People We Got To Know in August 2026

Father Javier Barreto is the kind of priest who feeds people, and he means it in every sense. Before he ever wore a collar, he was a chef, cooking for the Hyatt hotel chain, and one of his brothers likes to say his parishioners will never go hungry and never be sad.

He grew up in Manatí, Puerto Rico, the fourth of five children, in a home he describes as Catholic more by name than by practice. Even so, something in him leaned toward the altar early. He was serving Mass by the age of eight, and after an uncle told him he looked like a little priest, the family started teasing him with it. He went to everything the church had going, and when he had no ride, he simply walked.

The call did not come quickly. His career was going well and he was happy, he says, but there was always something missing. A priest noticed him praying alone before the Blessed Sacrament one Holy Thursday and asked whether he had ever thought about the priesthood. He said no and, by his own account, kind of ran away, though the question kept following him. When he finally told his family, his father asked him three times if he was sure. Soon after, his father, who had long kept the faith at arm's length, made his confession and came home to the Church, not long before Barreto lost him. He entered St. John Vianney Seminary in 2006 and was ordained for the Archdiocese of Miami in 2015, serving in Miami parishes before he came to Hollywood.

Today he leads Little Flower Parish, a warm community of about a thousand families, half of them Hispanic, that traces its roots back a hundred years to the little French saint it is named for, Therese of Lisieux. Barreto arrived as the parish neared its centennial, and he speaks about the milestone with real gratitude, calling it a privilege to build up what he inherited for the generations still to come. He has leaned into what he loves most, working with young people, the elderly, and the sick, offering Mass in both English and Spanish, and opening the church for adoration during the week.

For all of it, the chef in him never really left. He still seems to measure a good day by whether the people in front of him have been fed, at the altar and at the table both, and he still hopes to be, as he once put it, an instrument to bring people back, like his dad.

Fr. David Pantaleón is the kind of priest who never seems to be reaching for attention. People who have watched him work describe a gentle, measured man, fair and sensitive, someone who would rather stand quietly beside a person in trouble than say much about it.

He was born in Salcedo, in the Dominican Republic, has spent his life in the Society of Jesus, and along the way has kept up a quieter craft as a musician who writes and records his own music. That life has been tested more than once. In 2017 he was sent to Cuba to lead the Jesuits on the island, during some of the hardest years many Cubans could remember. For five years he walked with religious communities and ordinary families, and he did not look away from the people suffering around him. He stood with prisoners and with their families, and when he was asked to soften his voice and let it go, he would not. His permission to stay was eventually not renewed, and he had to leave the island where he had spent those five years.

He speaks about all of it without bitterness. "We cannot close our eyes and look the other way," he once wrote. "It is not about who is right or wrong. It is about things as simple as the right to live, to express what one thinks, to discuss differences without demonizing the opposite opinion, to respect the dignity of all." That belief is the heart of how he understands his work, and it has followed him into every place he has served.

Today his path has brought him to Gesú Catholic Parish in downtown Miami, the oldest Catholic parish in the city and a church that has welcomed generations of Cuban and immigrant families through its doors. It is a fitting home for a Dominican Jesuit who was sent away from Cuba for standing so close to its people. He came to Gesú as pastor in 2023, and the man who leads the congregation now is the same one the Cuban press once captured in a single line, a priest who does not seek the spotlight and simply tries to stay near the people who need him.

Fr. José Alvarez is happiest with people around him. Over more than two decades as a priest he has served in a lot of places and never picked a favorite. They are all good, he likes to say, as long as there are people in them. He believes a priest should be, in his own words, a regular guy, and that what gives the faith its credibility is not what you do but how you relate to people. His whole spirituality he sums up in a single phrase: finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.

He came to the priesthood the long way around. Born in Havana, he arrived in Miami as a young boy in 1967 with his parents and his older sister, and he grew up there. Before the collar, he lived a couple of other lives. He spent about a decade as an actor and director on stage, in commercials, and in film, the blink-and-you'll-miss-me kind of roles, as he puts it, and then fifteen years teaching and coaching at the Catholic schools he had once attended. He entered the seminary at thirty-six and was ordained in 2003. He did not become a priest because he was unhappy in either life. He loved teaching and coaching. He simply felt called, and felt he needed to be freer to give himself fully to the work.

Away from the parish, he is a devoted Marlins fan. On a day off, if they are playing, there is a good chance he is at the ballpark, and he is not shy about it. He plays a twelve-string guitar, and during the pandemic he and a fellow priest recorded a gentle version of the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" that unexpectedly went viral, much to the amusement of a man who happily admits he is lucky he knows how to use a cell phone. His taste in music surprises people, too: by his own description, he is probably the only Cuban who listens to American folk and bluegrass. For years he has quietly helped build bridges between Cuban Catholics on the island and those in exile, work he describes as helping the two communities understand one another and heal old wounds. For all the places he has stood and the different lives he has lived, it comes back to something simple. He just likes being around people.

