Fr. Michael Barber, SJ Selected By The Holy Father

Bishop Michael Barber, S.J. at the Oratory of Oxford, England

Michael Charles Barber was born in 1954 to Californians living temporarily in Salt Lake City. He is the oldest of three brothers, two of them Jesuit priests. As a young boy his early teachers, Ursuline Sisters from Santa Rosa and Dominican Sisters of San Rafael, instilled the beauty of the Catholic faith in him. He was a youngster, like many baby boomers, who made his First Communion in a parish hall because the church was still being built and spent his school days in crowded classrooms, where he was enthralled by visiting missionaries' stories of faraway lands. He would later go on to serve halfway around the world on islands that lacked luxuries but not people of faith. That's the Michael Barber, SJ selected by the Holy Father.

True to the Jesuit of tradition of serving where he was needed most, Bishop Barber was willing to set aside his own pursuits, primarily, his post-graduate studies on Cardinal John Newman, to go the people. His long service as a military chaplain in the Navy has given him the closest thing to his own parish on his résumé — an aircraft carrier, and 7,000 military personnel awaiting deployment to Iraq in the tense days before the start of the war.

A call to help build vocations has led to two stints — one at St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, the most recent at St. John's Seminary in Boston — where he has not only spent time in the classroom with young men studying for the priesthood, but served as spiritual director. Many of those young priests were present at his ordination and installation as bishop.

Link (here) to The Catholic Voice