James Thomas Ruggieri

Bishop James Ruggieri says that if you hear people's stories, you can understand them better. It is a simple enough thing to say, and a much harder thing to arrange a life around, but he has done it, and almost everything about him makes more sense once you know that closeness is the point.

Warm, soft-spoken, and quick to smile, he is the kind of man people describe by how they feel in his company rather than by anything on his record. Humble is the word that comes up first, followed closely by authentic, and by the observation from more than one person that a conversation with him tends to leave you calmer than it found you. He has also never lived far from where he began. He grew up in Barrington, Rhode Island, the youngest of four boys, went through the public schools there, studied at Providence College, and was ordained for the Diocese of Providence in 1995. Rhode Island, as he puts it, has been his home since birth, which means that for most of his life the people he served were the people he had always lived among.

More than twenty of those years he gave to St. Patrick's in inner-city Providence, and that parish is the clearest picture of him there is. English and Spanish share the pews there, along with families from Latin America and from Burundi and Rwanda, and instead of waiting for his neighbors to come to him in a language he already had, he learned Spanish so he could go to them in theirs. He later took on a second, largely Latino parish nearby. And when the parish elementary school could no longer keep its doors open, the ordinary thing would have been to let those families find their schooling somewhere else. He kept them instead, opening a high school in the same building in 2009, with no set tuition, where parents pay whatever they can manage and most pay very little, and he still walks into a classroom to teach theology himself whenever there is a gap to fill.

He has never been much good at handing a need over to someone else, which is roughly how he came to spend years driving a food truck around Providence. It began with a parishioner's suggestion one November, that they might bring meals out to the homeless the day after Thanksgiving. He said yes, and what started as a single afternoon quietly turned into years of them. On Friday and Sunday afternoons he would drive the parish's old white truck to three stops around the city and hand hot food, coffee and warm clothes through the window himself, a line from Matthew's Gospel painted along the side. He came to know the people who came well enough to pick up a conversation weeks after it had stopped, as ready to talk about music as about God. He has been honest about how much of it he could not fix, particularly for those caught in addiction, and about feeling helpless standing in front of it. What he could offer was a meal, his attention, and the promise that he would be back on Friday.

Nothing in the way he was living suggested a man positioning himself to become a bishop. The call came anyway, on a Saturday afternoon in February 2024, about five minutes before he was due to say Mass. He said yes, went upstairs and celebrated it, and admitted later that his first thought had been how big this was, and that he was only a pastor, taking what comfort he could in the fact that he had not known how to be a pastor either until he started being one. Maine is an entire state, and a man whose whole method is being present now has all of it to cover, so he has spent his time since driving it and meeting the people in it. The motto he chose belongs to the same devotion that was already painted on the side of that old truck, Auspice Maria, under the protection of Mary. And when he speaks about the priests and the people now in his care, he does not describe them as a diocese he was handed. He is not on the outside, he says. He is on the inside with them.