Robert F. Tywoniak

Father Bob Tywoniak is the kind of pastor who is genuinely glad to see you walk through the door. He is friendly, quick with a joke, and warm toward anyone who comes in worn down or unsure they belong. None of us are perfect here, he is the first to say, himself included, and there is always room for one more. "We are faithful," he likes to say. "Come on in."

Public service was almost the family trade. His father served back home in New Jersey as a city councilman and police commissioner, and for a long time Bob assumed he would follow some version of that path, maybe law, maybe elected office. Born in 1957, he had moved to Florida with his family as a boy, and by college he was studying business and pre-law at Stetson University. That is where the plan came undone. On a quiet retreat, he heard what he still describes as an almost audible voice telling him to be a priest. He was ordained in 1983, and more than forty years on, people describe him much the way they always have, less by his titles or his social work credentials than by a plain conviction: faith is something you do, not just something you say.

That conviction has taken real shape for as long as he has worn the collar. Long before Blessed Sacrament, he spent ten years running the child welfare division of Catholic Charities, a trained social worker who liked to joke that God called him to be celibate and then made him "the father of hundreds of kids a year." Over the years he has sat on community boards and a hospital ethics committee and pitched in to feed people who were going hungry. For Bob, the Gospel was never meant to stay in the pulpit. It is something you carry out the door and put to work.

Away from the parish, there is more to him than the collar lets on. He still runs five miles at a time, several days a week, and treats the miles as much like prayer as exercise. He grew up singing and playing the trumpet, and once took the stage in a high school production of "The Sound of Music." He is a longtime fan of "The West Wing," which he thinks captures better than anything else on television just how hard it is to govern. He genuinely likes people, all kinds of them, and has spent much of his ministry in parishes where the pews fill with families from all over.

Through all of it, one thing holds steady. The best part of his week, he has said, is the Sunday liturgy, and everything else makes little sense without it. A line from Mother Teresa, that we are called to be faithful, not successful, has come to mean more to him the longer he has been a priest, especially in the stretches when he built something up only to be moved along before he could see it bear fruit. Ask him what he would most want to be remembered for, and he turns the question around. He hopes people will not really remember him at all, only that being near him felt like being near the love of God, and that afterward they might just wonder, "Who was that guy?"