Carlos Bedoya

Fr. Carlos Bedoya is the kind of pastor who turns a Saturday in December into something no one forgets. When his twenty-eighth ordination anniversary landed on the same day as the parish's annual International Festival, he did not separate the two. He celebrated both, because that is who Fr. Carlos is: a man who believes every good thing deserves to be shared. A Colombian native who came to the United States as an immigrant, Fr. Carlos is a graduate of St. John Vianney and was ordained on December 1, 1990. Over the years that followed, he served across the Diocese of Orlando, including as pastor of St. Clare in Deltona, before being named the sixteenth pastor of St. Mary of the Lakes in 2018. What you notice about Fr. Carlos is how much he genuinely loves where he is. He loves the history of his parish, a hilltop church in Eustis dedicated in 1912. He loves walking people through the small museum behind the sacristy, pointing out old photos and telling the story of the three churches the community has had. "Going to the museum is like stepping back into time, 100 years ago," he has said, and you can hear in it that this is not a duty for him but a joy. He loves his Colombian roots and finds ways to share them, like introducing a six-foot Santo Cristo Yacente into the parish's Good Friday procession, a tradition close to his heart from Latin American culture, and the church was packed for it. He loves taking people on pilgrimage, and has traveled with parishioners and families like the Demarrés all the way to Assisi, Italy. He added vestments belonging to Msgr. Manuel Fernandez, the first pastor to offer Spanish Masses for the Hispanic community, to the parish museum, not as an artifact but as a way to honor the people who came before him. Now thirty-five years into his priesthood, Fr. Carlos is still the kind of priest who sees a reason to celebrate in just about everything.