Cristiano Guilherme Borro Barbosa

Cristiano Barbosa came to Boston for a degree and fully expected to go home to Brazil when it was finished. He is still here, and the reason had little to do with school. He studied during the day, his evenings filled up with the Brazilian families scattered across the city, and somewhere in those years the plan quietly changed.

He is warm and attentive with people, and quick with a joke at his own expense. He trained as a psychologist before he ever entered a seminary, and something of that stayed with him, because he keeps returning to the idea of a church that listens, one that creates what he calls a culture of encounter. When his appointment as bishop was announced, Cardinal Seán O'Malley pointed not just to his theology and his years in parishes, but to a shepherd's heart and to how well the priests and people of Boston already knew him.

He comes from Adamantina, a town in the countryside of São Paulo state, eight hours west of the city. He was the younger of two sons, and he grew up in the parish there. He had wanted to be a priest before he ever went to college. He set the idea aside long enough to finish his psychology degree, then went straight back to it. The theology years he spent with the Jesuits in Belo Horizonte are the ones he still talks about most, four years he credits with lighting the fire that carried him to ordination in 2007. He arrived in the United States the following year barely knowing where Boston was, sat in on a single class at Boston College, and applied nowhere else.

Ministry among immigrants turned out to be its own education. He borrows an image from Pope Francis to explain it, the church as a field hospital, where it makes no difference that you trained as a dermatologist, because there is a broken bone in front of you and you set it. So he learned to sit with families grieving a relative who had died in Brazil, unable to travel home for the funeral, some of them with no family at all in this country. Pope Francis named him an auxiliary bishop of Boston in December 2023, and he was ordained the following February at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the first bishop of Brazilian descent in the archdiocese's history. He said at the time that he was happy and humbled, and that he also felt the weight of it.

A Sunday can still take him to four different communities. A Brazilian congregation in the morning, a Nicaraguan one at eleven, a Ugandan parish in the afternoon, and a Vietnamese one after that. He calls those days beautiful, and he means it plainly. He preaches in Portuguese, English and Spanish, and he is the first to admit his Spanish is still coming along. Early in his priesthood he said there was no use dividing ourselves, being one thing in faith and another in the world. The motto he chose as bishop asks for much the same thing. Ut unum sint. That they may be one.