Robert Joseph McManus

Bishop Robert McManus grew up three blocks from his parish in a corner of Providence so full of faith that the whole neighborhood was known as the Holy Land. It was the kind of place where home, school, and church ran together into one, where a priest was always in the stands when the grade-school team played, and he has never really left it, not in the way he tells it.

He is plainspoken and sure of what he believes, the kind of person who tells you a thing straight and lets it stand. He knew early, while he was still a young boy, that he wanted the priesthood, and he has never really wavered since, ordained for Providence in 1978 after studies that carried him from Washington to Toronto to Rome. Of all the roles he has held, the one he speaks of most warmly is his time as a seminary rector, six years he calls some of the happiest of his life. He has known many of the men he ordained since they were boys, and to this day he talks about them the way a father talks about his children.

What lights him up now is his people. When he became the fifth Bishop of Worcester in 2004, he found a diocese being remade by newcomers, and it has never stopped moving him, all the Ghanaian and Kenyan and Vietnamese and Brazilian families filling his churches, grandparents and parents and children together, on fire with the faith. He counts them among the great blessings of his years there. It is the same love of his people that made the pandemic so hard on him, when he found himself saying Mass to an empty cathedral, and all he could think was that it felt like being left behind by everyone he was meant to serve.

At the center of everything for him is the Eucharist, the thing he will tell anyone you cannot really be Catholic without. He is a man of plain and faithful habits, who believes the rosary is a gift anyone can find time for and that the Church is a big place with room for many kinds of people. When you ask how he hopes to be remembered, the answer turns out to be smaller than the office he holds. He would simply like people to say he was a true and loyal friend of Jesus.