Orlando Catholic Church Leaders

Fr. Jose Muñoz became a priest because he wanted to be happy. At seventeen, he had drifted from the Church until he met a priest so plainly happy that he wanted that same happiness for himself.

That happiness never really left him. He greets each new parish the same way, glad to be there and warm about the people and parish he calls beautiful and wonderful. Those who spent years around him remember him not just as their pastor but as a friend, someone who showed up for its charities and made himself part of the place. His story began a long way from here, in Ventaquemada, a small town in Colombia where everyone he knew was Catholic and he grew up the youngest after three older sisters, raised by his parents Patrocinio and Florentina.

Faith was all around him there, but it did not really take hold until a day he can still name. On December 15, 1985, he went to a novena Mass, heard a homily he never forgot, and became friends with the priest who gave it. He started going along on the rounds, to the sick and to Masses out in the countryside, and six months later he told the man he wanted to do the same with his life. The road from there was long. He studied in Colombia, came to the Diocese of Orlando in the early nineties, and was ordained in 1996, a moment he still describes in physical terms, lying prostrate on the floor and feeling his whole life change as the bishop laid hands on him. In the decades since, he has counted it a grace to walk with people through their hardest hours, including his own parents and one of his sisters, each of whom he anointed and whose funerals he celebrated himself. He has called that an honor, pain and all.

There is a lighter side to him too. He led St. Isaac Jogues in Orlando for sixteen years, and for much of that time he played on the parish's Knights of Columbus golf team, where he and his teammates won the tournament, or came close, almost every year. He had played in an amateur soccer league back in Colombia, and the competitive streak never quite left him. He leads Holy Redeemer in Kissimmee now, a busy bilingual parish with Masses in English and Spanish, a food pantry, a youth ministry, and a chapel kept for adoration, and he welcomes newcomers there the way he always has, hoping they feel the love of God and a little of the peace of the place. What he loves about the work is simple, and he says it plainly: he likes being with people at the biggest moments of their lives, the baptisms, the weddings, the quiet of the confessional. He enjoys walking with people in their faith.

Ask the people of Corpus Christi about Father Richard Trout and one word comes up again and again: humble. He is an easy man to be around, the kind of pastor who can make a whole church smile in the middle of a homily. His parishioners came to call him the cornerstone of their family, and one of them said it was his kind words that welcomed them back to the Catholic faith after forty years away.

There is a selflessness underneath all of it. He is far more interested in other people than in himself, and after years of knowing him, his parishioners tend to reach past his titles for plainer words: a caring friend, a compassionate mentor, someone they thank God for sending them. He has carried that spirit through more than forty years of priesthood, almost all of it spent close to home. A Central Florida priest through and through, he was born in Melbourne and ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 1985, and he came up as one of several children whose siblings still turn out for the milestones.

His path reads less like a career than a long act of staying put. When he arrived at All Souls in Sanford in the early 1990s, he took over a parish that had worn through six pastors in eleven years, and he stayed for nearly two decades, steadying it and helping it grow. In 2012 he moved on to Corpus Christi in Celebration, where he spent another fourteen years as pastor before retiring in the summer of 2026.

But titles were never really the point with him. Long before any of that, the diocese kept turning to him to look after its own priests, first walking with young men as they discerned whether the priesthood was theirs, then caring for the life and ministry of the clergy, and now, in the role he took up this year, watching over its senior priests. In a real way, he has spent his life being a priest for other priests. He once spoke about the balance of work and rest in a priest's life, and how joy is the fruit that grows out of the labor. Four decades in, he does not sound finished. He has simply turned that same care toward the men who gave their lives to the same work he did.

Father Charles Viviano has always had a knack for meeting people where they are, whether that is in a pew on Sunday or through a screen the rest of the week. He will use whatever is at hand, a good story, a song on the radio, the parish website, once even a spot on national television, if it helps open a door back to God.

