Orlando Catholic Church Leaders

Father Mathew Vettath Joseph wants people to know that he is always available to them. And if you happen to bring a good joke, even better, because he loves them.

That easy warmth is the first thing people notice about him, and it sits on top of a faith that runs deeper than most. Father Mathew comes from Trichur, in the Kerala state of South India, where his family has been Catholic for more than two hundred years, in a part of the country that has been Catholic for nearly two thousand, going back to the apostle St. Thomas. He is the seventh of eight children, an uncle to fifteen nieces and nephews, and the cousin of several priests and nuns, with two more cousins in seminary today. Surrounded by that kind of faith his whole life, he says he simply received the "feeling" to become a priest at the age of twenty, and he followed it.

Following it took him a long way from home. He is a Vocationist, a member of the Society of Divine Vocations, a religious community founded to foster vocations, especially among the poor, and he has carried that ministry across three continents. He spent his early years as a priest in India and then in Argentina, where he grew fluent in Spanish and fell in love with the asado, the Argentine barbecue of seared meat and open flame that is still his favorite meal. From there he served in New Jersey before arriving at St. Francis of Assisi in Apopka, where he leads a busy, bilingual English and Spanish parish and has stayed ever since.

Away from the altar, Father Mathew keeps a quiet, ordinary rhythm. He reads, he watches a little television, and he takes long walks or goes jogging, though he will admit he has hung up his volleyball, basketball, and badminton days, joking that he is getting too old for them. His parents, Joseph and Mary, and all of his siblings are still back in India, and he remains their very proud brother, son, and uncle from across the ocean. Through it all he keeps a steady gratitude, the kind that surfaced during the hardest stretch of the pandemic, when he reminded his parishioners that they were still alive by the grace of God, and that a hard year was really a second chance to do better. "It is a call for us all," he said. Then, most likely, he asked if anyone had a good joke.

Father George Nursey came to the priesthood the long way around. He entered seminary on his fiftieth birthday, after more than twenty years of quietly wondering whether the call he first felt in his late twenties was real.

He is warm, welcoming, and friendly, with a smile that seems to stay put no matter what the day brings. Those who have known him for years describe him not just by his doctorate or his years teaching in the seminary, but by that smile, a quick humor, and a way of turning a single question into a ninety-minute conversation, so much so that one old friend took to calling him a walking Catholic encyclopedia. He is one of eleven children, raised by a devoted Catholic mother and a father who was not Catholic but backed her fully in bringing the children up in the faith. Ask him about the work and he does not hesitate. "It's the best job in the world," he says. "Every day when I wake up, I look forward to going to work."

He did not always feel that certain. Fr. George left the Church as a young teenager and stayed away for more than fifteen years before a reversion in his late twenties pulled him back, and almost as soon as he returned, he felt drawn toward the priesthood. It took him a long time to trust it. Two moments cut through the doubt. Once, a man he barely knew walked up to him and said, "You are a priest of the living God," with no prompting at all. Later, when he finally sat down with a priest for serious guidance, he was asked a single question: what is it that you must do, not what you think you ought to do or what others want, but what is in your heart. The answer came back clear. In his own words, God "let me do all kind of stuff and said, 'Yeah, yeah, I'll see you when you're ready.'" He was ordained in 2013 at fifty-four, and before arriving at St. Stephen in 2023, he spent years forming other men for the priesthood as a professor and dean at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary.

Away from the altar, Fr. George is easy to picture. He spent years as a jeweler before he ever put on a collar, and something of that trade stayed with him, an eye for craftsmanship and a love of beautiful things that shows whenever he talks about churches full of gold and gemstones and the art that turns a building into a little taste of heaven. He is a reader and a lifelong student, as at home quoting Dostoevsky or a favorite theologian as he is telling a story from his own life. He wakes early, he will happily rough it on a mountain trip with a group of young people, and he pours that same energy into St. Stephen, leading book studies, Adoration, and youth camps. For all the theology, it runs back to something simple. He just likes being around people.

Humble, warm, and always smiling, he has spent more than thirty-five years greeting people after Mass with a handshake and preaching homilies his parishioners call personal and enlightening, the kind that seem written for whatever a person happened to walk in carrying that week. People who have sat in his pews tend to describe him not by his title or his years, but by the way he makes them feel welcome.

