Orlando Catholic Church Leaders

Father Eugene Grytner has a simple way of talking about God: look at the person next to you. He told his parish once that it is through other people, a wife, a husband, anyone who bears God's image, that we come to see God at all. Whatever he is preaching, he has a way of bringing it back to the people in the room.

That instinct took him a long way from home. He is Polish, and he could have spent his life in a parish there, but he joined the Salvatorian missionaries hoping to carry the Gospel to Africa. The hope came true. He gave twenty-nine years to Tanzania, learned to pray with its people, and never quite left them behind. When his order's founder was declared blessed, what he thought of first were the Tanzanian parishioners who had faithfully prayed a Swahili prayer he once handed them, and he was quietly sure they had something to do with it.

His tenderness runs all the way down to the smallest and least seen. Every afternoon at 3:15, right after the Divine Mercy Chaplet, the bells at St. Thomas Aquinas ring for the unborn, a daily habit he took up after Pope Francis blessed a bell called the Voice of the Unborn. He wanted the children who never drew a breath to be remembered out loud, because, as he put it, the message to protect life has to be heard loud and clear, to the ends of the world.

For all of it, much of who he is lives in the ordinary work of a pastor: leading pilgrimages, remembering the dead a month after a funeral, praying for the sick and for the young to answer whatever God is asking of them. After all these years and all these miles, Father Eugene still keeps pointing the same direction, past himself and toward whoever is in front of him, sure that this is exactly where God tends to turn up.

Father Alfonso is the kind of welcoming priest who would rather give you a hug than a handshake. The warmth is genuine, the kind you feel the moment he greets you at the door. For him, the priesthood has always been about the people, never the size of the building around them. The hugs in the narthex, he says, are an energetic and uplifting experience.

Warm, welcoming, and something of a dreamer, Fr. Alfonso has spent more than two decades serving central Florida, and the people who fill his pews speak of him with plain affection, an amazing man and a blessing to the parish. He came to the priesthood by a road he did not expect. He grew up in Colombia, one of four children in a very Catholic family, studied hotel and tourism, and was working for an airline when he first heard God asking for something else. His family, he admits, was not thrilled by the news. But he had always carried what he calls a hunger for the Truth and a desire to communicate it clearly, and that pull led him to the Dominicans, the order of study and preaching, where he found the life of prayer he still lives today.

He arrived in the United States as a missionary in 2002 and has called it home ever since, the place where he found a wonderful family and where, he says plainly, he intends to die. Most of his work has been with the growing Hispanic community of central Florida, first at a small mission in Ocala where he watched a twenty-person Mass swell past two hundred, and now at St. Ann, where his heart for the parish's young people has carried a few of them as far as Rome. His dream there is to turn the thirty-acre grounds into a great garden of contemplation and prayer, complete with olive trees, a lake view, and a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, so that even when the doors are locked, no one who comes looking for God leaves without a place to pray.

For all the dreaming and building, what Fr. Alfonso loves most is simply gathering people in. He ends his welcome to newcomers not with a word about the church he leads, but with the ones still missing from it: "Only you are missing. Come and see. We are waiting for you.

Tim Wright calls campus ministry the best of both worlds, the place where his love of teaching and his love of ministry finally came together. Eighteen years in, he is the longest-serving chaplain in the history of Florida Southern College, and he still talks about the role as the dream he waited four years to get.

Patient, humble about his own place in the work, and genuinely taken with the people he serves, Wright has spent nearly two decades with students between eighteen and twenty-two, and he is candid that the potential he sees in them is both the best part of the job and its hardest lesson. He wanted them to reach it all at once, and the work taught him to let them grow in their own time. It is why the people who came up under him tend to describe him not by his title but by the chance he gave them when they had none, and the voice he became in their lives and their callings.

