Orlando Catholic Church Leaders

Fr. Randall Meissen went to college certain he would become a doctor of bodies, and somewhere along the way found out he was meant to be a doctor of souls.

Curious, thoughtful, and genuinely easy to talk to, he treats faith as a conversation rather than a lecture, someone who says he wants to be a partner in the dialogue no matter what a person believes or does not believe. He is quick to push back on the idea that priests are dull. A sad saint is a bad saint, he likes to say, and he sees the priesthood not as a solemn duty but as a real quest for joy. Ask him to describe himself and he keeps it to three words: inquisitive, analytic, compassionate.

He came to it the long way. A farm kid from Salisbury, Missouri, the oldest of four boys, he ran his own small business trapping insects and selling the collections to biology teachers, and paid for his first car that way. Dead grasshoppers for a set of wheels, he calls it, a good trade. That scientific streak carried him to Rice University bound for medical school, until a car accident that took the life of a friend turned him toward the questions medicine could not answer. He was ordained in Rome in 2014, and the curious mind never left him, he went on to study Latin and history and still digs through old manuscripts in archives from Guatemala to Spain for the sheer pleasure of understanding how things came to be.

Everything he has ends up pointed at students. He has walked the Camino de Santiago with them and led them into the mountains of the Dominican Republic to dig water lines for families who had none, asking anyone who wanted to come along a single question: can you dig a hole? Away from the work, he hikes, kayaks, and plays Ultimate Frisbee, still the outdoor kid he was on the farm. His favorite saint is John Paul II, whose gift for making millions of people feel personally seen left a mark on him as a young man. It is the same gift Fr. Randall reaches for now, helping each student feel known, and part of something far bigger than the world they came from.

Fr. Tom Walden did not decide to become a priest so much as he was slowly, quietly convinced. It happened at two funerals, ten years apart.

He had come to Central Florida for a job at Disney, with no thought of ever wearing a collar. Then his mother died back home in Pennsylvania, and the priest who buried her spoke about Eternal Life in a way that steadied the whole family. Fr. Tom went back to work, and life moved on. About ten years later his brother died, and the same priest was there again. That time it took hold of him. He talked with his pastor in Orlando, thought it over for a good while, and entered the seminary in 2006. He has never called any of it chance. As he once put it, God takes tragic events and allows a greater good to come from them.

That belief shapes the kind of priest he is. He has a teacher's habit of reaching people through the small, human details of the faith, the sort who will point out that St. Martha, remembered for her hospitality to Jesus, is now the patron saint of restaurant servers, and let something ordinary open up into something larger. The families at his school describe him simply as amazing, and thank him for his service and love. He has a way of making faith feel close, and of making people feel looked after.

These days he is the one greeting people at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Palm Bay, where he became pastor in the summer of 2026. Nearly all of his years as a priest have been spent around Brevard County, long enough that he once stood with his parish in Melbourne as it turned ninety, and long enough that he is now a Vicar Forane, the kind of priest other priests lean on. None of that is what he leads with, though. It is a long way from a Disney paycheck to a parish of his own, and Fr. Tom will tell you he never planned the route. He found it the way he believes most people find their best things, out of the hardest days, and often when they are least expecting to.

Fr. Ben Berinti is the kind of priest who believes the world already has enough ugliness, and that a church, of all places, ought to answer it with beauty. Our worship should make room for beautiful things, he says, because good art draws people into an expression of faith that words alone cannot reach. Coming from him, that is quite an admission, because words are his craft.

Engaging, creative, and inspirational in the way he handles the Word, Fr. Ben has carried that gift through four decades of ministry, and it is why people tend to describe him not by his titles or the many places he has served, but by the warmth and the missionary heart he brings to the work. He is forever trying, in his own words, to widen the circle and make more room, to look again at the person who has run out of chances or the one everyone else finds easy to overlook. Born in Pittsburgh in 1958, he joined the Missionaries of the Precious Blood at fourteen, walking into the minor seminary as a boy and never really leaving the path he found there. He was ordained in 1985 and marked his fortieth anniversary as a priest in the summer of 2025, still taking his bearings from St. Gaspar del Bufalo and Blessed Giovanni Merlini, the founders whose spirituality runs through everything he does.

