People We Got To Know in August 2026

Bishop Luis Rafael Zarama likes to tell young people never to be ashamed of where they come from. He says it because he has lived it. Learning a new language was never the hard part, he says. The real challenge is stepping into a new culture without losing who you are, opening yourself to what it offers while sharing the richness you already carry. He calls it a mutual enrichment, and it is close to the center of how he understands his whole life.

Warm, unassuming, and quick to laugh at himself, he jokes that he speaks "one and a half languages," a nod to an English he still calls a work in progress. People who worked with him for years tend to describe him the same way, as caring, collaborative, and genuinely kind, a man who reminds the people around him that they are dealing with human beings, not paperwork. He is the first to admit he never went looking for any of the roles that found him, and he can tell the story of each one like a man still a little surprised he said yes.

He grew up in Pasto, high in the mountains of southern Colombia, the oldest of six children in a close family with farms and businesses and a father who had once been a teacher. It was a normal childhood, by his telling, full of horses he loved to ride and the occasional bit of mischief he was not supposed to get into. The priesthood came slowly. A priest dear to the family, Padre Alvarez, used to share meals in their home, and watching him planted an early thought that faded as Zarama grew and imagined other lives for himself, a pilot maybe, or a cowboy. The call kept returning until he could not ignore it, and it was at a Cursillo that he finally admitted the truth to himself, in words as plain as the man: "Okay, I need to do this."

Coming to the United States was the one part he never wanted. His parents had settled in Orlando and his father kept urging him to follow, and Zarama did not like the idea at all. A chance connection through his canon law faculty in Bogotá brought him to Atlanta for a couple of days, he liked the city, and that was that. The early years were hard. He arrived with almost no English, and it got hard enough that he tried to leave, stopping to say goodbye to a priest on his way out, who simply took his car keys and would not give them back. Three days later, Zarama decided to stay. Looking back, he does not point to that as the moment he managed to remain in America. He points to it as the moment he began to become himself, formed not simply by his father or his friends or the Colombia he came from, but through all of it, the leaving, the struggle, the new language, the near-surrender.

His first twelve years as a priest he still calls the most beautiful of his life, especially the decade pastoring two small churches thirty miles apart in the north Georgia hills, running seven Masses a weekend and loving every mile of it, because what makes the priesthood beautiful, he says, is simply being with people. The bigger roles came the same way they always had, by surprise. When Archbishop Gregory asked him to become vicar general, he joked that it took away his honeymoon as a priest, and when the call came naming him a bishop, he was so stunned the archbishop finally had to say, "Luisito, please, please say something," and all Zarama could manage was "Wow." Even now, leading a growing diocese, he would rather drive the North Carolina countryside praying the rosary and marveling at the tractors in the fields than dwell on the size of his territory. He remembers sitting alone in the bishop's chair in his cathedral, no ceremony, no crowd, overwhelmed, asking himself what he was doing there before the answer settled in. What he wants most is for people to know how much God loves them, a love he insists is never soft or sentimental but a real relationship that asks something of us. His motto puts it in three words, God is love, and after a life of surprises he never went looking for, he says the rest just as plainly: we can never lose hope.

Bishop Stephen Parkes does not tell the story of his life as a straight road to the priesthood. He likes to say that God writes with crooked lines, and his own path is a good example. He wanted to be a doctor once, then found that chemistry was not for him. He earned a marketing degree, worked in retail, and spent three and a half years in banking before he ever thought seriously about the collar. Looking back, he does not see any of it as wasted. He sees a pattern he could not have drawn himself.

Warm and unhurried, he is the kind of pastor people do not want to let go of. When word came that he was leaving his Florida parish to become a bishop, the joy was real and so were the tears. Those who worked with him for years describe a man who never wanted to turn anyone away, whose calendar was always overflowing because he could not say no to the person in front of him. He grew up in a faithful family, the kind where you prayed before meals, went to Mass on Sunday, and were expected to make something of yourself. He was the youngest of three boys, and one of those boys, his brother Gregory, is now a bishop too, which makes them one of only a handful of brother-bishops in the history of the American Church.

He came to the priesthood the way he came to everything, patiently. He describes seminary as a marathon, not a sprint, six years of testing a decision rather than a single lightning-bolt moment, until the day he simply bought the black suit and committed. Ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 1998, he spent most of his ministry there, including a stretch as the founding pastor of a new parish in Oviedo that grew, in just a few years, from a first Mass he was not sure anyone would attend into a community of two thousand families. In 2020, Pope Francis sent him north to shepherd the southern half of Georgia, a vast, largely rural territory he calls true mission country.

