2026 Vocations Awareness Supplement
Franciscan friar takes lessons learned on Indianapolis’ near east side around the world
Franciscan Brother Michael Perry, minister provincial of the Franciscan Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe, presides at a liturgy on Aug. 22 at St. Camillus Church in Silver Springs, Md., during which eight friars of the province professed solemn vows. (Photo courtesy: Franciscan Brother Octavio Duran, Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe)
(Editor’s note: Franciscan Brother Michael Perry, a native of Indianapolis, was ordained a priest in 1984. Looking back to the teachings and practices of St. Francis of Assisi, he and other Franciscan priests have chosen to identify themselves as “brother” like other non-ordained member of the religious order founded by St. Francis rather than “father.” In respect of that decision, this terminology will be used in this article.)
By Sean Gallagher
Franciscan Brother Michael Perry’s world in the early 1960s was the neighborhood on the near east side of Indianapolis around the former Holy Cross Parish.
He came to know the neighborhood well working as a paper boy at 6 and managing a lawn care business with some friends by the time he was 10.
Along the way, Brother Michael learned important lessons there about neighbors taking responsibility to care for each other, about how the Church is all the people of God and that its worship and its care for those in need are closely related and strengthen each other.
A wide array of people instilled these lessons in him: his parents, his neighbors, the priests who served at Holy Cross, and the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods who staffed the parish’s school.
Those lessons paved the way for Brother Michael to discern a call to religious life as a Franciscan. And he’s taken those lessons with him in a wide variety of assignments and places.
He’s been a missionary in the Democratic Republic of Congo in central Africa and served as a staff member in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ international relief agency.
All of this led Brother Michael to be chosen in 2013 by his fellow Franciscans to serve as their religious order’s worldwide leader as its minister general. As such, he was the 120th successor of St. Francis of Assisi himself, serving in this office until 2021.
This summer, Brother Michael was elected as the minister provincial of the Our Lady of Guadalupe Province of the Franciscans that is made up of most of the members of the order in the U.S. It was formed in 2023 when several provinces came together to form one new province of about 700 friars. He also serves as the director of the Laudato Si’ Center for Integral Ecology at Siena University in Loudonville, N.Y.
In an interview with The Criterion, Brother Michael reflected on how the lessons he learned as a youth in Indianapolis have remained with him and shaped him as his world has grown far beyond the near east side neighborhood.
“I’m no longer the paper boy or the one who cut grass in the neighborhood,” he said. “But I’m still that person because that sense of community, that sense of responsibility, that sense of the dignity and the holiness of life that was communicated through the community of Holy Cross and other communities in Indianapolis remains.”
‘Something that shaped my whole vision’
Although he’s now ministered throughout the world and held positions of high responsibility in his religious community, Brother Michael remembers well the people in his neighborhood and parish who shaped him to be the person he has become.
One such person is retired Father John Geis, whose first pastoral assignment after his 1964 ordination was as associate pastor of Holy Cross Parish, serving there until 1970.
Brother Michael described Father Geis as “a wonderful pastoral person.”
Then there was Father James Byrne, Holy Cross’ pastor from 1970-83, whom Brother Michael described as “a natural pastoral person” who “was able to bring people together to work for the benefit of the community.”
“He really presented to me an image of what the Second Vatican Council talked about, the Church as the people of God,” Brother Michael added. “And that has never left me. That’s something that shaped my whole vision.”
Then there were his parents and his neighbors who helped form him. He recalls his parents and other adults in the neighborhood taking action to help their neighbors who were in need.
“The priests at Holy Cross were sensitive to that and would even sometimes just say that there’s a family in need and can some families help,” Brother Michael recalled. “And they’d get an immediate response.”
After graduating from the former Holy Cross Central School in 1968, Brother Michael ultimately became part of the first graduating class of the-then new Roncalli High School in Indianapolis. He’s also the first of its many graduates to be ordained to the priesthood.
Brother Michael was first drawn to the Franciscans by meeting a friar serving in Indianapolis who, in an ecumenical effort, worked with a Methodist congregation to serve the poor on trips to West Virgina.
Brother Michael joined what was then the Sacred Heart Province of the Franciscans, based in St. Louis. He first professed vows in 1978. When he later enrolled at Chicago Theological Union for priestly formation, two Augustinian friars showed him and other new students around the city in a bus ride.
One of those Augustinians was Brother Robert Prevost, the future Pope Leo XIV. The other Augustinian was also named Robert, which confused Brother Michael.
“I remember getting off the bus at the first stop and I turned to he who now is Pope Leo and I said, ‘Are you Robert or Bob?’ ” Brother Michael recalled. “And he said, ‘Just call me Bob.’ ”
Although his ties to Pope Leo are not that close, another pope played a much larger role in his life.
All Franciscans are ‘successors of St. Francis’
After his ordination in 1984, Brother Michael did graduate studies in theology in England and later did missionary work in Africa and work for the U.S. bishops in Washington.
The friars of the Sacred Heart Province recognized his leadership potential in all these ministries and elected him as their minister provincial in 2008.
But it was a position that Brother Michael held for only 11 months. In 2009, Franciscans from around the world elected him to serve a six-year term as second in worldwide leadership of the order as its vicar general.