His road has taken him just about everywhere a priest can go, from university lecterns and campus ministry to directing formation, serving on the provincial council, and leading retreats, and, for years now, pastoring a parish. The same instinct shows up in each place, a desire to help people encounter something real and put words, or images, around it. At Immaculate Conception, a class he started on sacred icons caught on in a way he never expected, his parishioners taking to it so warmly that their donations have filled the church walls with them. He will tell you an icon is not painted but written, a window to heaven, and you get the sense he could talk about them all day. He has also lived what he preaches. When his own mother died, in the first uncertain weeks of the pandemic, the communion of saints he had taught for years stopped being an idea in his head and became, as he put it, a consolation in his heart. Much of his writing circles the same ground, three collections of spiritual essays and a shelf of smaller books and chapbooks that keep returning to the Eucharist, the Precious Blood, and the quiet work of finding God in ordinary and difficult days.

Ask him about his greatest joy apart from writing, though, and he will not name any of that. He will tell you it is cooking and sharing a meal, a love he traces straight to his Italian-American upbringing. It fits him. Whether it is beauty on the walls, words on the page, or food on the table, it is all his way of gathering people close. He pastors a small church wedged between the Atlantic and the Indian River Lagoon, where, as he likes to point out, the sun comes up behind the altar and goes down beyond the doors, and after forty years he is still, in the words of his favorite passage from Isaiah, watching the desert bloom.

There is a gentle steadiness to Fr. Frankline Rayappa. His parishioners describe him as steadfast, wise, and faithful, a priest they know they can lean on, and when he moves to a new parish they miss him dearly and keep him close in their prayers.

Fr. Frankline is a Missionary of the Precious Blood, part of a religious community whose whole reason for being is reconciliation, the work of drawing people back together and healing what is broken. He was ordained a priest in 2007, and in the years since he has carried that mission from one assignment to the next, serving parishes in California and Ohio before arriving in Florida, and now pastoring three churches in Dayton. His community recently elected him to serve on its Provincial Council. He does not talk about ministry as a career. He talks about it as an invitation. Every vocation and every ministry, he says, begins with God's invitation to serve, and he tends to describe each new responsibility as another chance to listen for that call and to keep walking with the people he serves.

What that looks like up close is a man who builds. In Palm Bay he led his parish through the renovation of its sanctuary, and when it was finished he handed the credit straight back to the people who made it possible. "This sanctuary stands as a testament to the strength of our community and our shared faith," he told them. It is a small window into how he sees the priesthood. The spirituality of the Precious Blood, he says, has always spoken to him as one of relationship, reconciliation, and self-giving love, a belief that God wants to draw everyone into communion and to restore hope where it is needed most. He has spent his priesthood trying to embody that rather than only preach it, gathering parishioners, lay Companions, and fellow Missionaries into the same shared work. As he steps into this new role, he keeps coming back to the same quiet conviction: that the road ahead is best met by staying rooted in what formed you and open to wherever the Spirit leads next.

Father Chris Bugno has a way of leaving people a little better than he found them.

Warm, hard-working, and quick to laugh, he is the kind of priest who would rather you just call him Father Chris, and the kind his parishioners talk about not as a distant figure at the altar but as one of their own. He has a soft spot for young people, too. At his first Mass in a new parish he waved the children up to sit around the altar while he preached, and when the parish youth once challenged him to a soccer match, he was happy to admit afterward that the priesthood had been the better career choice.

That warmth was shaped a long way from Florida. Father Chris is a highlander from the Tatra Mountains of southern Poland, born in 1959 in the same corner of the country, and under the same communist shadow, as another mountain son the world would come to know as Pope John Paul II. As a teenager he was drawn into a Catholic youth movement the future pope helped inspire, and he served as his altar boy more than once. Father Chris still calls him his mentor and role model, the example of the kind of priest he hoped to become.

He became that priest with the Salvatorians, ordained in 1985, and has spent his life since going where he was sent, from parishes across Poland to others in New Jersey, New York, and Indiana, and seven years in the L'Arche communities of Europe, sharing daily life with people who have disabilities. He came to St. Teresa of Avila in Titusville in 2009 and has been its pastor ever since, bringing the devotions closest to his heart and a love of celebrating the many cultures in his pews. He is also, quietly, the man who once pulled a drowning friend from the surf at a nearby beach and, untrained in CPR, believed it was God who gave him the strength to bring him back.

