he can treat them with the dignity anyone would want. The same spirit makes him happiest working shoulder to shoulder with others, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, anyone of goodwill, because, as he puts it, "we can't do this alone." His heart goes first to the poor, the homeless, the immigrant, the imprisoned, and anyone who feels forgotten, and in Mobile he has spoken of honoring the city's civil rights legacy by fostering racial harmony. It all comes back to what he told his new flock the day he arrived: "Christ calls us to be Christ for one another."

Archbishop Gregory Hartmayer has spent most of his life around classrooms and young people. Long before he wore a bishop's ring, he was a teacher, a counselor, and a principal in Catholic schools, and that part of him never really faded. What he loves most as a bishop is confirmations, the days that put him back among students.

Kind, unassuming, and most himself in a room full of people, he is a priest others tend to describe by his manner more than his title. When Archbishop Wilton Gregory handed Atlanta to him, Gregory told the archdiocese they were getting a gentle and dedicated minister of the gospel, and that is very much the man they found, one who looks for common ground rather than reasons to stand apart.

He came by that spirit honestly. He was born in Buffalo, New York, one of four children whose parents made real sacrifices to keep them in Catholic school, though he jokes that his own years as a student were another story. He joined the Franciscan friars as a young man and never let go of what they taught him. His motto, Pax et bonum, is the old Franciscan greeting for peace and good, and it suits him.

His road began in the classroom, in Baltimore and New York, where he likes to remember the senior honors sociology class he was handed fresh out of college, teaching from a textbook he barely knew and staying, as he puts it, one chapter ahead of his students. From there it ran to a small parish in Jonesboro, Georgia, where fifteen years as pastor gave him the pastoral life that shaped everything after. He was named Bishop of Savannah in 2011 and, in 2020, the seventh Archbishop of Atlanta, installed in the first uncertain weeks of the pandemic before a cathedral emptied of the crowds that should have filled it. He chose to read those empty pews not as a disappointment but as a wake-up call, a reminder of what can quietly slip away when faith is taken for granted.

Through all of it, what tends to stay with people is his warmth. He has sat down with rabbis and imams to pray for peace, and he keeps returning to one simple idea, that everyone without exception is a child of God and a brother or sister on the same journey. Away from the work, he is still a Buffalo boy who golfs, takes long walks, and keeps an eye on the Atlanta Braves. He can talk about an archdiocese of more than a million Catholics in one breath and a single classroom of students in the next, and it is not hard to tell which one still lights him up. We need to listen to our young people more than we do, he once said. Some of them are wiser than the rest of us.

Bishop Joel Konzen has a way of putting people at ease, often before they have even sat down. He is gentle and unhurried, with kind eyes and a voice that makes you feel he is there to serve you rather than the other way around.

He has spent the better part of his life in Catholic education, and yet he carries none of the weight you might expect from a man of his rank. He is a humble man and a teacher at heart, the kind of leader who would rather pull up a chair at the table than sit at the head of it. He makes his decisions with other people, not above them, listening and leaning on their counsel until the right course becomes clear, because, as he puts it, he is "not under any illusion that I have either the only way or the best way a lot of the time."

He grew up in Oak Harbor, a small town east of Toledo, Ohio, the younger of two brothers in a quiet, church-centered household, serving at the altar by the third grade, often right beside his brother. He knew early that he wanted to be a priest and said so to his pastor in the eighth grade, though it took him longer to find where he belonged. That search led him in time to the Marists, drawn by their devotion to Mary and their love of teaching. He likes to say that with the Holy Spirit you cannot see the path in front of you, only trace it once you have passed, and his own traces straight through the classroom. Nearly all of it unfolded at a single school, Marist School in Atlanta, where he taught long before he ever led it, and what he loved most was helping young people claim talents they did not yet know they had. That, more than any title, is the shape of his life, quietly making the people around him a little bigger than they thought they were.

