Benedict Andrzej Jurkiewicz

Father Andrzej Jurkiewicz talks about a parish the way most people talk about a home. When he arrived at St. Ann's, he told his new parishioners he looked forward to getting to know each of them and would serve them, as he put it, with his Polish accent. It was a humble way to begin, and it suited him.

He is warm and unassuming, more interested in the people in front of him than in anything on his résumé. The parishioners who have come to know him describe him not by his title or his decades in ministry but as a wonderful priest and a wonderful man who has brought real joy to the parish. He does not make much of himself. What he makes much of is community, the sense that a church is less a building than a family gathered under one roof.

He came to that conviction by a long road that began an ocean away. He grew up in Siemianowice Slaskie, in southern Poland, and as a young man entered the Discalced Carmelites, taking the religious name Benedict. He was ordained in Krakow and served for years in Poland before he was sent to the United States in the early 1990s, and then to Florida, where he found the work that would shape the rest of his ministry. For more than a decade he cared for the Polish Catholic community across Central Florida, celebrating Mass and the sacraments in their own language, a familiar sound of home for families far from theirs.

These days his life is centered on St. Ann's in DeBary, the parish he was asked to lead and, some years later, installed to shepherd as pastor. He calls it a family parish and means it plainly, quoting St. John Paul II that a parish is "not principally a structure, a territory, or a building, but rather the Family of God, a familiar and welcoming home." He guided it through a season of renewal, finishing the gathering space his late predecessor had started and marking it with a sign in the man's honor. But for all the new paint and the new roof, what holds his attention is the people who fill the pews. He signs his letters the way he greets his parish, with a blessing in his first language. Pan Z Wami. The Lord be with you.