What has stayed constant through all of it is how he treats people. He talks about meeting them where they are, listening before deciding what they need, and walking alongside them rather than standing across from them. His heart goes first to the ones easy to overlook, the poor, the forgotten, the family whose home was split in two by a hurricane and still waiting on help months later. He was named for St. Stephen, the first martyr, a man he admires for inspiring others to look beyond themselves. It fits. For a bishop who found his own vocation at the end of a long detour, the work has always come back to something simple, the line he took as his motto and returns to again and again: rejoice in the Lord always.

Archbishop William Lori has spent nearly fifty years as a priest, and when he talks about what has meant the most, he does not point to the appointments or the committees. He points to the quiet moments: a confession, a deathbed, a couple who came to him carrying something heavy. Those, he says, are where he has felt the Lord working through him, and they are still what gets him up in the morning. "It's not about power," he once put it. "The people of God is not a concept. The people of God are people."

Warm and unhurried, he is happiest down among his flock rather than standing out in front. After Mass he is often the last to leave, standing for as long as it takes to greet everyone who wants a word. He does not pretend to be a natural at it. He laughs that he is no politician and cannot always match a name to a face, and he apologizes for Spanish he insists is worse than everyone tells him. But he keeps standing there anyway, because meeting people is the part of the work he loves most.

He has a way of ending up where he never planned to be. He came to the priesthood from Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Francis and Margaret Lori, and was ordained for the Archdiocese of Washington in 1977, sure he was headed for a quiet life of teaching. Instead a cardinal borrowed him as a secretary for six months and kept him for the better part of eighteen years. He assumed some senior priest would be made a bishop before him, and was surprised when the call came for him instead. He figured someone else would be sent to Baltimore, the first diocese ever established in the country, and it went to him, a place he now says has simply become his home. Along the way he helped the American bishops write their charter for protecting children, and for two decades he has served as Supreme Chaplain of the Knights of Columbus, watching over the spiritual life of more than a million men and their families.

For all the weight those roles carry, the man underneath stays plainly himself. He calls his mother every single day. He walks his golden retriever, Bayley, through Bolton Hill, reads fat biographies of Churchill, doodles the way he has since grade school, and quietly mourns the loss of Turner Classic Movies from his cable lineup. He would rather eat a quiet dinner at home than anywhere else. And when he walks his four or five miles, he prays the rosary as he goes, clearing his head and turning things over. It fits the way he has always understood the work. Evangelization, he likes to say, is not a program but the Church falling in love again, and after nearly half a century he still sounds like a man glad to be along for it.

Jess McKimmie is the kind of person who seems to measure a life not by what it avoids, but by what it is willing to sit with.

Warm, playful, and naturally at ease beside the things most of us spend our lives trying not to think about, Jess also brings a rare understanding of how healing actually works. Jess does not simply comfort people in the moment; she holds a space where sorrow and laughter are allowed to sit side by side. One person who came to Jess after their father's sudden death said they did not expect to laugh in their first session, and they did not expect how much it would help. A Marine sergeant Jess cared for as a chaplain put it even more simply: calmer and clearer. There is wisdom in that approach: when grief is met with warmth instead of fear, it becomes something a person can move through.

That way of being was not learned in a classroom. Jess grew up in North Seattle in a house full of music, laughter, and hippie-ish love, and left home planning to build a business someday. Grief had other plans. It arrived twice by telephone, once in college with news of her father's cancer, and again in 2012 with news about her mother that no one saw coming. What those losses built in Jess, slowly and at great cost, is the very thing people now seek her out for: someone who is not afraid to sit close to death, and who knows from the inside what it takes to keep living. These days that means keeping company with people in their hardest hours, young people in juvenile detention, veterans in hospital beds, youth experiencing homelessness, families keeping watch at a bedside, and anyone in the LGBTQ2IA+ community, Jess's own community, who needs care that meets them exactly as they are. Peace Through Grief, the practice Jess built, is simply that promise with a name on it: no one should have to face death, loss, or grief alone.

Still, Jess is more than the titles attached to the work. She is a sister and sibling, an auntie-uncle, a forever student, and the friend people turn to when they simply need someone to listen. The kid who loved inventing games and making people laugh never really went anywhere; these days you will find her chasing sunsets, watching birds, and soaking up the nature she loves. It fits that Jess describes herself, simply, as a lover of life and people. Sweet and salty, she calls this path of life, and she walks it the way she always has: laughing, exploring, and loving the people beside her.

Ron Gray had spent years as a therapist, sitting with other people through the worst days of their lives, before he learned what it was to be one of them. All of his training, it turned out, did little to soften his own loss.

Warm, faith-centered, and honest about his own hardest stretch, Ron is a Christian counselor who folds a person's faith and values into the work rather than setting them aside. He does not pretend that being a therapist made him immune to grief. For a while after his wife died, he settled for just existing, not really living, putting on a brave face for others while trying to convince himself he was okay, and he was not. He tells that part plainly, because he believes grieving people deserve to hear it from someone who has been there rather than someone who has only read about it. He has carried that honesty through years of grief and trauma work, and it is the reason people tend to describe him less by his credentials than by the sense that he genuinely understands. He is a licensed marriage and family therapist, the founder of The Haven, a spiritual retreat center in Orange, California, and a husband again after meeting his wife Anne-Marie through their shared work with the grieving. And he is still, after all of it, someone who believes a broken heart can be mended.

