Barry C. Knestout

Bishop Barry Knestout has a plain way of describing his own life. He grew up one of nine children in a Maryland parish family, and when he looks back on it, he does not reach for anything dramatic. "I always saw our lives as very ordinary lives that have been touched in a special way by God's grace," he said.

Steady is the word that keeps coming up around him, and he came by it honestly. He has called his mother the heart of their family, a pragmatic woman whose fidelity to family and friends was an example to all of them. His father was a deacon who worked as a cryptologist during the week and gave his free hours to a state hospital serving people with disabilities, usually with a couple of his sons in tow. He missed some Sunday afternoons of football for it and says he did not appreciate the witness at the time. He does now. A younger brother followed him into the priesthood, and their father preached at his first Mass years before he preached at his brother's. The people who worked closest to him in Washington described him not by his offices but as kind and devoted, unflappable, solid in his faith, hardworking, and funny in a way people remember.

He did not set out to be a priest. He was studying architecture at the University of Maryland when a college retreat put him in front of a priest and a brother whose service struck him as unusually generous and joyful, and he came away thinking he could do that too. A priest from his home parish walked with him through the years of discernment that followed, and once he reached his first years of theology at Mount St. Mary's Seminary, he says, there was no turning back. Ordained in 1989, he spent most of the following decade as secretary to Cardinal James Hickey, close enough to the man to anoint him before his death and to help carry him at his funeral. Youth ministry came after that, then a parish of his own, then the work of running an archdiocese. He was ordained a bishop in 2008 under the motto he chose then, Christ Our Hope, and Richmond has been his since 2018, a diocese he greeted on his first day as a new family.

The architecture never entirely left him. When Pope Benedict XVI came to Washington, he ran a contest for architecture students to design the altar and chair for the Mass at Nationals Park, and he has spent years on the commissions that look after church buildings and sacred art. He notices a room. He writes a column too, returning often to peace, to the long shadow of war, and to the Christians of the Holy Land, whose care he helps look after from a hospital foundation board. For all of that, he still puts the real work somewhere much smaller than a cathedral. "That's where it happens, in the parish, where the Gospel has the most impact in people's day-to-day lives," he said. "It's beautiful to see the many ways that God works in people's lives."