As a Catholic school student in Chicago, Cardinal Wilton Gregory found his faith and his calling to the priesthood.
In 1958 at the age of 11, he began attending the sixth grade at St. Carthage School in his home city of Chicago. At the 2019 press conference after Pope Francis named then-Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta as the new archbishop of Washington, he noted that as a new student at St. Carthage School, he was so inspired by the gentleness, compassion and outreach of the parish priests and Adrian Dominican sisters there, “that within six weeks of being in Catholic school, and not being from a Catholic background, I said, ‘I want to be a priest.’”
Young Wilton Gregory was baptized as a Catholic during the Easter Vigil that school year. His two younger sisters, Elaine and Claudia, also attended that Catholic school. He later entered the seminary, and in 1973 then-Father Gregory was ordained as a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago.
Father Gregory went on to earn a doctorate in sacred liturgy in Rome in 1980, and in Chicago he served as a parish priest, a seminary faculty member and as the master of ceremonies for the archbishop there, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who ordained him as an auxiliary bishop of Chicago in 1983.
Later while serving as the archbishop of Atlanta, Cardinal Gregory in a 2016 column for the Georgia Bulletin newspaper remembered Cardinal Bernardin’s impact on his life, saying “he was my pastor, my mentor, my friend and brother.”
Cardinal Gregory wrote that his mentor had “a great pastoral heart,” and was a prophetic voice for the Catholic Church who recognized “we needed to find and explore common ground to address the challenges facing the Church.”
Later while serving as the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Gregory in a 2023 interview remembered how Cardinal Bernardin “never lost the common touch. He was always a priest, approachable, (and) never took himself too seriously. He was always one who could kid with me, and I could kid with him. It was a relationship that was comfortable enough so that I could poke fun at him, and he could poke fun at me… he just was so down to earth.
“He never let his office, the titles, his positions separate him from his people. He used them to draw his people closer to himself,” the cardinal said, remembering Cardinal Bernardin, who died from pancreatic cancer in 1996.