For all of that, the call to become a bishop caught him completely off guard. "I was stunned," he says of 2018. It carried a man who grew up walking to Mass down the block into the service of the Archdiocese of Atlanta and its more than a million Catholics, and the size of it never seems to have changed him. He has always tried to make an impact without leaving much of a wake. Away from the work he is quieter still, a lifelong reader who goes back again and again to Alan Paton and C.S. Lewis, and a writer at heart ever since his school days. His favorite line of Scripture is a question he keeps returning to from the Psalms, "What return can I make to the Lord for all that he has done for me?", and his motto answers it in three words of Latin that come down to something simple: be merciful, and do it with a cheerful heart.

Bishop Joel Konzen has a way of putting people at ease, often before they have even sat down. He is gentle and unhurried, with kind eyes and a voice that makes you feel he is there to serve you rather than the other way around.

He has spent the better part of his life in Catholic education, and yet he carries none of the weight you might expect from a man of his rank. He is a humble man and a teacher at heart, the kind of leader who would rather pull up a chair at the table than sit at the head of it. He makes his decisions with other people, not above them, listening and leaning on their counsel until the right course becomes clear, because, as he puts it, he is "not under any illusion that I have either the only way or the best way a lot of the time."

He grew up in Oak Harbor, a small town east of Toledo, Ohio, the younger of two brothers in a quiet, church-centered household, serving at the altar by the third grade, often right beside his brother. He knew early that he wanted to be a priest and said so to his pastor in the eighth grade, though it took him longer to find where he belonged. That search led him in time to the Marists, drawn by their devotion to Mary and their love of teaching. He likes to say that with the Holy Spirit you cannot see the path in front of you, only trace it once you have passed, and his own traces straight through the classroom. Nearly all of it unfolded at a single school, Marist School in Atlanta, where he taught long before he ever led it, and what he loved most was helping young people claim talents they did not yet know they had. That, more than any title, is the shape of his life, quietly making the people around him a little bigger than they thought they were.

For all of that, the call to become a bishop caught him completely off guard. "I was stunned," he says of 2018. It carried a man who grew up walking to Mass down the block into the service of the Archdiocese of Atlanta and its more than a million Catholics, and the size of it never seems to have changed him. He has always tried to make an impact without leaving much of a wake. Away from the work he is quieter still, a lifelong reader who goes back again and again to Alan Paton and C.S. Lewis, and a writer at heart ever since his school days. His favorite line of Scripture is a question he keeps returning to from the Psalms, "What return can I make to the Lord for all that he has done for me?", and his motto answers it in three words of Latin that come down to something simple: be merciful, and do it with a cheerful heart.

Bishop John Tran has a way of treating whatever comes next as something to walk into rather than worry over. He never really planned the path that made him a priest, and he says as much plainly. There was never a single moment when he decided he wanted to be one. It just felt natural, one step after another, until it felt like the life he was meant to have.

Warm and unhurried, and quick to hand the credit to God, he is a man whose whole story runs on a single conviction, that God will provide. It is the promise he took as his episcopal motto, drawn from the words carved above the door of the seminary where he trained, and it is not a sentiment he picked up in a classroom. He learned it as a boy. He was nine years old when his family climbed onto a barge in the dark at a Saigon port in 1975 and left everything behind, a good home, a whole way of life, to go, as he puts it, nowhere. They ran out of water drifting in the South China Sea and were rescued by an American ship he believes saved their lives. He was too young then to grasp how close they came. The pain of it, he has said, he only felt later, on behalf of the parents who carried him through it.

That early trust in providence settled into the steady rhythm of a priest who goes where he is asked and makes a home of it. He grew up in Louisiana, wrote letter after letter as an eighth grader to a boarding school in New York until the priests there took a chance on him, and was ordained for the Archdiocese of New Orleans in 1992. For more than three decades he served parishes across southeast Louisiana, and when Hurricane Katrina scattered his people he followed them, saying Mass in parking lots and nursing homes and wherever anyone needed one. Transition, he says, has never been a challenge, because everywhere he lands the work is the same, to walk with people through their hardest days and their happiest ones. In 2023 that work carried him to Atlanta, where Pope Francis named him an auxiliary bishop, the third Vietnamese American to hold the office.

