Joel M. Konzen

Bishop Joel Konzen has a way of putting people at ease, often before they have even sat down. He is gentle and unhurried, with kind eyes and a voice that makes you feel he is there to serve you rather than the other way around.

He has spent the better part of his life in Catholic education, and yet he carries none of the weight you might expect from a man of his rank. He is a humble man and a teacher at heart, the kind of leader who would rather pull up a chair at the table than sit at the head of it. He makes his decisions with other people, not above them, listening and leaning on their counsel until the right course becomes clear, because, as he puts it, he is "not under any illusion that I have either the only way or the best way a lot of the time."

He grew up in Oak Harbor, a small town east of Toledo, Ohio, the younger of two brothers in a quiet, church-centered household, serving at the altar by the third grade, often right beside his brother. He knew early that he wanted to be a priest and said so to his pastor in the eighth grade, though it took him longer to find where he belonged. That search led him in time to the Marists, drawn by their devotion to Mary and their love of teaching. He likes to say that with the Holy Spirit you cannot see the path in front of you, only trace it once you have passed, and his own traces straight through the classroom. Nearly all of it unfolded at a single school, Marist School in Atlanta, where he taught long before he ever led it, and what he loved most was helping young people claim talents they did not yet know they had. That, more than any title, is the shape of his life, quietly making the people around him a little bigger than they thought they were.

For all of that, the call to become a bishop caught him completely off guard. "I was stunned," he says of 2018. It carried a man who grew up walking to Mass down the block into the service of the Archdiocese of Atlanta and its more than a million Catholics, and the size of it never seems to have changed him. He has always tried to make an impact without leaving much of a wake. Away from the work he is quieter still, a lifelong reader who goes back again and again to Alan Paton and C.S. Lewis, and a writer at heart ever since his school days. His favorite line of Scripture is a question he keeps returning to from the Psalms, "What return can I make to the Lord for all that he has done for me?", and his motto answers it in three words of Latin that come down to something simple: be merciful, and do it with a cheerful heart.