“God has called me to point to things and to be a bridge and to try to create reconciliation and connectivity,” he says. “I am called to connect things that are disconnected.”

At Covenant Health, that includes looking for ways to connect people with the gifts of the Catholic faith.

“I intentionally look for ways to connect that, to bridge that, so that people can understand the richness of our traditions and certainly so that they can link it with their own faith and their connections as well. I just know that’s what God asks me to do in a lot of situations. I’m a link between the health system and the Church. I am meant to be a bridge with the senior teams and the other teams,” he says.

As the vice president of mission integration, Carmello-Harper says he is responsible for ensuring that mission remains at the heart of all the health system does.

“I’m the person who is going to be helping to frame the resources, formation, our ethics, our committees, all the things that we do to expand mission and enable mission to be really embedded across the health system,” he says. 

That includes Covenant’s family of healthcare organizations in Maine, which include Bangor Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, St. André Health Care in Biddeford, St. Joseph Healthcare in Bangor, and St. Mary’s Health System and St. Mary’s d’Youville Pavilion in Lewiston.

“I’m honored to continue the important work of inspiring and advancing Covenant Health’s core values of compassion, integrity, collaboration, and excellence into all areas of our ministry,” he says. 

Carmello-Harper says one of his first focuses will be to provide more formation experiences for local leadership teams so that those experiences can then cascade throughout the health system.

“It’s incumbent upon anyone who works with Covenant or in Catholic healthcare to understand our values, our mission, why we do what we do,” he says. “No one ever graduates from formation.”

Prior to coming to Covenant, Carmello-Harper served as vice president and chief mission integration leader of Ascension’s St. Vincent’s Health System in Alabama. He served there for 13 years until St. Vincent’s was acquired by the University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System Authority.

Carmello-Harper says transitioning to the Northeast wasn’t difficult because he has lived in several places during his life and was born in Newfoundland, Canada. He still has family members there as well as in Nova Scotia and Ontario.

Carmello-Harper brings with him not only expertise in Catholic healthcare but also a deep commitment to it and to his Catholic faith, something rooted in his upbringing.

Raised by his mother after his father left, he says money was always scarce. Yet, each week, his mother, who didn’t yet drive, would spend some of the little she had to pay for a taxi ride to Mass. 

“We went from middle class to very low income very quickly. And when she took out five dollars to pay for the cab ride, I remember thinking about what we could buy with those five dollars. She did that every week. I was young, but that really touched me that this was that important to her,” he says. 

Carmello-Harper says he was also struck by his mother’s unwavering faith despite the challenges she faced.

“She didn’t go, ‘Well, God doesn’t care about us’ or ‘We’re not going back to church anymore.’ It became the center of her life, just really her hope, and that then became mine,” he says. “I experienced the goodness of God in my mom.”

So powerful was the experience that after high school, he entered seminary. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Birmingham, serving as an associate pastor, pastor, and then vice chancellor before studying canon law at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

He earned a licentiate in canon law, but not feeling called to serve the Church in that area, he took a leave of absence and eventually left the priesthood.

He never lost his faith, however, nor his call to serve. He went to work for a public interest law firm in Washington, D.C., and then for the AARP Tax-Aid Program, which is where he met his future wife.

They settled in Birmingham, where he took a job with the United Way before personal tragedy brought him face-to-face with the world of healthcare. His stepson Adam was diagnosed with colon cancer and died at the age of 13. Although Carmello-Harper says he and his wife had health insurance and were able to get Adam the treatment he needed, during the days spent at the hospital, he became aware that many people weren’t as fortunate.

“I saw for six months, every day, what we had access to and what others didn’t. It really caused me to look at this and ask, ‘How do we create access?’” he says. “I’m not saying anyone was not treated well, but you could see the disparity between people who have insurance and people who don’t.”

That experience led to his decision to apply for the mission leadership position at St. Vincent’s.

“The Church teaches us that suffering must have meaning. And so, whatever suffering I have experienced in my life, it has to have meaning. It has to go somewhere. I don’t believe it’s given to us, but I do believe that we are obligated to take that and to transform it and use it as some form of grace for someone else who’s experiencing suffering,” he says.

In his position at St. Vincent’s and now at Covenant, Carmello-Harper says one thing he has tried to share with leaders and staff is the importance of even brief encounters with people. He points to the Scripture passages that tell of the woman afflicted with a hemorrhage who was healed by merely touching Jesus’s cloak.

“It’s a reminder to our staff, our associates, our physicians, the clinical team, that the simplest of encounters can have a remarkable impact on someone’s life. When people connect to that or remember that, then you find that they put more attention into what they’re doing,” he says.

He says being able to help people heal not only in body but in mind and spirit is why there is still such a need for Catholic healthcare today. He points to those who work in behavioral healthcare as well as to the presence of Catholic chaplains.

“These individuals are looking at the deeper pain that is inside someone, that is harming their spirit. And that’s why, in Catholic healthcare, we have board-certified, trained chaplains, people with a master’s degree in theology and four units of clinical pastoral education, truly skilled, professional people. They’re not social visitors. They’re not just roaming the hospital door to door. They’re assessing what’s happening,” he says.

Carmello-Harper says hospital stays, especially lengthy ones, can be like a form of exile, which is why it’s important to be present to patients and to bring them hope.

“They’ve been removed from home. They’ve been removed from family, removed from work, removed from what’s commonplace, removed from pets,” he says. “There is suffering that takes place that’s not just physical. Oftentimes when people experience an illness or a major event or maybe the beginning of an acute illness, one of the first things they will say is why me?  Why is this happening to me? Am I not blessed? And without Catholic healthcare, who is going to speak to that? Chaplains are gifted in doing that. I’ve seen many nurses and other people who can hold those moments, too, but we need to make sure that we’re present to those moments.”

Carmello-Harper says that is why it is critically important that people support Catholic healthcare and that it remains available.

“Catholic education, Catholic healthcare, we are the public presence of the Church of the world. Our parishes serve our communities and help sustain our communities, but those two public ministries of the Church, that’s our influence in the world,” he says. “Working in Catholic healthcare is a remarkable opportunity to expand that influence to let other people know who we are and what we believe in and why we do what we do.”