Orlando Catholic Church Leaders

Father José Bautista is the kind of priest who leads people toward the quiet center of the faith and gives them a reason to stay there.

When he arrived at St. Isaac Jogues in the summer of 2021, the adoration chapel was still closed from the pandemic, and he found parishioners kneeling outside anyway, peering through the window just to be near the Blessed Sacrament. For a priest who believes the Eucharist is everything, that was all he needed to see. Warm and deeply spiritual, Father José has spent more than thirty years in the priesthood, and it is the reason the people who have known him describe him not just by his title or his training in canon law, but by the way he leads, the way he teaches, and the heart he brings to the Sacrament of Marriage.

For Father José, that chapel is not a program but the heart of the matter. He speaks about the Eucharist the way he lives it, as a relationship. "Some saints have told us He is waiting there for us to let ourselves be loved by Him, and to love Him back," he says. Under his care the chapel now offers Adoration seventy-two hours a week, and he hopes to grow it toward Perpetual Adoration, around the clock, so the Blessed Sacrament is never left alone. It has become one of the gathering places of parish life, where people come to sit with the Lord and, often, with one another. The same devotion runs through his love of the Blessed Mother, seen in the October rosary campaign he once led that gathered more than fifteen hundred rosaries offered to Our Lady.

He carries all of this with the warmth of where he comes from. He came to Central Florida from Colombia, and it still shows, in how he celebrates Mass and gathers his people before dawn in Advent to sing. After these years together, they talk about him the way you talk about family, a shepherd they are grateful for, an example they try to follow, a priest who, as one of them put it, fills the heart with joy.

Father Skip Negley lasted sixteen days in retirement before the phone rang. He said yes to what came next, and he still jokes that he may hold the record for the shortest retirement on the books.

That yes says a lot about him. He is warm and good-humored, a priest far more interested in serving people than in his own plans. A Missionary of Our Lady of La Salette from Omaha, Nebraska, he spent much of his priesthood as what his community calls a "priest for priests," the one other clergy turned to when the weight of the work got heavy. People describe him not by his doctorate or his years of leadership but by how it feels when he walks into a room. Cardinal DiNardo put it best at Father Skip's fiftieth anniversary of ordination: when a vicar calls, priests get nervous, and when the cardinal calls, they are scared to death, but when Father Skip calls, "you're relieved."

That gift for putting people at ease has followed him everywhere. He led his order across three years and several continents as Provincial Superior, helped open seminaries from Brazil to India, and twice directed the Galveston-Houston office that cared for hundreds of priests. When Blessed Trinity's beloved pastor died, Father Skip prayed with the others, and two days later the call came asking for his help. He traded retirement in Texas for a new adventure in Florida, arriving with a plain belief in renewal: deeper devotion to the Eucharist and reconciliation, the two La Salette charisms he says feed and heal the same soul, and vocations that rise from within the parish. Sixteen days of retirement, it turned out, was all the rest he needed.

The parish he came to is an easy place to love, and it suits him. Tucked into Orlando's Conway neighborhood, Blessed Trinity began in 1962 as a small group of families gathering at the local elementary school and grew into a lively community of more than fifty ministries, with Sunday Masses in English and Spanish and a home for Hispanic and Filipino families alike. It tells newcomers plainly to come as you are, which is more or less how Father Skip meets people too. He felt that same welcome the moment he arrived. "The staff and the people are the most kind and generous, and warm and welcoming," he said. "I walked into a place that is very well run, very good liturgies, very fine people." The way he sees it, his job now is simply to find where he fits and bring a little renewal where it is needed.

Fr. Andrews Kollannoor believes that being a good shepherd is not something reserved for priests. In one way or another, he says, we are all shepherds to the people placed in our care, meant to help them and lead them home. It is a conviction he has held for decades, and it suits him well, since the parish he leads today is named Good Shepherd.

Devotion runs deep in him, and none deeper than his love for the Blessed Mother. He is a Missionary of Our Lady of La Salette, and he has spent his life carrying her message, sometimes in ways you can walk right up and touch. During his years as pastor in Sulphur, Louisiana, that love moved him to build a shrine, not a modest one, but an exact replica of the holy mountain in La Salette, France. It took two hundred fifty truckloads of dirt to raise the mountain on a quiet street, and seven life-size marble statues to finish it. People who knew him there do not reach for his titles when they describe him. They talk about the man who brightened their church and helped a small parish grow in faith, and when he moved on they were still saying they missed him and wished he would come back.

