Fr. Bavinger comes from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and after graduating from Georgetown University with a major in English, he entered the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus in 1969. During his two-year novitiate, Fr. Bavinger spent three months at a Jesuit parish in Guatemala City, Guatemala. This was his first longer experience in Hispanic culture. After completing philosophy studies at Boston College, Fr. Bavinger did a two-year regency at the Nativity School in lower eastside Manhattan in New York, a school primarily for Puerto Rican children. He also studied at Columbia University in Urban Education, thinking that he would be teaching in urban areas for much of his Jesuit life. He studied theology at the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago (now closed) and was ordained in 1978.

During theology, Fr. Bavinger was drawn to the African American experience and to ministry with adults. With that, rather than doing the teaching he had been expecting to do, he chose to work in pastoral ministries, and has been there ever since ordination. Fr. Bavinger has spent his priestly life largely in Jesuit parishes which are at least in part African American. His first parish was the Church of the Gesu in Philadelphia, where he went as part of a new team for that parish. In 1984 Fr. Bruce professed his Final Vows in Philadelphia.  After seven years, he became pastor of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Durham, an historically African American parish, where he spent eleven years. His next assignment was for nearly eight years as pastor of the St. Aloysius Church in Washington, D.C. . And then for the next five years, Fr. Bavinger worked in full-time Hispanic ministry, living in the diocesan parish of St. Therese in Wilson, and ministering there, in Rocky Mount and in Roanoke Rapids.

Fr. Bavinger’s return to involvement with the Hispanic community was caused in good part by the arrival around 1990 of many Hispanics, mostly Mexican, in the Durham area while he was at Holy Cross. There were no Masses being offered in Spanish at the time, and so Fr. Bavinger began working in the Hispanic community, with the assistance of the Holy Cross parishioners.

Father is available for spiritual direction, enjoys political commentary, wants to see the planet taken care of, and occasionally gets into a good poem.