New Associate Priest Announced
We are excited to announce that Fr. Robert Pish will join St. Bartholomew’s as our new associate priest (more formally called a Parochial Vicar) beginning April 17. Please join us in welcoming him to our parish.
Fr. Pish was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. He is also known as Fr. Bobby since an unfortunate similarity in last names with his first pastor after ordination at All Saints in Lakeville, Minnesota, made the change all but a necessity.
He attended college at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and used his business degree to launch him into an 8-year career in technology consulting with a company that brought him to Minneapolis in the spring of 1997.
Around that time, he discerned a call to the priesthood, which had persisted since grade school. He entered the St. Paul Seminary in 1999 and soon became convinced that the faith that had been a constant gift in his life was worth offering his life in service to the Church. He was ordained in 2005, and after two years at All Saints, he was assigned back to the St. Paul Seminary. He spent the first two years of his assignment working on a Ph.D. in Historical Theology at Catholic University in Washington, DC. He studied the development of the understanding of the spiritual life throughout the history of the Church.
From fall 2009 to summer 2016, Fr. Pish served as the Vice Rector and Associate Dean of the seminary. After a very intense seven years, Archbishop Hebda gave him the freedom with which he studied psychology at the Adler Graduate School in Minnetonka. From 2019 to 2023, Fr. Pish gained a variety of experience as a mental health counselor with treatment organizations and in his private practice. He has greatly appreciated his work with the clients who have allowed him to accompany them as they work to overcome difficult challenges.
Last summer, Fr. Pish decided to return to parish life by living in residence at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Savage. He will be forever grateful to the parishioners and staff there who reconfirmed that his vocation is to serve the people of this Archdiocese in the wonderfully complex and foundational environment of the parish. He looks forward to working with Fr. Klockeman, whom he worked with at the St. Paul Seminary, and is eager to learn how the Holy Spirit has built St. Bartholomew into the parish that it is today and the way parishioners are being called to follow Christ into the future.