For all the miles he has traveled, a part of Father Chris never left the mountains. Ask about his life beyond the parish and he will tell you his favorite sport is skiing, his hobbies are hiking and rollerblading, and his real passions are geography and history. Florida's flat coastline is a long way from the peaks he grew up on, but the people who call him their shepherd, their friend, and their family in faith will tell you he brought the warmth of home with him.

Fr. Phil Egitto is the kind of priest who will not let you sit quietly in the pew and slip out the side door. He wants to know your name, and if he does not, he already knows you are visiting.

Warm, funny, and completely direct about what he believes, Fr. Phil has carried that mix through more than three decades at one parish, and it is the reason people describe him not by his title but by how his church feels. One visitor said a single Mass renewed her faith and made her wish her home parish felt the same. Another put it plainly: he is kind, empathetic, and energetic, but most of all, he walks the walk. He would tell you it is not really about him. The parish has a motto he repeats often, loving the God we cannot see by loving the neighbor we can, and he means the second half as an instruction, not a sentiment. Love, in his telling, is not a gushy feeling. It is willing the good of the other and then actually doing something about it.

He came to the priesthood the long way. A Brooklyn kid from a close Italian family, the son of a dentist who treated his work as ministry, he went off to the University of Florida as a pre-med student, switched to psychology, and spent years working with forensic mental-health patients before a college retreat first stirred the idea that would not leave him. He was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in the late 1980s, served in South Orlando and Titusville, and arrived at Our Lady of Lourdes around three decades ago, a tenure so long he jokes the diocese simply did not know what to do with him. What he built there is a justice-and-action parish, and he does not soften it. He leads a busload of parishioners to Florida State Prison for every execution, praying and ringing a bell in the dark. He organizes his people through an interfaith coalition that has pushed for affordable housing and better mental health care, and he insists there are no volunteers at his church, only people called to serve. Yet for all the causes, what he lights up about is the connecting itself, the bagels and leftover pastries after Mass, the dinner churches in people's homes, the crowd he cannot get to go home once the lights come on. Ask him where he finds the sacred and he does not point to a doctrine. He points to the love his people share, and he says you can feel it the moment you walk through the door.

Father John Britto Antony describes his own gift in the simplest terms: to be joyful, and to present himself smiling all the time. He is, by his own account, people-oriented, someone who loves being with people, and who wants above all to share the joy of belonging to Christ.

Soft-spoken and, by his nephew's account, deeply prayerful, he has carried that same spirit from a village in southern India to a parish in Central Florida. It is why people who have known him describe him not just by the roles he has held but as loving, compassionate, and welcoming, a true shepherd who cares for his flock.

He was the youngest of five children in Agraharam, a small town near Salem in Tamil Nadu, where the faith was simply part of the air. His mother led the family rosary every evening, his father walked to daily Mass at a church barely a few hundred feet from their door, and a Holy Cross school sat near the village. By the end of eighth grade, young John already sensed God calling him.

That call took a long and patient road. He joined the Brothers of Holy Cross and spent twenty-five years as a religious brother, teaching, leading a school, and eventually guiding the brothers across India. But he ached to offer Mass, to hear confessions, to baptize and bless marriages, and after years of asking he finally crossed the world to become a priest, ordained at Notre Dame in 2011. He is convinced God's hand led every step. "God does not ration his gift of the Spirit," he likes to say, and his own life feels to him like proof of it.

He came to St. John the Evangelist in Viera and became its pastor in 2018, and in 2021 he became a U.S. citizen, because the word alien never sat right with him and he wanted to belong fully to the people he serves. Providence keeps surprising him. After a year serving alone, his own nephew, also a priest, was sent to work beside him, something he can only call God's grace.

In quieter hours he is content with a book and some music, but he is happiest among people. He carries the Our Lady of Lourdes devotion of his childhood into the grotto he helped build, and he is just as glad learning the Vacation Bible School dance with the children as he is unveiling a new mosaic for the parish jubilee. Through all of it, one conviction holds steady. His parish, he says, has become his family, and celebrating Mass among them remains the singular joy of his life.