Michael Francis Burbidge

Bishop Michael Burbidge has spent much of his life around classrooms and young people. Long before he wore a bishop's ring, he was a teacher and a seminary rector, and that love of the classroom never really faded. He has said that if he had not become a priest, he would have wanted to teach in a Catholic school, following the sisters and teachers he grew up admiring.

Warm and unfailingly grateful, he is a man who tends to talk about the people who shaped him more than the offices he has held. He grew up in a close-knit Philadelphia neighborhood of row homes, where everyone walked to church and everyone walked to school, the second son of Francis and Shirley Burbidge. Every single Sunday, his whole family gathered at his grandparents' house for a two o'clock dinner, a tradition he still remembers with real fondness. He calls his upbringing a blessing, and he does not say it lightly.

If there is one thing that has shaped how Bishop Burbidge sees his life, it is the assignments he never expected. Ordained for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, he has said that more than once a new posting caught him off guard, only to become a gift he could not have predicted. He has come to read that pattern as God's hand rather than his own planning, a quiet kind of trust that has carried him from Philadelphia to a decade among the people of Raleigh, a place he came to call home, and on to Arlington.

There is a lighter side he does not always advertise. He is, by his own confession, a big country music fan, partial to Kenny Chesney, and he jokes that he kept this quiet for years for fear his nieces and nephews might disown him. He roots for his Philadelphia Eagles without apology, a loyalty rooted less in the game than in the years of season tickets shared with his father. And he lights up around children in a way that is hard to miss. He still tells the story of pointing to a photo of himself beside Pope Benedict, asking a class of second-graders to name the good-looking one, and hearing every child shout back the pope's name.

The saint he keeps returning to is Thomas More, the patron of his diocese, whose story he loves in both the book and the film that share the title "A Man for All Seasons." What draws him is More's courage under pressure, the willingness to be, as Burbidge likes to put it, God's servant first. Peace and joy, he has said, follow when we stop insisting on our own way and say yes to God's.