When he was told by a group of friars before the election that he was likely to be chosen for the office, Brother Michael asked them to choose someone else.
“But as good, obedient Franciscans are, you tell them not to do it, and they will do it,” said Brother Michael with a laugh.
Four years into that term, history was made when Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires became the first Jesuit to be elected supreme pontiff and selected a papal name never adopted by a previous pope: Francis.
Less than a month after Pope Francis was elected on March 13, 2013, the pontiff appointed the Franciscans’ minister general to serve as secretary for the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.
That congregation (now a dicastery) needed a new secretary because its previous one, then-Archbishop Joseph W. Tobin, had been appointed in 2012 as archbishop of Indianapolis.
With the Franciscans no longer having a minister general, a special election was called to choose a friar to complete the last two years of the term of now-Archbishop José Rodríguez Carballo. Brother Michael was elected.
It was a weighty moment for the man who had grown up on the near east side of Indianapolis, noting that becoming a successor of St. Francis “places a tremendous responsibility on one’s shoulders.”
“But I reminded them to not forget that each of them were also the successors of St. Francis, of the same spirituality, of the same invitation to do what is yours to do,” Brother Michael said.
He tried to give his fellow Franciscans an example of their common spirituality by adding a word to the title of his new office: “servant.” Brother Michael was to be the “minister general and servant” of the Franciscans.
“This is something that St. Francis highly valued,” said Brother Michael, adding that it was “a central theme of Francis’ writing and in his leadership of the Franciscan order, which he did until he resigned in 1220.
“He wanted us never to allow any rules or titles that we held to elevate us anything above washing the feet of others.”
To ‘reclaim our values’ or ‘to be reclaimed by them’
It was a moment of feet-washing that began reminding Brother Michael, his fellow Franciscans around the world and all Catholics of the service that all disciples of Christ are called to give those in need and those who suffer.
The new pontiff, following in the footsteps of his namesake, St. Francis, washed the feet of inmates in a Roman prison on Holy Thursday, March 28, 2013, just two weeks after his election.
In doing this so soon after his election, Pope Francis, for Brother Michael, was “demonstrating a quality for me, not only of Jesus and of the Church, but of the core values of the Franciscan identity, that our life is intimately connected with our brothers and sisters who are in various conditions of suffering.”
“He really challenged us and reminded us of our simplicity and our need to always stay close to God’s people, especially those who are marginalized, those who are poor,” Brother Michael said.
He added that Pope Francis’ ongoing witness was “an opportunity to reclaim our values—or maybe to be reclaimed by them—and to reorient our lives.”
Later in 2013, Pope Francis issued his landmark apostolic exhortation on the proclamation of the Gospel, “Evangelii Gaudium” (“The Joy of the Gospel”).
This document, Brother Michael said, reflected a particular Franciscan understanding of the nature of the Church.
“His vision was the same vision I grew up with as a young adult,” he said, “as the Church as the people of God, the communion of the world with the Church and the Church’s relationship to the world and all people, even those outside the Church.”
Brother Michael continued to see deeply Franciscan qualities in other teaching documents of Pope Francis, such as his 2020 encyclical letter, “Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship.”
For him, this document was a call to all Franciscans, and all Catholics, “to expand our spiritual and affective imagination to embrace all people, to recognize we’re on a common journey together back toward God, together with all of creation.”
This, Brother Michael said, is a message “which the world needs to hear today in all of the divisions, all the pursuit of weapons and war, with each country being told it has to stand on its own and demonstrate its capacity to dominate others.”
‘On the edge of a whole new adventure’
Because he served for eight years as minister general and servant of all Franciscans around the world, choosing Brother Michael to lead one province might seem like a no brainer.
But while he was humbled by his fellow friars’ choice of him to lead the Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe, there was another friar whom he was praying would be selected instead of him.
“I think some people think that maybe because you’ve been to Rome and had some other job you might have some special wisdom, which simply isn’t true,” he said.
Nonetheless, Brother Michael is excited to lead his fellow friars across the U.S. in a time when other religious communities are considering that their time in the Church is coming to an end.
“Franciscans don’t have that luxury because our charism doesn’t come from us,” he said. “Our charism belongs to the Church, and it belongs to the world.
“We’re re-imagining [it] in light of what the Church and young people need right now. That’s the direction we’re being called to right now in terms of a witness.”
Brother Michael noted that eight young friars recently professed solemn vows in his province, two others were ordained as priests and seven men entered the province as postulants.
“I feel excited because we’re on the edge of a whole new adventure, a whole new epoch that’s emerging,” he said. “We don’t have any control over it, and we certainly don’t have a crystal ball knowing what direction it’s going to lead us. But we are at an incredible moment in history, an incredible opportunity.”
That’s a big vision for a boy who grew up delivering newspapers and mowing lawns on Indianapolis’ near east side. But the foundations of faith and care for all people that were laid there in his heart and soul have prepared Brother Michael for this moment.
“I just think God is preparing us for something amazing yet to come,” he said. “We’ve just got to be faithful, and we’ve got to be willing to change and move forward.”
(To learn more about a vocation as a Franciscan in the Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe, visit friars.us.) †
