David Zubik

Catholic bishop

As a student at St. Veronica High School in Ambridge in the 1960s, David Zubik planned to become an attorney, get married and have children.

Nothing changed that plan after a friend invited him to go along on a religious retreat. “I hated it,” he recalled. “I just felt like a fish out of water.”

A couple of years later, the same friend invited him to another retreat.

He refused at first, but the friend didn’t want to go either and just wanted some company. So the future Bishop Zubik went, with very different results from the last one.

There, he met seminarians preparing for the priesthood, and their example inspired him. So did the retreat leader, then-Bishop and future Cardinal John Wright. This was 1965, and the bishop was freshly returned from the Second Vatican Council, with its historic reforms in liturgy and other church practice.

“God really got me. He got me where I needed to be gotten,” said Bishop Zubik, who would eventually fill the position Cardinal Wright held as spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh.

Even after Bishop Zubik entered seminary, he said, “I still continued to fight the Lord during that time, because I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to do. Eventually I got the peace in my own heart” about his calling.

What followed was ordination in 1975 and a long tenure as priest, as administrator and eventually as a bishop, serving for a time in Green Bay before assuming leadership in his home Diocese of Pittsburgh in 2007.

The past few years alone have been among the most challenging — a grand jury report on decades of sexual abuse in the diocese, a sweeping parish

reorganization in response to declining membership and participation, a slump in funding.

Now there’s the COVID-19 outbreak, causing churches temporarily to shutter, interrupting sacramental life for more than two months and causing further cuts in revenues and jobs. Bishop Zubik has taken his share of criticism through all of this.

He said there’s no point in speculating on whether he would have chosen a different calling had he known what was coming.

“It’s the same thing for a married person” facing a challenging situation, such as having a child with a disability, he said. “You’re better off not knowing what you’re going to face. When you face the challenges, you have the commitment to say, ‘I have to work through this.’”

He added: “It’s the issue of having faith to say I’m going to put my whole self, heart and soul, to do the best job I can.” And, he said, “I know I’m not alone, that Jesus Christ is with me.”

Bishop Zubik often tells audiences about a conversation he had with an airplane seatmate. The man noticed the bishop praying the rosary and, as they conversed, told him he used to be a Catholic but became a Buddhist because he’d never seen a “Christian who really tries to be like Jesus.”

That encounter, Bishop Zubik said, has guided his decision-making with an aim to get people enthusiastic about knowing Jesus and following his example.

While Catholic churches have begun reopening in June, Bishop Zubik said the impact of the recent shutdown is profound.

“I’m hoping that it has made people more appreciative and aware of the presence of God in their lives, and perhaps because of what’s happened, because of self-quarantining and being self-quarantined with the family, they’ve discovered each other in a new way,” he said.

He has continued to lead services at St. Paul Seminary’s chapel for online worshippers.

“We’ve been very blessed to be able to do livestreaming,” he said. “We do Mass every day, we do evening prayer. It’s amazing how many hits there are, from other parts of the country. I just received a thank-you note from Canada.”

He added: “That’s been beautiful, people expressing their gratitude and expressing their faith, but let’s face it: There’s nothing like being with your people.”