One young man still remembers what that felt like. Years ago he came to Orlando for college, new to the city and looking for a church, and he found Sts. Peter and Paul. He never forgot his first Mass there, when a younger priest walked out, introduced himself simply as Father Derk, and preached a homily that felt like it had been written for him. For the first time, the new city felt like home. Over the next two years he came to think of Father Derk as the picture of what a good man looks like, and he watched his own faith deepen because of it. The two never really knew each other, but Father Derk left a permanent mark on him, and years later, when the young man learned that the priest he had admired from the pews had become that parish's pastor, he was glad, sure that plenty of others felt exactly the way he did.

That parish is Sts. Peter and Paul in Winter Park, a leafy town just north of Orlando. It is a large and welcoming community, thousands of families strong, gathered in a church that visitors tend to call beautiful the first time they see it. But ask what makes the place feel like home and people rarely point to the architecture. They point to the man at the front of it, a pastor who leads not as an institution to run, but as people to care for.

Lately he talks often about the future of the Church, and his hope that young people, especially young men, will step forward to lead it. He calls his parishioners his family, and speaks about staying close to the joys and sorrows that come with that word. All these years later, that is still where he puts himself: with his people, treating the parish in front of him as his own.

Fr. Scott Circe calls the hour a person spends at Mass the hour of power. He means it is supposed to carry you through the rest of the week, into the workplace, the school, and the house you go home to. "We've got to live our faith outside the church walls too," he says. It is not an idea he picked up secondhand. He worked in those places himself for years before he ever wore a collar.

Thoughtful and plainspoken, he is easy about the years he took getting there. He describes God as patient with him, patient enough to let him work through what he calls "a lot of the what-ifs in life," and he says it without dressing it up. People who have sat in his pews describe him not just by the offices he has held, but by the smile they mention first, by preaching they grade in superlatives, and by the way a parish keeps claiming him as their own long after he has moved on.

He spent his twenties finding out what else his life could have been. Born in Syracuse and raised in Louisiana, he came to Florida with his family in 1988 and studied television and film production back when Orlando was supposed to become the next Hollywood, working at Nickelodeon Studios and for the Orlando Magic. He had known since he was a boy that God was asking him for something else, and one weekday morning he stayed after Mass at Annunciation in Altamonte Springs and asked the priest how a man goes about entering the seminary. The priesthood has kept sending him back to the places that formed him since, to Annunciation for his first assignment, to his own alma mater to run campus ministry, and into the work of forming other men for a vocation that took him so long to reach himself, before nine years on the Space Coast and now St. Timothy in Lady Lake.

For Fr. Scott, it starts at home. He calls that the domestic church, and he talks about parents and children more than programs, because he believes a faith that is not important to the parents will not be important to their children. So he builds parish life around getting people into the same room, whether that is a picnic in the pavilion after the family Mass, Masses spread across the weekend so hardworking people can find one that fits, or lunch with the pastors of other churches for no reason except to hear how things are going in their communities. He gives the same attention to people at the edges, the hungry, the homeless, and families who cannot find housing they can afford, work he treats as something Christians of every denomination ought to be able to do together. He wrote to his new parish that people come to discover how much God loves them through others, and most of what he does as a pastor is making room for that to happen.

Fr. Andrew Wojtan is the kind of pastor who does not just lead a study, he pulls up a chair and joins it. When his parish worked its way through a video series on the Catechism, he was a regular in the room, and one longtime parishioner credited him with building a community that strengthens one another and takes the practice of the faith seriously. That is the thread that runs through Holy Spirit under his care. He wants people to know their faith, not from a distance, but well enough to live it and to explain it kindly to anyone who asks.

Warm and welcoming by his own account, Fr. Andrew is the kind of priest people describe less by his title than by how at home he makes them feel. He calls his parish a family oriented faith community and clearly means it, pointing newcomers toward the adult Bible studies, the youth ministry, and the coffee and donuts after Sunday Mass with the same easy hospitality. He speaks often about the parish being blessed with faith-filled and tireless parishioners, a man more inclined to praise the people around him than himself.

