Andrew E. Bellisario

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."