He did not set out to be a chaplain at all. Wright is a Melbourne, Florida nativ and an ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church, Wright came to Duke Divinity School meaning to earn a doctorate and teach theology, until chaperoning youth groups kept turning him toward ministry instead. Campus ministry became the way to do both, though it took four years, a couple of church appointments, and a national search before the job he wanted was finally his.

These days you are as likely to find him on the intramural courts as behind a pulpit or in front of a religion class. When his responsibilities grew well beyond ministry, his first worry was for the students, that they might lose the easy access to him they had always counted on, and he helped create an associate chaplain role to protect it. He does not think in terms of legacy, because he does not believe the work belongs to him. What he hopes for is simpler: that everyone he has ever been in ministry with comes away knowing, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that God loves them. If this is the only place they ever hear it, and it comes from him, he would be pretty satisfied with that.

Fr. Nathanael Soliven tells the story of his calling with a smile, and usually at his own expense. There was no lightning bolt, he says, and no long wrestling match with God. If anything, he was the last to know. As he puts it, "God calls young boy. Young boy doesn't know he's being called, so God drags him to seminary."

That humor is part of his charm, and the warmth beneath it is part of why people grow attached to him and hate to see him go. Those who have known him reach for words like faithful, inspiring, and devoted, but the affection is plainer than any of them. At the parishes he served on his way to ordination, people still speak of missing him and hoping he might come back, remembering little things like the way he could weave a hymn into a homily. The day he arrived at Saint Anthony in Lakeland, they lined up out the door to welcome their new shepherd.

His path there was never really his own plan. Born in the Philippines, one of four children, he was twelve when his mother decided a high school seminary was where he belonged. He went unwillingly. But something shifted once he was inside it, and in the daily rhythm of prayer and Mass he stumbled into a friendship with God he had not gone looking for, until slowly the boy who had resisted the collar began to want it. Even then he wanted to be sure, so after seminary he stepped away for four years and lived an ordinary life, earning his own way and seeing much of Europe. It was a good life, and still, he says, "something was still not enough." The call kept finding him, and this time he answered it for good, following it through to ordination in 2021. Three years later he became pastor of Saint Anthony, finally doing the things he had waited years to do, saying Mass, hearing confessions, visiting the sick, and hoping the work will carry him into the diocese's schools, where he has always loved being around the young. "I want to be the priest who serves the families," he says, "making an impact in their lives."

Before he was ever a priest, he was a teacher, and languages were his subject and his love, first in the Philippines and later in Spain, where he spent his last year abroad teaching English at a bilingual school. He speaks English, Tagalog, and Spanish, along with two Filipino dialects, and reads enough Greek, Latin, and Hebrew to catch how a single word can shift the meaning of a sacred text. He loves them, he says, because each one opens him up to another culture, almost another world. It is a fitting love for a man who has lived across a few worlds himself, the reluctant boy who grew into a willing priest, and who has a way of belonging wherever he goes.

When Father David Vargas arrives somewhere new, he is in no hurry to change it. At his last parish he spent close to a year simply getting to know the people before he did anything at all, watching, listening, and, in his own words, discovering the beauty of the ones he had been sent to serve. Only then did he begin.

That patience says most of what you need to know about him. Father David is a listener before he is a leader, more inclined to sit down over coffee and pray about an idea than to rush a decision. He is the first to say the work is not about him, unafraid to admit when he does not know how to do something, and happy to hand a task to whoever does. Fluent in Spanish, English, and Italian, he has a way of making room for whoever is in front of him. People who have worked beside him tend to remember him not for his title or his years in ministry but for something harder to measure: the way he makes ordinary people believe they can actually do something for one another.

Ordained in Puerto Rico in 2002 through the order of Saint Augustine, he joined the Diocese of Orlando in 2019 and has spent his years in Florida among people the wider world tends to overlook. At Holy Spirit in Lake Wales, a rural, largely retirement community he once called the last church of the diocese, he found a small parish food pantry that ran on whatever neighbors dropped off on Fridays. He saw in it the start of something much larger. Working hand in hand with Catholic Charities and a devoted crowd of volunteers, he helped it grow into far more than food: help for immigrants and lonely seniors, English classes for newcomers and Spanish classes for the neighbors who wanted to meet them halfway, care for the sick and the imprisoned. He refuses to take the credit. "It's by the grace of the Lord," he likes to say, "because it's impossible."

