Alfonso Cely

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.