Michael T. Martin

Bishop Michael Martin spent almost his entire priesthood around classrooms and young people, and it shows the moment he walks into a room. The day the Vatican named him Bishop of Charlotte, he did not spend the afternoon settling into an office. He spent it in a high school. He teased the seniors that they had already checked out for the year, prayed with a theology class over the empty desk of a classmate they were worried about, and slipped into the cafeteria kitchen to shake hands with the workers before anyone could steer him back on schedule.

Warm, playful, and most himself in a crowd, he is a priest people tend to describe by his manner more than his title. Those who have worked with him say the same handful of things again and again: that he makes the people around him better, that he can talk to a freshman and a college president in the same afternoon, and that he is one of the finest homilists they have ever heard. He has a habit of handing out nicknames, and a way of giving whoever is in front of him his full attention.

He came by that spirit honestly, in Baltimore, the only boy among four children in a family whose faith ran through everything. He entered the Conventual Franciscans at seventeen, took the name of St. Francis as his own, and never looked back. His road ran mostly through schools, from Baltimore to Buffalo, where he taught, coached basketball, and eventually led his own high school through a turnaround, and then to Duke University, where he spent twelve years building a campus ministry that students of every kind, and even a few who were not Catholic, found their way to. He liked to set two chairs out on the residential quad and just wait, ready to hear confessions or simply to be with whoever wandered by.

For all the years spent teaching and forming young people, what those who know him keep returning to is something simpler than any of his titles. He is a die-hard Baltimore Orioles and Ravens fan, makes a chili with a secret ingredient he will not disclose, and cuts his brother friars' hair, a job he picked up his first year in seminary and never gave back. But for all the roles and the moving around, what he wants people to know about him has never really changed. "I have only one answer," he says. "Jesus. Jesus is the answer."