Orlando Catholic Church Leaders

Fr. Chris Hoffmann has always wanted the same thing: to serve God and help his people. Nearly forty years into the priesthood, that is still where he finds his greatest joy, walking with people through grief, through hard seasons, through the weeks before a wedding, and watching God's grace take hold in their lives.

Warm, patient, and good with people in the quiet moments, Fr. Chris has carried those qualities through nearly forty years of parish ministry, and it is the reason those who have worked with him tend to describe him not by his titles, but by the way he actually shows up: someone who listens, works well with people, stays positive, and gives good counsel. He is the first to say a priest is a human being before anything else, with the same problems as everyone in the pews, who simply sets his own aside to help carry theirs.

He knew early. He was eight years old when he first thought about becoming a priest, and he never seriously considered anything else, committing to it for good while studying accounting at Marquette. If he had not been a priest, he says he would have been a stockbroker. He is good with numbers, likes business and investing, a practical streak that never really left him. But the pull toward serving God and helping his people had been there his whole life, and by the time he entered seminary the choice was an easy one. His years at St. Lawrence Seminary shaped how he still sees people, boys from Chicago and Detroit, from farms in Wisconsin and Michigan, and reservations in Montana, all praying and playing side by side, a lesson in how difference can bring people together rather than divide them. Ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 1987, he has spent the years since across its parishes before returning to Deltona to lead Our Lady of the Lakes.

He is a teacher at heart, the kind of pastor who will stop to explain why the church turns to deep blue in Advent or why incense rises the way a prayer does, small things that help faith reach all the senses. But what he keeps coming back to is people. Being a priest, for Fr. Chris, was never a job to weigh against the others he might have had. It was the one thing he always wanted. "It was not hard," he says of the choice. "I had been thinking about it my whole life.

Father Andrzej Jurkiewicz talks about a parish the way most people talk about a home. When he arrived at St. Ann's, he told his new parishioners he looked forward to getting to know each of them and would serve them, as he put it, with his Polish accent. It was a humble way to begin, and it suited him.

He is warm and unassuming, more interested in the people in front of him than in anything on his résumé. The parishioners who have come to know him describe him not by his title or his decades in ministry but as a wonderful priest and a wonderful man who has brought real joy to the parish. He does not make much of himself. What he makes much of is community, the sense that a church is less a building than a family gathered under one roof.

He came to that conviction by a long road that began an ocean away. He grew up in Siemianowice Slaskie, in southern Poland, and as a young man entered the Discalced Carmelites, taking the religious name Benedict. He was ordained in Krakow and served for years in Poland before he was sent to the United States in the early 1990s, and then to Florida, where he found the work that would shape the rest of his ministry. For more than a decade he cared for the Polish Catholic community across Central Florida, celebrating Mass and the sacraments in their own language, a familiar sound of home for families far from theirs.

These days his life is centered on St. Ann's in DeBary, the parish he was asked to lead and, some years later, installed to shepherd as pastor. He calls it a family parish and means it plainly, quoting St. John Paul II that a parish is "not principally a structure, a territory, or a building, but rather the Family of God, a familiar and welcoming home." He guided it through a season of renewal, finishing the gathering space his late predecessor had started and marking it with a sign in the man's honor. But for all the new paint and the new roof, what holds his attention is the people who fill the pews. He signs his letters the way he greets his parish, with a blessing in his first language. Pan Z Wami. The Lord be with you.

Fr. Matthew Mello has a way of putting people at ease. Whether he is sitting with a grieving family or standing at a microphone in front of local officials, he shows up the same way, calm and steady, the one others look to when things feel uncertain.

To those who know him, he is the same man at a hospital bedside and a public assembly. Across more than three decades in the same corner of Florida, those who have relied on him describe him not just by his title or his long service, but as a constant and reassuring presence, a pastor whose guidance and example move others to serve. He keeps his own sense of the work plain, describing his ministry as counseling the doubtful, comforting the sorrowful, and providing food and shelter for those in need.

His path to the priesthood took a winding route. He was born in New Jersey, went to grade school in Puerto Rico, finished high school in Florida, trained at a seminary in Indiana, and studied theology in Chicago before his ordination in 1987. He has served Central Florida ever since, leading parishes in Lakeland, Winter Haven, and Merritt Island before arriving at Our Lady of Hope in 2020, where he also serves as Vicar Forane of the diocese's Eastern Deanery. He is bilingual in English and Spanish, and has always stayed close to the everyday needs of the community around him.

The thread running through all of it is justice. In each place he has served, Fr. Matt has helped ordinary people organize to change the things that wear them down. In Lakeland he helped grow an interfaith coalition from small assemblies into a movement more than a thousand strong, one that won drug treatment for inmates and health clinics that eased fifteen thousand visits off the local hospital's emergency room. Today, as co-chair of a Volusia County group called F.A.I.T.H., he presses city and county leaders on affordable housing and on fairer treatment for young people who get into trouble. He puts it plainly. "It's not always about making people comfortable," he has said. "It's about seeking justice." But for all the coalitions and campaigns, what he keeps coming back to is simpler. "I love being a priest," he says. "I love my church and God's holy people.

Father Kenneth Gill is the kind of priest who talks about being led rather than leading. He came to the priesthood later than most, after more than twenty years in a secular career, and he speaks of the whole of it as being led by God rather than something he decided on his own.

For those who know him, he is remembered less for his titles than for how he shows up. Parishioners at his last assignment describe him by his warm smile and easy friendliness, his kindness and steady guidance, and his availability during difficult times in their lives. He tends to turn that kind of praise back toward God. "I am trying not to lead the Lord," he has said, "but allowing the Lord to lead me."