That instinct showed up early. He grew up in Daytona Beach, a fifth grader at Our Lady of Lourdes when he first felt the pull toward the priesthood, and even then he was already the kind of kid who went looking for the people a parish can miss, the homebound, the sick, the ones who could not see for themselves. That instinct never really changed shape. Years later it is why he is so at ease with a camera or a parish website, why he once even turned up on national television, and why he lights up talking about technology, not for its own sake, but because he sees it as one more way to be, as he puts it, personal with everyone.

More than anything, though, Father Charles is a builder. Give him a new parish and he will grow it, give him a school cafeteria and he will fill it. That is more or less the story of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini in Lake Nona, which he started from nothing in 2019 and watched grow into a parish of hundreds, counting the blessings out loud the whole way. Wherever he has landed he has had the same gift for making a parish feel less like an institution and more like a family. This year he carries all of it to Corpus Christi in Celebration.

For all the websites and the television cameras, what comes through most is his optimism. He has a way of seeing doors where other people see walls, and growth where other people see a school cafeteria on a Saturday night. When he talks about his parish, the note he keeps landing on is gratitude. Even at his twenty-fifth anniversary, asked to sum up the priesthood, he described it as still fresh, alive, connected, and present. Connected. For a man who has spent his life finding new ways to reach people, it is the right word to keep. The Holy Spirit, as he once put it, is alive and well.

Fr. Esaú García likes to say that he and everyone who works beside him are only the little donkeys. The Lord does all the real work.

He is Colombian, and he was still young when he entered religious life as a Passionist. His studies in theology later took him to Rome, where he was ordained by Pope John Paul II. He taught for a few years back home in Colombia, then came to the Diocese of Orlando in the 1990s and has been pastor of Holy Cross for more than two decades. He jokes that God pulled him away from finishing a doctorate to give him a different one, the kind you earn leading a parish of four thousand families. "I barely have time to eat," he says, and yet he calls those years wonderful.

At heart, he is a teacher. Ask him to sum up the faith and he will boil it down to three words his parishioners know by heart: creation, redemption, and sanctification. He has a way of making the Eucharist feel like the center of everything. "It is not a thing," he tells them. "It is His body, His blood, His soul, His divinity, the mystery of love here present." He is also the kind of pastor people gather around. More than a thousand once packed the parish parking lot for a single night of prayer, and when a family left to serve as missionaries, he blessed them and sent them off with a line to carry: God "does not call the qualified, but qualifies the called."

What changed him most, though, came quietly. Years ago, a seminarian doing a year in his parish spent his afternoons in the chapel with a small blue book, the writings of Luisa Piccarreta on living in the Divine Will. Fr. García asked what it was, borrowed it, and started reading that night. He could not stop. He still describes it like falling in love, a clear before and after in his life. He is just as open about his own failings, and about the mercy that drew him back.

For all his learning, that is the man people meet. Someone who opens a gathering by reminding everyone that God is multilingual, and who counts himself among the little donkeys. After decades as a priest, he still lets a new idea surprise him, still turns it over before he trusts it, and will still read straight through the night when something takes hold of him.

Father Carlos Cabán has an easy, joyful way about him, the kind that puts people at ease and usually comes with a joke. Ask how he ended up in Orlando and he has one ready. "I came and stayed," he says. "Or should I say, I came and they left me here, because the bishop wanted it."

None of that is an accident. Father Carlos is Puerto Rican-born and a Salesian of Don Bosco, ordained in Aguadilla in 2005, formed in an order that treats friendliness, availability, and joy as part of the calling. It stuck, and it is why people tend to describe him not just by his title or his studies, but by the way he shows up, glad to be there and quick to make room for one more person.

For nearly twenty years before Orlando, almost everything he did came back to young people. He led youth ministry at a parish in Cataño, helped form young men discerning the Salesian life in the Dominican Republic, served four years at a polytechnic institute in Santiago, and directed youth ministry after returning home to Puerto Rico. It fit the heart of his order exactly. The Salesians exist to educate and evangelize the young, and Father Carlos believes that mission runs deeper than any one community or title. It followed him to Central Florida, and it has not let go.

