Peter John Uglietto

Bishop Peter Uglietto is a Boston priest in every sense of it. He was born in Cambridge, went to its schools, was ordained for Boston, and has been at it for more than four decades. Most of what he was asked to do in those years came down to the same thing, helping people pray and helping other men become priests.

Warm, steady, and never one to put himself at the center of things, he has carried that through his whole priesthood, and it is why the people who have worked with him describe him not just by his titles or his degrees but as a good shepherd, the kind of man they trust while he is with them and miss when he moves on. He grew up in Cambridge in a proud Italian American family, the only boy among three children. He was still a boy when he started singing in the archdiocesan choir school, and none of what followed took him far, the Jesuits' high school, Boston College, the seminary in Brighton, all of it a short drive from home.

The parish years came first, eleven of them in Weymouth and Dorchester, and even then he was being sent out to preach retreats around the archdiocese, to sit with seminarians as a spiritual director, to help form men studying for the diaconate, and later to spend three years as a campus minister. Somebody had clearly noticed he was good at it. All of it pointed toward Weston, and the national seminary for second career vocations, where the men come late, in their forties and fifties, out of law and medicine and business and the military, and start over as beginners. He taught there for years before he was asked to lead the place, and by the end he had given it fourteen. He called the work challenging and gratifying and said he would miss it when he was made a bishop, and he meant it, because he kept coming back. Years later he was still turning up at the seminary's annual lawn party, pleased to see so many people there.

As a bishop he was given the North Region, and then, for eight years, the job of vicar general, which keeps a big archdiocese running day to day. None of it went to his head. At his own ordination as a bishop, in a cathedral holding close to two thousand people, he said the day was not about him but about Jesus Christ. What he keeps instead are other people's words. He was a young priest at a gathering on Boston Common when a teacher he was talking with said that we spend so much time teaching the mind and so little teaching the heart. He carried that line around for decades. Then he gave it back, telling a room of retiring Catholic school teachers that this was what all their years had been for, the heart as much as the mind. He had been saving it a long time.

The saints closest to him have been there since the beginning, Peter, his baptismal patron, and Joseph, the carpenter who taught Jesus how to be a man. Both are on his coat of arms, and beside them sits a lion he borrowed from Pope John XXIII, the pope who insisted that his own lion be drawn smiling. Under all of it are three words he took from Morning Prayer, Guide Our Steps. It asks for help rather than promising it, which fits him. When he was handed the biggest job of his life, that is close to what he asked of everyone else too. Pray for me, he said, so I can serve well with Jesus at my side.