His path into this work began with the loss he never saw coming. Ron and his wife had been married thirty years when cancer took her, far too young, after a four-year fight they threw everything into. Even as a skilled therapist, he was stunned that she was gone and not coming back. Deep in that loss, doing the usual things to numb and distract himself, he finally went looking for help. He read about grief, joined a grief group, and worked with a therapist, and then a friend pointed him toward a grief specialist, a kind of help he had not even known existed. She handed him a few tools that actually made a difference, and that small shift changed everything. Working on his own grief led him to seek more training so he could do the same for others, and eventually he rebuilt his entire practice around loss, grief, and the trauma that comes with them. Along the way he met Anne-Marie Lockmyer, another grief specialist with a story much like his own, and their shared work quietly became a shared life. To anyone in the middle of it now, Ron offers the thing he once could not believe himself. Life can be good again, he says. There is hope and healing for a broken heart, and your heart can be mended.

Fr. John Juszczak is the kind of priest who will learn your language so he can meet you where you are. Over the years he has picked up five of them, French, Polish, Spanish, English, and an African language most people have never heard of, not to collect them but because you cannot really care for people you cannot talk to. Wherever he has been sent, and he has been sent to a lot of places, he has made it home and made the people there his own.

He was born in Poland in 1960 and ordained there in 1988 for the Redemptorists, a missionary congregation. He is also a scholar, with studies that carried him from Poland to Paris to Chicago and a doctorate he spent on a quietly beautiful question, how the Sacrament of Reconciliation actually heals a person. But spend any time around him and you notice the learning never sits above people. It bends back toward them. Those who have come to know him tend to describe him less by his degrees than by his warmth, and by the sense that a parish is lucky to have him.

His path reads like a map of the Church's far corners. He spent eight years in the missions of West Africa, teaching, forming seminarians, and building youth programs. He served Polish, Spanish, and American communities in Chicago and ran a Polish Catholic school there. He walked alongside servicemen and women as a military chaplain. He gave years to island parishes in the Caribbean, with a gift for bringing a struggling parish and school back to life. The through line is simple. Wherever he lands he starts things, a Bible study, a youth group, a way back to steadier ground, and he leaves people more connected to their faith and to one another than he found them.

These days home is Annunciation, a small bilingual parish in West Park, Florida, the kind of place where it is easy to be known by name and where the chapel by the grotto stays open for prayer nearly all week. It suits him. After a life spent among people who started out as strangers and became his own, he seems most himself in a parish small enough to know everyone in it. He still teaches, still holds his parish in prayer, and still comes back to the words he uses to sum up his whole life, everything for the glory of God, and the love of his sisters and brothers, through the Perpetual Help of Mother Mary.

Father Yamil Miranda has a way of making faith feel like good news you would actually want to hear. Parishioners describe him as a priest who is on fire for God, the kind who spreads the word with laughter and leaves people glad they came.

Kind, funny, and unmistakably at home at the altar, he is the sort of priest people tend to describe not by his title but by the joy he carries, and that joy has roots. He was born in Managua and came to Miami at twelve to join his mother, the youngest of three, and he still calls himself a Little Havana boy. He fell in love with the Church as a kid at St. John Bosco, a parish that reminded him of the one he had left behind in Nicaragua, where he loved serving at the altar and loved the moment the priest lifted the host.

The priesthood, though, was never the plan. As a teenager he walked away from the Church for a couple of years, and by the time he was in college he was set on a career in law, so sure the collar was not for him that he figured, honestly, that priests led a boring life. The calling found him anyway. He likes to say the answer he finally heard came down to two words, follow me, and he has been following ever since.

What he wanted from the beginning was to be close to the people most easily overlooked. Working with the poor, he has said, is something that really brings joy to his heart, and he talks about the rest of ministry with the same plainness. Feed the soul first and the rest takes care of itself. "The first thing is let me save that soul and let me feed that soul," he once said about running a parish. Do that well, he figures, and the money comes on its own.

That instinct to meet people where they are has a way of showing up creatively. When the doors closed during the pandemic, he blessed water through a webcam, sent incense toward the camera, and carried the Eucharist through the streets of Sunrise while a parishioner livestreamed it on an iPhone, sure that if you love the ministry, you will do anything to reach your people. These days that energy lives at All Saints, a bilingual parish that works to make everyone feel at home, with a soup kitchen and a yearly carnival, the kind of place where a Little Havana boy who once loved watching the priest lift the host now gets to lift it himself.