Mary, St. Juan Diego guides for Bishop José María Garcia-Maldonado

Bishop José María Garcia-Maldonado, 45, loves being a priest.

He loves being with people when they experience God.

He sees it when he celebrates Mass in a full church on a cold winter Sunday.

“They’re not looking for you, they are looking for God, they want to be fed by their faith,” he said in a January interview. “Just to see the appreciation of the parishioners for the church. … Yes, it’s great when you make the connection with the community, they love you, you love them. It makes a big difference. But just to see them coming, on a day like a last Sunday, when I thought maybe a few people would come because of the weather. But no. They really want to be here, and I appreciate that.”

He also sees it when he listens to confessions during the sacrament of reconciliation.

“It’s a sacred time, he said. “People open their lives and their hearts to the priest. They are looking for healing, and I have witnessed many times the mercy of God, and when people experience that forgiveness, they experience joy and often you will see tears coming up from their eyes.”

Bishop Garcia-Maldonado is episcopal vicar of Vicariate IV, which includes parts of the Northwest Side and west and northwest suburbs.

Bishop Garcia-Maldonado is taking as his guides Mary, who assented to becoming the mother of God, and St. Juan Diego, who accepted Mary’s commission of speaking to the bishop even though he didn’t think anyone would listen to him.

They are among the examples he looked to when he received a call from Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the apostolic nuncio to the United States, at about 4 p.m. on Dec. 12, 2024, the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

He was shocked when Cardinal Pierre, who ministered for several years in Mexico, addressed Bishop Garcia-Maldonado in Spanish, telling him that Pope Francis intended to appoint him an auxiliary bishop of Chicago.

“And then he started telling me, ‘You were not looking for this, I know. God knows who we are, and he will be the one, if he is calling you to do this, who will give you the means to do it.’”

Bishop Garcia-Maldonado, who was ordained to the priesthood in 2008, is the fifth of nine children in his family. He grew up in San Julián in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, and discerned his call to the priesthood when he was young.

“When I was 9 years old, the pastor from my parish asked me to become an altar server,” Bishop Garcia-Maldonado said. “I never asked for it. He invited me and I accepted. Being an altar server, I had the opportunity to be close to the priests, to the church. After being an altar server for three or four years, I asked one of the priests, ‘If I want to become a priest, what do I need to do?’ He said to me, ‘You have to go to the seminary.’”

That presented a dilemma, as his family was all moving north to Chicago when he was preparing to enter the seminary in San Juan de los Lagos.

He stayed in Mexico, separated from his family, for eight years and completed his undergraduate work and philosophy studies before coming to Chicago at age 21.

“I had the feeling that there was need of Hispanic priests in the U.S., in Chicago, so I decided to leave the seminary in Mexico,” he said. “I came to Chicago, and I worked in a factory for a year in Des Plaines.”

At the time, Bishop Garcia-Maldonado said, he was thinking again about whether he was called to be a priest.

“It was, do I want to move on, do I want something else? After a year of being in Chicago, I said to a priest, ‘I was a seminarian in Mexico. I would like to continue my studies in Chicago.”

The priest referred Bishop Garcia-Maldonado to Casa Jesus, a house of discernment the archdiocese then operated for young men from Latin America.After a year there, Bishop Garcia-Maldonado entered the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary.

After being ordained, he served as associate pastor of St. Sylvester Parish and the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Des Plaines before becoming administrator and then pastor of Good Shepherd Parish in Little Village.

Silvia Villeda was active in Good Shepherd Parish when Bishop Garcia-Maldonado was first assigned there, and over the years, he became a good friend, she said.

Villeda was a leader of the youth group and lector when Bishop Garcia-Maldonado arrived, she said, and he encouraged her to take on more leadership roles. She served on the parish finance council and went to the Instituto Liderazgo, a lay leadership formation program for Spanish speakers. When she was finishing the program, with Bishop Garcia-Maldonado’s encouragement, she started a group for disabled parishioners and their families, the Grupo de Angelitos, she said.

At the beginning, he was very serious, she recalled, even with parish volunteers.

“We were very joyful, and sometimes we would go to the rectory and have lunch together,” she said. “And at the beginning, he was very strict. One day, there was a lot of talking and laughing in the kitchen, and he entered with a very strict face.”

At the same time, she said, he was open and available to people.

“He’s a very approachable person,” she said. “He’d talk with anyone — kids, older people. He was talking with people who usually are rejected by society, like drunk people or people who are in trouble. He was part of our community.”

Father Marco Franco, pastor of St. Agnes of Bohemia Parish in the Little Village neighborhood, said he noticed Bishop Garcia-Maldonado’s way with people when he started attending weekend services at Good Shepherd during his year at Casa Jesus.

“He is always very respectful of the liturgy, but right after, when he’s greeting people, he’s very approachable,” Franco said. “I’m very grateful that I met a person like him. He was guiding me through the process of getting to know the archdiocese and the priests and the city. Also, later in my ministry, when I was ordained, my first assignment as a priest was at Good Shepherd with him. It was nice to have someone who was very organized, very clear in what he wanted, but also very reasonable with people. When I was working with him, I never felt pressured by him.”

Bishop Garcia-Maldonado said that while his journey to this point sometimes seemed circuitous, he now can see the thread that runs through it.

“Now it’s easy to see everything,” he said. “At the time, though, when my family was moving from Mexico, living at the seminary, coming to the U.S., it’s very confusing. It’s like, what I’m doing here? Now if I look back at my vocation, I can see how God was saying, ‘OK, I will bring you to this place.’”