Andrew Kollannoor

Fr. Andrews Kollannoor believes that being a good shepherd is not something reserved for priests. In one way or another, he says, we are all shepherds to the people placed in our care, meant to help them and lead them home. It is a conviction he has held for decades, and it suits him well, since the parish he leads today is named Good Shepherd.

Devotion runs deep in him, and none deeper than his love for the Blessed Mother. He is a Missionary of Our Lady of La Salette, and he has spent his life carrying her message, sometimes in ways you can walk right up and touch. During his years as pastor in Sulphur, Louisiana, that love moved him to build a shrine, not a modest one, but an exact replica of the holy mountain in La Salette, France. It took two hundred fifty truckloads of dirt to raise the mountain on a quiet street, and seven life-size marble statues to finish it. People who knew him there do not reach for his titles when they describe him. They talk about the man who brightened their church and helped a small parish grow in faith, and when he moved on they were still saying they missed him and wished he would come back.

In many ways, he has spent his life starting things. Born in Kerala, in southern India, he was among the first young men his congregation drew from that country, and in 1985 he became the first Indian priest the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette ever ordained. He went home to help the mission take root, joining his brother, a Carmelite priest, to turn an old hospital that had belonged to the Carmelite sisters into the community's first house there, and in time he was chosen to lead that growing family as its first provincial superior. The work eventually carried him across the world to the United States, and in 2023 to Good Shepherd in Orlando, where Bishop John Noonan handed him the keys to the parish and reminded him that his real task was to lead his people all the way to heaven.

Today he shepherds a busy bilingual parish and school in east Orlando, a community that prays in both English and Spanish, and he welcomes new families warmly, glad to see them make the parish and its school their own. Ask him why he does any of it, and the answer comes back to the same simple idea he has preached all along. We have come, he has said, to make other people's lives easier and more comfortable, and to help everyone find the fullness of life. We are called to serve, and not to be served.