Gregory J. Hartmayer

Archbishop Gregory Hartmayer has spent most of his life around classrooms and young people. Long before he wore a bishop's ring, he was a teacher, a counselor, and a principal in Catholic schools, and that part of him never really faded. What he loves most as a bishop is confirmations, the days that put him back among students.

Kind, unassuming, and most himself in a room full of people, he is a priest others tend to describe by his manner more than his title. When Archbishop Wilton Gregory handed Atlanta to him, Gregory told the archdiocese they were getting a gentle and dedicated minister of the gospel, and that is very much the man they found, one who looks for common ground rather than reasons to stand apart.

He came by that spirit honestly. He was born in Buffalo, New York, one of four children whose parents made real sacrifices to keep them in Catholic school, though he jokes that his own years as a student were another story. He joined the Franciscan friars as a young man and never let go of what they taught him. His motto, Pax et bonum, is the old Franciscan greeting for peace and good, and it suits him.

His road began in the classroom, in Baltimore and New York, where he likes to remember the senior honors sociology class he was handed fresh out of college, teaching from a textbook he barely knew and staying, as he puts it, one chapter ahead of his students. From there it ran to a small parish in Jonesboro, Georgia, where fifteen years as pastor gave him the pastoral life that shaped everything after. He was named Bishop of Savannah in 2011 and, in 2020, the seventh Archbishop of Atlanta, installed in the first uncertain weeks of the pandemic before a cathedral emptied of the crowds that should have filled it. He chose to read those empty pews not as a disappointment but as a wake-up call, a reminder of what can quietly slip away when faith is taken for granted.

Through all of it, what tends to stay with people is his warmth. He has sat down with rabbis and imams to pray for peace, and he keeps returning to one simple idea, that everyone without exception is a child of God and a brother or sister on the same journey. Away from the work, he is still a Buffalo boy who golfs, takes long walks, and keeps an eye on the Atlanta Braves. He can talk about an archdiocese of more than a million Catholics in one breath and a single classroom of students in the next, and it is not hard to tell which one still lights him up. We need to listen to our young people more than we do, he once said. Some of them are wiser than the rest of us.