Robert Francis Hennessey

Bishop Robert Hennessey has a simple way of describing his own job. He looks after the priests, so the priests can look after everyone else. He has said it about as plainly as that, and it is less a job description than something he settled into a long time ago. Priests notice. It is the kind of thing that gets a man called a priests' priest, which is what other priests call someone who loves being a priest and makes it plain he loves them too.

Warm, quick with a joke, and never one to make much of himself, he is easy to be around and just as happy when the joke is on him. Friends who have known him since seminary say he knows what to take seriously and what to take with a grain of salt, and the people who have worked with him since describe an approachable, humble man with a shepherd's heart. He grew up in South Boston, the second of five children, in a home within sight of Carson Beach. The family was not well off, he says, but with the water right there he always thought they were rich. He was still in school when his mother died, and his father, a Boston police officer working hours that were anything but regular, raised the five of them on his own. St. Augustine was his home parish. He served there as an altar boy, and for all eighteen years he lived in the parish it had the same pastor and the same three associate priests. He credits those men, along with a great-uncle who was a priest and his mother, for the call he followed.

He went from Boston Latin School straight into the seminary and was ordained in 1978, and it did not take him long to work out that parish life was where he belonged. Graduate study at Notre Dame only confirmed it. Then he volunteered for the Missionary Society of St. James the Apostle, drawn to it by a pastor in Plymouth who had served there and talked about how close the priests became, and he spent years in Bolivia as the only priest in a parish of some forty-five thousand people. The nearest brother priest was sometimes hours away. He came home speaking Spanish and a little of the local languages, and carrying something he still returns to. When those families prayed for their daily bread, they meant it literally. Back in Boston, he spent twelve years as pastor of Most Holy Redeemer in East Boston, the largest Spanish-speaking parish in the archdiocese, where he baptized more people than most priests do in a lifetime and kept the rectory door open, especially for priests, who could count on sandwiches and a long conversation.

He was ordained a bishop in 2006, on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and took his motto from Mary's song, Magnificat anima mea Dominum, my soul magnifies the Lord. The first thing he told the priests he was about to serve was that he would need their patience while he learned the job. The Merrimack Region came later, thirty-some communities of country roads a long way from the tight grid of neighborhood churches he knew growing up. He calls the difference the exciting part, and jokes that it means a lot of hours in the car, though at least this time the car will be moving.

Whatever the title has been, the work has kept the same shape. He is still the one who keeps a door open for priests, and still, by his own accounting, the oldest of the three Hennessey priests in the archdiocese. The young one, the smart one, and, as he puts it, the old one, me.