Adriano Tezone

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.