Benjamin Lehnertz

Baseball was Father Benjamin Lehnertz's first love, and for most of his childhood it sat a little higher in his heart than God did. That eventually flipped, and he has never once wished it back the other way.

Warm, funny, and quick to laugh at himself, Ben is an Air Force kid who lived in eight states in eighteen years before Florida, where his faith finally became his own. He is a self-described recovering perfectionist who says baseball taught him how to keep swinging after failing seven times out of ten, and a Minnesota Twins fan since the team beat the Braves in the 1991 World Series. He has carried an unusual contentment through more than a decade of priesthood, and it is the reason people tend to remember him not for the ballplayer he once was, but for being, plainly, a happy priest who is exactly where he wants to be. He is a former high school baseball chaplain, a devoted son of St. Joseph, and the kind of man who says that if you want to watch God show off, you should just try to out-give him. And he is still, after all of it, someone who insists he would not trade this life for a World Series ring and all the money to match.

The turning point came in his freshman year of college. He was dating a woman he thought he might one day marry, weighing a future in the game he loved, and torn enough that he found himself in an adoration chapel in the middle of the night, asking God for a little clarity and promising to do whatever he was told. The answer, when it came, was simple: go to seminary. He went, was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando, and has spent his priesthood tucked inside the Holy Family, assigned first to Annunciation, then Holy Family, then St. Joseph, a saint he had quietly consecrated himself to before he had any idea he was being sent there. He took the parish over two weeks before the world shut down in 2020 and, as its only priest for five years, led it through everything that came after.

Through all of it, baseball never fully left him. He played a few seasons of slow-pitch softball with a men's group, spent five years as chaplain to a Catholic high school baseball team, and still lights up talking about the game the way people do about a first love. Ask him which saint he would pick for a game of catch and he goes with Pier Giorgio Frassati, a young Italian he has admired for years and figures he could teach to throw well enough for a good afternoon. He preaches like it is the thing he was made for, tells young athletes that trading Sunday Mass for a game has it backwards, and jokes that the one position he is not after is the papacy, because he does not look good in white. Under all of it is the line he keeps coming back to: self-reliance is the enemy of the Christian life, and you can never out-give God.