In many ways, he has spent his life starting things. Born in Kerala, in southern India, he was among the first young men his congregation drew from that country, and in 1985 he became the first Indian priest the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette ever ordained. He went home to help the mission take root, joining his brother, a Carmelite priest, to turn an old hospital that had belonged to the Carmelite sisters into the community's first house there, and in time he was chosen to lead that growing family as its first provincial superior. The work eventually carried him across the world to the United States, and in 2023 to Good Shepherd in Orlando, where Bishop John Noonan handed him the keys to the parish and reminded him that his real task was to lead his people all the way to heaven.

Today he shepherds a busy bilingual parish and school in east Orlando, a community that prays in both English and Spanish, and he welcomes new families warmly, glad to see them make the parish and its school their own. Ask him why he does any of it, and the answer comes back to the same simple idea he has preached all along. We have come, he has said, to make other people's lives easier and more comfortable, and to help everyone find the fullness of life. We are called to serve, and not to be served.

Baseball was Father Benjamin Lehnertz's first love, and for most of his childhood it sat a little higher in his heart than God did. That eventually flipped, and he has never once wished it back the other way.

Warm, funny, and quick to laugh at himself, Ben is an Air Force kid who lived in eight states in eighteen years before Florida, where his faith finally became his own. He is a self-described recovering perfectionist who says baseball taught him how to keep swinging after failing seven times out of ten, and a Minnesota Twins fan since the team beat the Braves in the 1991 World Series. He has carried an unusual contentment through more than a decade of priesthood, and it is the reason people tend to remember him not for the ballplayer he once was, but for being, plainly, a happy priest who is exactly where he wants to be. He is a former high school baseball chaplain, a devoted son of St. Joseph, and the kind of man who says that if you want to watch God show off, you should just try to out-give him. And he is still, after all of it, someone who insists he would not trade this life for a World Series ring and all the money to match.

The turning point came in his freshman year of college. He was dating a woman he thought he might one day marry, weighing a future in the game he loved, and torn enough that he found himself in an adoration chapel in the middle of the night, asking God for a little clarity and promising to do whatever he was told. The answer, when it came, was simple: go to seminary. He went, was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando, and has spent his priesthood tucked inside the Holy Family, assigned first to Annunciation, then Holy Family, then St. Joseph, a saint he had quietly consecrated himself to before he had any idea he was being sent there. He took the parish over two weeks before the world shut down in 2020 and, as its only priest for five years, led it through everything that came after.

Through all of it, baseball never fully left him. He played a few seasons of slow-pitch softball with a men's group, spent five years as chaplain to a Catholic high school baseball team, and still lights up talking about the game the way people do about a first love. Ask him which saint he would pick for a game of catch and he goes with Pier Giorgio Frassati, a young Italian he has admired for years and figures he could teach to throw well enough for a good afternoon. He preaches like it is the thing he was made for, tells young athletes that trading Sunday Mass for a game has it backwards, and jokes that the one position he is not after is the papacy, because he does not look good in white. Under all of it is the line he keeps coming back to: self-reliance is the enemy of the Christian life, and you can never out-give God.

Fr. Roberto Marquez knows what it feels like to walk into a place and finally feel at home, and much of what he does now is about giving that feeling to other people. He is warm and service-minded, the kind of priest who wants the person in front of him to feel genuinely welcomed.

He came by that warmth honestly. He grew up in a big Cuban-American family in Miami, the kind where, as he puts it, "the extended family is family" and there was "so much love" to go around. His family ran restaurants, and Roberto grew up dropping whatever he was doing to pitch in, learning responsibility, organization, and how to work alongside other people. What stayed with him most, though, was the sense of community, the way a busy family kitchen always seems to make room for one more. "It helped me to understand that there's more than just myself," he said, and it left him wanting to give back.

The road to the priesthood was not a straight one, and he is at peace with that. He felt the pull early but set it aside for a while because there were other things he wanted to do first, and he does not regret the detour. When he finally moved from South Florida to Orlando, he spent close to ten years mostly on his own, rebuilding his relationship with Christ and coming to see, in his own words, that it is Christ who fulfills him. The turning point came the day he walked, homesick and lonely, into the Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe. He looked up, and something settled. "Wow, I'm home," he remembers thinking, as his fears and anxiety quietly fell away. Years later, in that same church, Bishop John Noonan ordained him a priest.

