Mark Steven Rivituso

Mark Rivituso leads the Catholic Church across the southern half of Alabama, and what catches you first about him is not the size of the territory but how much he lights up at the chance to serve someone. "Every time I have an opportunity to truly serve others, that's truly a blessing," he said with a big smile the day he was named its archbishop, and anyone who has watched him work knows he means it.

Warm, unassuming, and slow to make much of himself, Mark has carried that spirit through nearly four decades of priesthood. The archbishop he succeeded welcomed him as an outstanding bishop, and the high schoolers he once taught still remember a beloved teacher.

That instinct to put people first goes back a long way, to a big, hardworking family in St. Louis. Mark was the sixth of eight children of August and Rosemary Rivituso, and his father, Gus, worked three jobs to keep the family going. His grandmother took him to early Mass on Sundays and helped shape his prayer life, and it was praying before the Blessed Sacrament that he first heard, in his own words, the call from Jesus to become a priest. Even in high school, he already knew where his life was headed.

That calling led him to ordination for St. Louis in 1988, and to decades of service in his home archdiocese as a parish priest, a church-court judge, and eventually its vicar general, before Pope Francis named him an auxiliary bishop in 2017. In 2025, Pope Leo XIV sent him south to Mobile.

For all the titles, what drives him has never really changed. He has never been one to serve from a distance. You are more likely to find him with his sleeves rolled up at a food line or a shelter, meeting people right where they are. He says the first step is not to presume what someone needs but to listen, so he can treat them with the dignity anyone would want. The same spirit makes him happiest working shoulder to shoulder with others, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, anyone of goodwill, because, as he puts it, "we can't do this alone." His heart goes first to the poor, the homeless, the immigrant, the imprisoned, and anyone who feels forgotten, and in Mobile he has spoken of honoring the city's civil rights legacy by fostering racial harmony. It all comes back to what he told his new flock the day he arrived: "Christ calls us to be Christ for one another."