Ben Berinti

Fr. Ben Berinti is the kind of priest who believes the world already has enough ugliness, and that a church, of all places, ought to answer it with beauty. Our worship should make room for beautiful things, he says, because good art draws people into an expression of faith that words alone cannot reach. Coming from him, that is quite an admission, because words are his craft.

Engaging, creative, and inspirational in the way he handles the Word, Fr. Ben has carried that gift through four decades of ministry, and it is why people tend to describe him not by his titles or the many places he has served, but by the warmth and the missionary heart he brings to the work. He is forever trying, in his own words, to widen the circle and make more room, to look again at the person who has run out of chances or the one everyone else finds easy to overlook. Born in Pittsburgh in 1958, he joined the Missionaries of the Precious Blood at fourteen, walking into the minor seminary as a boy and never really leaving the path he found there. He was ordained in 1985 and marked his fortieth anniversary as a priest in the summer of 2025, still taking his bearings from St. Gaspar del Bufalo and Blessed Giovanni Merlini, the founders whose spirituality runs through everything he does.

His road has taken him just about everywhere a priest can go, from university lecterns and campus ministry to directing formation, serving on the provincial council, and leading retreats, and, for years now, pastoring a parish. The same instinct shows up in each place, a desire to help people encounter something real and put words, or images, around it. At Immaculate Conception, a class he started on sacred icons caught on in a way he never expected, his parishioners taking to it so warmly that their donations have filled the church walls with them. He will tell you an icon is not painted but written, a window to heaven, and you get the sense he could talk about them all day. He has also lived what he preaches. When his own mother died, in the first uncertain weeks of the pandemic, the communion of saints he had taught for years stopped being an idea in his head and became, as he put it, a consolation in his heart. Much of his writing circles the same ground, three collections of spiritual essays and a shelf of smaller books and chapbooks that keep returning to the Eucharist, the Precious Blood, and the quiet work of finding God in ordinary and difficult days.

Ask him about his greatest joy apart from writing, though, and he will not name any of that. He will tell you it is cooking and sharing a meal, a love he traces straight to his Italian-American upbringing. It fits him. Whether it is beauty on the walls, words on the page, or food on the table, it is all his way of gathering people close. He pastors a small church wedged between the Atlantic and the Indian River Lagoon, where, as he likes to point out, the sun comes up behind the altar and goes down beyond the doors, and after forty years he is still, in the words of his favorite passage from Isaiah, watching the desert bloom.