Home these days is St. Charles Borromeo in Orlando, where he serves as parochial administrator and gives his time to Bishop Moore Catholic High School and Morning Star Catholic Schools as well. He has a particular love for the confessional, which he calls the sacrament that "leads us to the altar," and a real heart for vocations, praying for them after daily Mass at a parish he says has sent many of its own into religious life. His mother, Lucy, likes to say she knew all along, because he always had his nose in a religious book. His younger sister was not so sure, and he still laughs about it. What he wants most is simple, and it runs straight back to where he began: that the people who walk through the parish doors will feel what he felt looking up in that Basilica, and know they have finally come home.

Fr. Leo Hodges has spent almost forty years showing up for the people the world would rather forget. It is work he grew up around, and work he has made unmistakably his own.

Steady, warm, and easy to be around, he is the kind of pastor a parish settles into rather than sizes up. Parishioners describe him as loving and relatable, someone whose welcome feels genuine the moment you walk through the door, and the people around St. Andrew tend to say the same thing in different words: that he makes room for everyone. Those who have known him for years describe him not by his title or his years in the pulpit, but by that warmth, a gift for meeting people where they are, and a steadiness he carries into every room he walks into, whether that is a classroom, a prison, or a Sunday Mass. Before any of it, he was an athlete, a hurdler on the Florida State track team who once ran his way to a conference title, and he came to the collar by way of a criminology degree, an unusual road that somehow points straight at the work he would spend his life doing.

That work runs in the family. His father, Clarence Hodges, was one of the so-called "nine old men" who started Kairos Prison Ministry in Florida in 1976, a small effort among friends that grew into an international movement across dozens of states and nine countries. His mother, Christine, worked right alongside him. Both were converts to the faith, and both, as Fr. Leo tells it, carried "compassion for those on the margins of society" and believed the banquet table was "big enough for everyone to sit at." For almost forty years, Fr. Leo has carried that same conviction into prisons himself, for adults and for young people, alongside the retreats and spiritual direction that fill the rest of his ministry. He has said his parents' love for the outcast came out of their own relationship with Christ, the one who "is always for those that no one else is for." It is not hard to see where he got it.

There is more to him than the ministry he inherited. St. Andrew is a diverse, close-knit community on the west side of Orlando, the kind of parish that has been a place of peace for its members for more than thirty years, where Mass is celebrated in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole beneath tall stained-glass windows and the stated hope is simply that everyone, whoever they are, finds a warm welcome and a sense of belonging. It suits him. He is the kind of pastor who writes his own weekly note to parishioners in both English and Spanish, keeps the sick in the community in his prayers, and is as quick to point people toward caring for "the least of these" as toward anything else. He leads the parish and its school, serves as the Central Deanery's Vicar Forane, and helped launch a new Catholic school in the city. But the through-line is simpler than any of those roles. It is the same one his parents lived: make sure the people on the outside know there is a place for them at the table.

Father Mark Wajda came to the priesthood the long way around. He was already well into one life, in his fifties, when he finally answered a call he had carried for years, and he still speaks about his ordination as the fulfillment of a vocation he calls long overdue. Being named a pastor, he says, was the honor on top of it, "a little icing on the cake."

Warm, humble, and refreshingly practical, Fr. Mark is the kind of pastor who will talk plainly about the things others might tiptoe around, money included, and then lead by quiet example. He gives a tenth of his own paycheck back to the parish and does not make a show of it. He is generous about the people around him, too. When a fellow priest left Blessed Sacrament after twelve years, Fr. Mark used his bulletin column to praise the man's dedication rather than talk about himself. It is the kind of thing that has parishioners describing him not by his title but by his homilies and a simple sense that they are fortunate to have him.

There is a nice symmetry to where his path has led. Years ago, before his own ordination, he sat in a room full of men weighing whether the priesthood was for them, and he spoke with real hope about the young ones coming up behind him. Today he helps carry that work himself as the diocese's Assistant Director of Vocations, looking for and forming the priests who will come next. He came to Blessed Sacrament in 2020 and was installed as its pastor two years later, stepping into a role the parish had wanted filled for some time.

Much of his heart now goes into holding his community together, uniting Blessed Sacrament with its mission at Santo Toribio Romo and staying close to local Catholic life through school and retreat ministry. He is honest about the ordinary, unglamorous work of keeping a parish running, the leaky roofs and the light bills, but it is clear what he is really after underneath all of it. "What I really hope for," he says, "is that I can help shepherd the people of God to heaven, our true home."