What he found in Orlando was a crossroads. The parishes he has served gather people from many countries and languages under one roof, and that is the work he loves most, building what he has called a communion of cultures united in the love of God. He described becoming a diocesan priest as a chance to renew his commitment to the community that welcomed him, and on the day it became official, he was the one wiping away tears. For a man who only meant to pass through, it looked a lot like a promise to stay.

Warm, gracious, and genuinely grateful for the people he meets, he is the kind of priest who notices a community's kindness and says so out loud. When he left the Massachusetts parish where he had served for four years, he wrote that he had felt at home there always, and that he was leaving with a heart full of good memories. The city he served felt the same way about him. Its leaders gave him a public send-off, calling him a wonderful addition to their community and promising to remember him with gratitude. People tend to describe him less by his degrees or his titles than by the warmth he brings into a room and the gratitude he leaves behind.

Born in southern Brazil in 1982, Fr. Adriano was ordained there in 2012 and sent almost immediately to the United States. He belongs to the Scalabrinians, a missionary community devoted to walking with migrants and people far from home, and he has spent his entire priesthood doing exactly that, serving multicultural communities in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. "Life is made of cycles," he wrote as he prepared to leave New England, "each of them has its beginning, middle and end." He has lived plenty of them, moving from Brazil to New England and now to Central Florida, and he tends to meet each new chapter with gratitude for the last.

Beyond his own parish, Fr. Adriano has taken on a national role helping Brazilian Catholics across the United States find one another, building gathering places where a scattered community can feel, as he puts it, like it has a home. He is quick with a blessing and a big hug, and just as quick to point out how much bigger and more alive that community is than most people realize. Now leading Resurrection Catholic Church, a vibrant and diverse parish in Orlando, he is doing what he has always done best, turning a room full of people from everywhere into something that feels like family.

Long before he was Father Ojeda, Francisco was a boy newly arrived from Puerto Rico who could not speak enough English to ask his teacher where the lunchroom was. The one place he never felt like a stranger was church.

Warm, steady, and shaped by what it once felt like to be the outsider, Father Ojeda has a way of making a parish feel like the family he found in one as a boy. He says the priesthood was never foreign to him, and it shows in how the people who have come to know him describe him, not just by his title but by the joy he brings with him. At his installation, one longtime parishioner summed up the room: "We are so happy he is here. He's brought such joy to our parish." He is a son of Puerto Rico and of a family that gave up a great deal to raise him, and he is, after all of it, someone who believes no one is meant to walk their faith alone.

His path to the priesthood began at home. His father had studied for the priesthood himself, and those stories planted something early. When Francisco was nine, his father asked him outright if he wanted to become a priest. He said no. "But the Lord works in His own time," his father would say years later. What finally stayed with him came in a catechism class, when he could not understand why the shepherd in the Gospel would leave ninety-nine sheep to chase the one that wandered off. His catechist smiled and told him that this is what a priest is for, to keep the ninety-nine close while the Lord goes after the ones who are lost. He had already watched his parents love him that way, his mother sitting with him at night until he learned to spell, his father coming home tired but always ready to sit and talk. That was the shape of the life he wanted.

Today that life is centered on St. John Vianney, a parish as many-cultured as any in Orlando, where families from different countries and traditions fill the pews each week. Ojeda sees his own story in it. He calls the parish "heaven's preview, a communion of cultures united in the love of Jesus Christ," and describes that weekly gathering as a kind of Pentecost. He was installed there on the Feast of Christ the King, before a standing-room-only church, and he used the moment to point past himself. "Christ alone is king," he said. "Not us, not the world, not our fears or limitations, only Christ." For a boy who once could not find the words to ask a stranger for help, it is a fitting place to have landed, a house full of people from everywhere, learning to call it home together.