Edgar Moreira da Cunha

Bishop Edgar da Cunha is not a man in a hurry with people. He gives them time before something in their life changes, and he asks them what they think of it while there is still time to say so.

Patient and plainspoken, he has carried those qualities through parishes, a house of formation and two dioceses, and it is the reason the people who worked closest to him have tended to describe him less by the offices he held than by how he is with the person in front of him. The archbishop he served under in Newark, listing what he valued in him, got as far as the soccer, that he played with one of the communities at his own parish. He came to all of it from a town in the Brazilian state of Bahia, the son of Manoel and Josefa Moreira. He decided as a teenager that he wanted to be a priest and went off to the minor seminary the Vocationist Fathers ran nearby, joining a congregation founded in Italy in 1920 to encourage vocations and to work with the poor. He studied philosophy in Salvador and came to the United States for theology, and by 1978, still a seminarian, he was already spending his weekends in a Newark parish, teaching catechism and working with the young people. He was ordained in that same church in 1982.

Almost everything that followed happened among immigrants. He spent years at a parish in Palisades Park, where he helped start a Portuguese Mass for the Brazilian families who had settled in the towns around it, and he did the same thing again later in Newark. In between he was given the work of forming young men who were trying to sort out whether God was asking the same thing of them, and even then he kept driving back on weekends to the Portuguese, Brazilian, Hispanic and Italian communities he had been serving all along. He works in four languages, and his ministry went where you would expect it to go, toward people who wanted to pray in their own.

That instinct followed him into the office. When he was named an auxiliary bishop of Newark in 2003, the first Brazilian-born bishop in the United States, he was handed one of the hardest assignments a diocese can give anyone, working with parishes that would need to come together. He built the whole thing around consultation. Parishes were asked to respond to what was proposed, and those that disagreed were asked to come back with an alternative rather than simply a no. "We don't pretend to hold all the knowledge and truth," he said of it. "We need to get their input for their sake and our sake, too." The process moved in stages over years instead of months, and it was built that way on purpose, so that people would have time.

He speaks about the faith he grew up with the same way. The statues, the processions, the devotions people carry with them, he describes as something embedded in the culture, and he has said the Church is diverse enough to have room for all of it. In 2014 he came to Fall River as its eighth bishop, to parishes spread across southeastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod and the islands. The line he chose for his coat of arms has been with him the whole way, and it is not a claim about himself at all, my grace is enough for you.