Eugene Grytner

Father Eugene Grytner has a simple way of talking about God: look at the person next to you. He told his parish once that it is through other people, a wife, a husband, anyone who bears God's image, that we come to see God at all. Whatever he is preaching, he has a way of bringing it back to the people in the room.

That instinct took him a long way from home. He is Polish, and he could have spent his life in a parish there, but he joined the Salvatorian missionaries hoping to carry the Gospel to Africa. The hope came true. He gave twenty-nine years to Tanzania, learned to pray with its people, and never quite left them behind. When his order's founder was declared blessed, what he thought of first were the Tanzanian parishioners who had faithfully prayed a Swahili prayer he once handed them, and he was quietly sure they had something to do with it.

His tenderness runs all the way down to the smallest and least seen. Every afternoon at 3:15, right after the Divine Mercy Chaplet, the bells at St. Thomas Aquinas ring for the unborn, a daily habit he took up after Pope Francis blessed a bell called the Voice of the Unborn. He wanted the children who never drew a breath to be remembered out loud, because, as he put it, the message to protect life has to be heard loud and clear, to the ends of the world.

For all of it, much of who he is lives in the ordinary work of a pastor: leading pilgrimages, remembering the dead a month after a funeral, praying for the sick and for the young to answer whatever God is asking of them. After all these years and all these miles, Father Eugene still keeps pointing the same direction, past himself and toward whoever is in front of him, sure that this is exactly where God tends to turn up.