His path to Mims was a long one. Born in Poland, Fr. Andrew spent ten years as a missionary in Africa before coming to the United States for an assignment in the Diocese of Orlando, and he became a naturalized American citizen in 2014. He arrived at Holy Spirit as a parochial vicar in earlier years of Central Florida ministry and now leads the small parish tucked off I-95 near the Space Coast, a community he describes as warm and inviting to anyone who walks through the door.

But what centers Fr. Andrew is the care of people at both ends of the journey, the ones just growing into their faith and the ones saying goodbye. He has poured real energy into adult formation, and he has built a bereavement ministry around a single conviction: that no member of the faith community should grieve alone. He wants that outreach to be, in his words, the loving comfort of God here and now. It is a fitting picture of the man, someone who would rather sit beside you, in a study or in sorrow, than stand at a distance.

Fr. John Giel has built a great deal over his years as a priest, and he never takes the credit for any of it. Under his care a small, struggling parish grew into one of the largest in the county, and his explanation for it was simple. "I'm not going to take the credit," he once said. "God has a lot to do with it." That is the thread that runs through everything, a man who says he thinks less about himself with each passing year, and more about offering himself in service.

Warm, likeable, and easy to be around, Fr. John is the kind of pastor people describe not by his titles or the buildings he raised, but by the way he treated them. He took time with people, remembered the schoolchildren, and made a whole community feel like family. When he left Leesburg after nearly twenty-five years, longtime members said it felt less like a transfer and more like watching family move away.

He is a Central Florida native through and through, a DeLand boy who studied business at Stetson before he ever answered the call to the priesthood. That practical, build-it mind stayed with him. At a small parish in Leesburg he helped a struggling community grow into thousands of parishioners, dozens of ministries, a thriving school, a thrift store, and a Catholic television network that reached viewers around the world. He has carried that same steady, community-building spirit through his years as Vicar General of the Diocese of Orlando and pastor of several parishes before arriving at Divine Mercy in 2023.

There is a soft side to Fr. John too, and a good deal of it goes to a little black poodle named Buddy. He calls him his "little priest dog," a rescue he describes as the gentlest, most compassionate dog he has ever seen, one who never barks and follows him around like a shadow. Fr. John talks about him the way a proud grandparent talks about a grandchild. It fits. Whether it is a struggling parish, a young person weighing a vocation, or a gentle dog nobody else wanted, he has always been the one who notices who needs looking after, and never the one to take the credit when they flourish.

Fr. John Bosco Maison has a way of making people feel they belong. Across four countries and three decades of ministry, the parishioners he has served describe the same man: warm, joyful, quick to laugh, and utterly without judgment, the kind of priest families grow attached to and are heartbroken to see reassigned. More than a few have simply called him their favorite.

He grew up in the small gold-mining town of Prestea, Ghana, one of a large and loving family, where home and church were the two places he felt the most love. As a boy he watched the altar servers and longed to join them, and when he finally could, he was enchanted by the mystery of standing so near the sacred vessels and the Eucharist. He credits two people with his vocation: his mother, who gave him the joy of her faith and a love of singing in church he carries to this day, and his hometown pastor, who was available, approachable, and encouraging. Ordained in 1996, he served six years in Ghana and a six-year mission in Jamaica before a visit to friends in Florida gave him the feeling that this would become his home. He has served the Diocese of Orlando since 2008, including twelve years at Epiphany in Port Orange and five as pastor of Ascension in Melbourne, before being named pastor of the Basilica of St. Paul in Daytona Beach in 2026.

For all his love of prayer, study, and the balance he keeps in his own life, what has always driven Fr. John Bosco is people. He believes it is not where you are but who you are with that matters, a conviction that took its clearest form after his mother, who never received an education herself, died in 2012. He and his Port Orange parishioners raised the money to build the first library his Ghanaian hometown had ever seen, in her memory. "The goal is to better people's lives through education," he said, "even if one or two or three lives could be touched." For Fr. John Bosco, the greatest gift he has known as a priest is still celebrating the Eucharist. It is at that table, he says, that he has come to know the Lord, to love Him, and to serve others in His name. He always prays to be a priest people can turn to in their time of need.