William Draper Byrne

Bishop William Byrne has a way of making a room lighter, and he traces the reason back to gratitude. Live out of gratitude, he says, and you start to realize that everything is a gift and you stop taking yourself nearly so seriously. It is the closest thing he has to a philosophy, and it turns up in almost everything he does.

Warm and quick with a joke, he is the kind of pastor people did not want to give up. Someone who worked alongside him at his last parish said that if he wants to, he can make a joke out of every other sentence, and in the same breath described a man whose affection for his parishioners was obvious to anyone watching. He grew up in Washington, D.C., the youngest of eight children, the son of a heart surgeon and a mother who kept a full house running. His parents were daily communicants who were also, in his telling, fun people who laughed a lot, and he still calls his childhood a happy one. He was the gregarious one in the family, the kind of child other households wanted around. One Christmas morning a friend's mother called and asked if he could come over, because her own house had gone quiet and she thought he might lift the mood. His mother said no.

Priesthood was never a strange idea in that house. His uncle, Fr. John Byrne, was a priest in New York, a Renaissance man by the family's telling who played semi-pro football and loved poetry, and having him around made the seminary feel like an ordinary thing to consider. He could be a doctor like his father or a priest like his uncle. When his uncle died during Byrne's college years, he spoke for the family at the funeral, and the cardinal who celebrated the Mass told him afterward that they had to sign this guy up for the priesthood. It had already been in the back of his mind. He taught Latin at his old grade school for a few years first, then studied in Rome, and was ordained for the Archdiocese of Washington.

His ministry since has kept putting him in front of people working out what to do with their lives. There were eight years as a chaplain at the University of Maryland, a parish on Capitol Hill where he gathered Catholic members of Congress for conversation and prayer, and nine years teaching seminarians how to preach, where his advice came down to three things: be brief, be sincere, and be seated. He believes in precision, in shooting one arrow rather than fifty, and that same instinct is what made Five Things work, the column and video series that goes looking for God in ordinary life. The call telling him he had been named a bishop reached him on the feast of the Guardian Angels. His first thought was a joke, that his own guardian angel must have been asleep on the job, until he remembered that guardian angels do not sleep. What he was being handed, he decided, was a gift. He arrived in western Massachusetts having filled his search history with the names of the four counties now in his care, telling people that if they wanted to find him, they probably would not find him behind a desk.

There is a lighter side he makes no effort to hide. As a boy he made a murder mystery movie out of clips of his own family, and he never quite lost the instinct for a camera. He picks up languages for the pleasure of it, Spanish, French, and Italian. He is bald, and he has firm opinions about men who wear baseball caps indoors. He travels with Zelie, a black lab named for the mother of St. Thérèse, who waits at the back of the church during Mass and turns up in most of the photos afterward, because people are drawn to the dog, he says, and it makes the bishop seem a little more human. The saints tell the rest. He met Mother Teresa once as a seminarian, and out of a whole line of them she stopped in front of him and said, "Don't get in God's way." He still does not know why she said it to him and no one else, but he has tried to make it a rule ever since. He is drawn as well to St. Thérèse and her little way, on the grounds that it is hard to be anything but small before God. And when the time came to choose a motto, he chose the words he keeps returning to, In Spem Vivam, into a living hope.