Robert Philip Reed

Bishop Robert Reed has spent his priesthood in a parish and in a television studio at the same time, and he has never treated them as two different jobs. He says he understands himself as a parish priest even in the television work, because in his view the Church lives in the communion of a parish and not on a screen.

Warm and quick to call himself blessed, Reed is the sort of man people tend to describe by his manner before his titles, by his energy, his ready smile, and his loyalty to the people he works alongside. He has always said none of the work is his alone and that every assignment has been a team effort. And for all the offices he holds, the thing he says he enjoys most is being called Father. People apologize when it slips out and he tells them not to. For him the word is a term of endearment, and he has said the dads in his parish are the ones who show him how to do it well.

He grew up in Swampscott, north of Boston, the youngest of five children of William and Jeanne Reed. He likes to say he had two centers in his life, the family address and the parish church, and that the two carried about equal weight. He was seven when he lost his father, and young as he was, it set him asking questions that do not usually occur to a boy, about what living is for and what his faith was actually worth to him. He traces his vocation back to that. What he really wanted to be, he jokes, was Batman. But nothing else ever got much of a hearing, and when he told his mother, she said, "Bobby, you can do whatever you want as long as it makes you happy." He was ordained in 1985 at the church where he had been baptized and confirmed.

His interest in television started early. He had loved it since he was a boy in the studio audience of a local children's show, and as a young man he watched the big Protestant Sunday broadcasts and kept thinking, why can't we as Catholics do something like that. In the late nineties the archdiocese sent him back to school to learn the trade, and he has spent the years since bringing the Mass, the rosary, and the daily prayers of the Church to people who cannot easily get to a parish. He was ordained a bishop in 2016, and he now serves as rector of the seminary in Brighton where he once trained.

Away from all of it, he keeps a life that has not changed much since he was young. He escapes to Dunkin' Donuts to read and get work done, watches movies at night, walks the beach when the weather allows, and has been a Bruins fan since junior high. He is also a lifelong Spider-Man fan, for a reason he gives without any ceremony at all: he sees himself in Peter Parker, a bit goofy, a bit awkward, and used by God anyway. His motto says the rest in four words of Latin, and it comes out plainly enough in English. Jesus is our only hope. When it comes down to it, he says, there is nothing more than that.