Slowing down does not come naturally to him, and he is fine with that. "I'm always busy. I never stop," he says, and then, almost cheerfully, explains why: "people don't allow me to stop." In the summer of 2025 he began again, this time as administrator of Saint Paul Catholic Church in Leesburg, a new community full of names he has yet to learn. If the pattern holds, he will start the way he always does. He will listen first. Because for Father David, it was never really about the programs or the titles. It was about the person sitting across from him, and what becomes possible once someone finally pulls up a chair, pours the coffee, and asks how they can help.

Fr. Juan Camilo Montoya has a way of belonging quickly. Wherever he is sent, he takes a genuine interest in the people, and it is rarely long before they feel the same way about him.

He came a long way to get here. He grew up in Medellín, Colombia, one of seven children, and studied theology at the Pontifical Bolivarian University before he was ordained a priest in 2010. The road since has carried him far from home, first across the American Southwest and now to Central Florida, but the thing people tend to notice is not the distance he has traveled. It is the warmth he brings when he arrives.

For years he served the parishes around Las Cruces, New Mexico, among them a small historic adobe mission in the village of Doña Ana. He clearly loved it there. He threw himself into the life of the community and its traditions, presiding over the parish's beloved patronal feast, a local fiesta filled with traditional sacred dance and the old plaza lit for the occasion, and the people loved him back, with support that reached well beyond the village itself.

He came to the Diocese of Orlando in 2023 and did what he has always done, quietly settling in, serving two Lakeland parishes before he was entrusted with St. John Neumann in the summer of 2025. It suits him. St. John Neumann is a warm, family-minded parish on the south side of Lakeland, one that has spent nearly fifty years growing into what it is now, the last twenty of them learning to pray in two languages. It first offered Mass in Spanish in 2007, as more and more Spanish-speaking families found their way in, and today the two languages live side by side, in the Masses, the confessions, the marriage groups, the children lining up for First Communion. A bilingual Colombian priest, at home in both, feels almost made for a place like this.

He preaches to his people in both languages, at ease in the faith of whoever is in front of him. He is still new here, still learning names and faces. But if the places he has already been are any sign, it will not be long before this one feels like his own too.

Father Luis Osorio once stood in front of a mirror and asked himself the question most people spend a lifetime avoiding: "Who is Luis?" He did not look away from the answer.

That honesty with himself carries into how he is with everyone else: dedicated, steady, and glad to be among them. On his twenty-fifth anniversary as a priest, his parish prayed simply that God would keep giving him the strength and wisdom to lead them. None of it came from nowhere. He grew up in Pereira, Colombia, one of eight children in a family where faith was simply part of the air, with parents so devoted to Our Lady of Carmel that they kept an altar for her at home. He still points back to their rosaries and their quiet, faithful devotion as the ground he came from.

Osorio came to the priesthood the long way around. Back in Colombia he had a degree in political economics and steady work in a government office and a sugar refinery, a life that looked like enough. "But I felt that I was missing something," he said once, pointing to his heart. A priest he met spotted the vocation in him before he ever saw it himself, and it took years of prayer before he stopped arguing and finally said yes.

Most of his priesthood has been lived in two languages, across parishes in North Carolina and Florida, and serving people of every background is plainly the part he loves best. "The church is universal," he likes to say, "and we have to include everybody in that family." These days that family is Holy Spirit Parish in Lake Wales, a mostly English-speaking congregation he came to after years among Spanish-speaking communities, one he says has been patient and supportive. For a man who once stood at a mirror unsure who he was, he sounds settled now. He calls his vocation a feeling that words cannot describe, and about where he has landed he says, simply, "I feel blessed."