For all the miles and the years, what stays with people is how lightly he wears any of it. This is a man who once quietly gave a kidney to a priest friend from his seminary days, and who still marvels that he ended up here at all. He calls himself blessed to be a priest, and hopes he has been some small blessing in return. He is here, he likes to say, only by the grace of God, the grace that got him on that barge.

Bishop Jacques Fabre-Jeune loves people, and he says so plainly. He has spent nearly forty years going wherever the Church sent him, learning the language of whoever he found there, and he tends to meet each person the same way, looking for the humanity in them before anything else.

Warm and unassuming, a man who loves music and takes people as he finds them, he has carried that spirit since boyhood. He was born in Port-au-Prince, one of six children, and his mother left for the United States to find factory work when he was young, so his eldest sister, barely eighteen, helped raise the family until they could follow her north. He joined his mother in Brooklyn as a teenager. He felt the pull toward priesthood as a boy, lost it for a while, and found it again in college, where he had been studying to be an engineer until a professor's offhand remark about selling yourself convinced him he was on the wrong road. He called his mother and told her what he had known since he was a child.

That calling led him to the Scalabrinians, a missionary order devoted to immigrants and refugees, and being an immigrant himself, he felt he belonged there. The decades since read like a map of the places people go looking for a better life. He served Haitians and Hispanics at his first Florida parish, stood with Haitian detainees as a chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, and spent more than a decade pastoring a parish in the Dominican Republic in a community strained by ethnic tension. In Georgia he took charge of a struggling Latino mission that had once gathered for Mass outdoors under blue tarps, and he watched its people build their own church, largely with their own hands and their own dollars, one weekend of taco sales at a time. He liked to say the point was never to hand the poor everything, but to help them develop their talents and see what they could do.

For all the countries and languages, five in all, what he keeps coming back to is something plain. He describes his own way of working as nonjudgmental, and he means it as more than a word. He looks for the humanity in everyone and asks people to do the same, to forgive old mistakes and accept each other's frailties, the way you might peel back the leaves of a head of lettuce to find the fresher ones underneath. When people point out that he is the first Haitian-American to lead a U.S. diocese, he tends to wave it off, worried a label like that will put him in a box. What he would rather people see is what he told the crowd in Charleston the day he arrived, walking down off the stage to stand among them rather than above them. We are, he likes to say, one humanity, and we are better off when we bring it together.

Bishop Michael Martin spent almost his entire priesthood around classrooms and young people, and it shows the moment he walks into a room. The day the Vatican named him Bishop of Charlotte, he did not spend the afternoon settling into an office. He spent it in a high school. He teased the seniors that they had already checked out for the year, prayed with a theology class over the empty desk of a classmate they were worried about, and slipped into the cafeteria kitchen to shake hands with the workers before anyone could steer him back on schedule.

Warm, playful, and most himself in a crowd, he is a priest people tend to describe by his manner more than his title. Those who have worked with him say the same handful of things again and again: that he makes the people around him better, that he can talk to a freshman and a college president in the same afternoon, and that he is one of the finest homilists they have ever heard. He has a habit of handing out nicknames, and a way of giving whoever is in front of him his full attention.

He came by that spirit honestly, in Baltimore, the only boy among four children in a family whose faith ran through everything. He entered the Conventual Franciscans at seventeen, took the name of St. Francis as his own, and never looked back. His road ran mostly through schools, from Baltimore to Buffalo, where he taught, coached basketball, and eventually led his own high school through a turnaround, and then to Duke University, where he spent twelve years building a campus ministry that students of every kind, and even a few who were not Catholic, found their way to. He liked to set two chairs out on the residential quad and just wait, ready to hear confessions or simply to be with whoever wandered by.

For all the years spent teaching and forming young people, what those who know him keep returning to is something simpler than any of his titles. He is a die-hard Baltimore Orioles and Ravens fan, makes a chili with a secret ingredient he will not disclose, and cuts his brother friars' hair, a job he picked up his first year in seminary and never gave back. But for all the roles and the moving around, what he wants people to know about him has never really changed. "I have only one answer," he says. "Jesus. Jesus is the answer."