A Melbourne native, Father Gill grew up at Our Lady of Lourdes and first wondered about the priesthood as a young man, though decades passed before he answered. He spent those years in the public and private sectors, work that took him to Washington and carried him through the September 11 attacks, until a rosary his mother handed him drew him back to daily prayer and, eventually, to seminary. He was ordained for the Archdiocese of Washington in 2014, served a string of Maryland parishes, and returned to central Florida in 2022 to be closer to his aging mother. Two years later he was formally welcomed home, incardinated into the Diocese of Orlando, the diocese of his birth.

Now he steps into Ascension Catholic Church in Melbourne, not far from where he grew up. His ministry tends to circle the same themes wherever he lands: renewal, healing, and helping people find their way back to God's mercy. He built a following online during the pandemic, when public Masses were suspended and he was convinced people still needed a way to stay connected, and he talks often about the parish being a resource and a bridge for the people around it. For a priest who calls his vocation a homecoming, Melbourne is about as close to home as a calling can bring him.

There is a gentleness to Fr. Derek Saldanha that people notice right away. He does not need many words to make you feel welcome, and in St. Cloud, parishioners like to say his testimony is stronger than anything he could put into words.

To those who know him, he is simply a man of God, humble and full of love. They know him not by his title or the degrees behind his name, but by the warmth he brings to them and by a faith people feel in his presence. He has said his greatest joy is watching God's healing and transforming power come alive in people.

He came to the priesthood from a long way off. He grew up in Bombay in a home where faith was woven into ordinary days, his mother teaching catechism at their parish and the whole family kneeling for the rosary together every night, a habit he still keeps. He studied business at the University of Pune and worked in information technology before moving to the United States in 2009, where graduate studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville drew him closer to the sacramental heart of the Church. It was there that the priesthood came into focus for him, the realization that it is through a priest's hands that people receive the Eucharist and are reconciled with God, and he knew that was how the Lord was asking him to serve. He was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 2019 and served parishes in Orlando and Altamonte Springs before he was sent to shepherd St. Thomas Aquinas.

There is more to him than the parish, too. Since he was young, Fr. Derek has followed politics and current affairs closely; back in India he wrote letters to newspaper editors on the issues facing the Church and the wider world, and he still loves helping people see how their faith speaks to the questions they are actually living with. That same care reaches beyond his own pews, and the Magnify organization honored him for the tenderness he brings to young people and adults with disabilities. Through all of it runs the hope he named on the eve of his ordination, to preach the Word of God with zeal and meaning, and to give it his everything.

You do not have to spend long around Fr. Jean-Hughes Desir to notice the smile. For a lot of people, it is the first thing they remember about him.

He speaks four languages, writes and delivers his own sermons, and can pick up a guitar and have a whole room singing along. But talent is not the thing people reach for when they describe him. He has a way of making a room feel lighter, and years in ministry have earned him the same handful of words again and again: warm, humble, personable, and spiritually uplifting, a man with a big heart who folds a little humor into his homilies and means every word of it.

He grew up in Limbe, in northern Haiti, one of four children, and some of his earliest memories are of going to Mass with his mother, every single day. He came to the United States as a young man, mostly to see the country, and he loved it. But somewhere in that new life he felt something was missing, and what he kept circling back to was the Church he had been raised in. He decided to return to it, this time as a leader, and was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 2004. Being here has never meant forgetting where he came from. "I feel very blessed because I'm here," he once said. "But because I feel blessed I can't just forget my country and my people. I pray for my people every day."

The years since have carried him from Ocala to Clermont and now to Kissimmee, and the people he leaves behind tend to say the same thing, that they will miss him. What stays with Fr. Jean is never the buildings, it is the people, the ones he once called a lovely family. At St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, where he now serves as pastor, that shows up most clearly in a mission he has thrown himself into: feeding the hungry, growing the parish food pantry into something larger, a place to gather and to eat, built on a line he keeps close, to build community and defeat hunger with love. For all the languages and the years and the miles, what he does has always come back to something plain. "I trust in the Lord," he says. "Doing this work, I feel more close to God."

Fr. Tomás Hurtado is the kind of priest people call a blessing, and they tend to mean it plainly. On the day he was installed at his last parish, he stood with his hand over his heart and a wide smile, and lifted the keys of the church up toward God. It is a fair picture of the man.

Warm, humble, and steady, Fr. Tomás has carried those qualities through two decades of ministry in the Diocese of Orlando, and wherever he is sent, he brings peace, love, and a little light with him. He is Cuban, a native of Santa Clara, and he carries that heritage with pride.

His path in Central Florida has a way of circling back on itself. He began his priesthood in 2005 as an associate at St. Catherine of Siena, and after twenty years of serving communities around Orlando, his bishop asked him to come home to that same parish, this time as its pastor. The sense of belonging runs deep. Every year he gathers his fellow Cubans for the Mass of Our Lady of Charity, the patroness of Cuba, a day he calls not only an honor but a joy. "There we gather, all those who have come in exile," he has said. "There we unite to remember and to celebrate that charity unites us and, in the love of Christ we are one people."

What moves him most is the Eucharist. When he finally brought a traveling exhibit of eucharistic miracles to the church, one assembled by Carlo Acutis, the Italian teenager who has since become the Church's first millennial saint, he called it a dream that had waited years to come true, a chance for people to stand closer to what he believes is the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine. Yet for all that devotion, Fr. Tomás keeps returning to something simpler. A parish, to him, is not only the house of God. It is a home, and the people in it are family. "Together," he tells them, "we will move forward, guided and renewed by the Spirit of God."