Fr. José Luis Menéndez is the kind of priest who would rather trust people to do the work than do it for them. For more than three decades in a long-overlooked corner of Miami, that has been his way, believing in people until they start to believe in themselves. "The first thing you have to do," he says, "is believe that they can do it."

He was born in Havana in 1947 and was twelve when his family left as Castro's revolution took hold. What was supposed to be six months away turned into twenty years in Spain, and it was there, on a retreat as a teenager, that he knew he wanted to be a priest. He was ordained in Madrid in 1977 and came to Miami hoping to serve his fellow Cuban exiles.

The Lord, he likes to say, had a sense of humor about that, because Miami handed him just about everyone except Cubans. In 1988 he took over Corpus Christi, a struggling parish in one of the poorest zip codes in the country. Instead of waiting for a scattered neighborhood to come to him, he went out to it, turning one church into six small missions, one for each pocket of the community. He was reaching the edges of the city long before anyone called it that, and he became a voice for those streets too, showing people who had felt powerless that they could speak up and be heard.

Away from the streets and the missions, there is a quieter side of him that loves beauty. Over the years he has gathered one of the largest collections of colonial religious art and historical records in the country, kept in a church-museum he built on the parish grounds. For him it is not a hobby but part of the same calling. He believes beauty and history can reach people in a way a sermon cannot, and that a poor neighborhood surrounded by both slowly stops seeing itself as poor. And still, he waves off the credit for any of it. "What I have done," he says, "is allow people to do it and discover what they can do."

Father Joseph Jean-Louis still seems a little amazed that he gets to be a priest at all. He has spent his life going wherever the Church asked him to go, and he has never once treated the privilege as ordinary.

Born in Haiti, he joined the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate as a young man and spent his formation on the move, serving in Colombia, studying in Bolivia, and training in Spain long before he set foot in Florida. He was ordained back home in Haiti in 2003 and came to the United States nearly a decade later. Wherever he has been sent, he has gone, and that readiness is as much a part of him as the collar.

What holds all of that movement together is the Eucharist. Celebrating Mass and preaching bring him a joy he does not try to hide, and he says that every time he lifts the host, he feels the same pull toward the Lord he felt the very first time. He talks about the Real Presence the way other people talk about the love of their life, and he means it plainly. Not long after he came to Christ the King in Miami, he opened a perpetual adoration chapel, twenty-four hours a day, so his community would always have somewhere to pray before the Blessed Sacrament. In a world that has grown comfortable with what is virtual, he wants people to know the difference between that and what is real.

That same conviction is what sent him out again, this time far beyond his own parish. Fr. Joseph was chosen as one of the National Eucharistic Preachers, asked to travel to parishes and dioceses across the country and help people come back to the Eucharist. He does not pretend the work is easy. He calls it a demanding mission, one that asks for real preparation and dedication, and he treats it as simply part of what it means to be a priest.

For all the countries and the miles, what Fr. Joseph keeps returning to is something simple. He still remembers his first Mass as a young priest, holding the host and the chalice and not quite believing that God would let a sinner like him touch the Body and Blood of Christ. Years later, that wonder has not worn off. You can hear it in the invitation he offers to anyone who feels unsure or afraid. Do not be afraid to say yes to Jesus' love.

Fr. Matias Hualpa never planned to be a priest. For most of his life he was an engineer who fully expected to marry and raise a family, and the calling, when it came, caught him completely by surprise. He was, by his own account, a Sunday Catholic, and the first Catholic school he ever walked into was the seminary. The whole turn, he says, came through the Blessed Mother.

Matias was born in San Juan, Argentina, and spent his early career in information systems, including years at IBM and American Express, the job that eventually brought him to South Florida in 2003. Back in Buenos Aires, a young adult group had drawn him deeper into the faith through the Schoenstatt Movement, a Marian devotion whose spirituality he loved, and he kept helping with youth groups once he settled in Miami. It was on a Holy Week trip to a Schoenstatt shrine in Texas that a priest first asked him if he had ever thought about the priesthood. He said no, but the question stayed with him until he finally said yes. He entered the seminary in 2007, was ordained for the Archdiocese of Miami in 2014, and before arriving at Blessed Trinity he spent years at the seminary helping to form the next generation of priests.

In 2023 he was installed as pastor of Blessed Trinity, a small, old community in Virginia Gardens that people once called the open air parish, back in the days when Mass was celebrated under a tent. He has taken to it with real warmth. He carries the Blessed Sacrament through the neighborhood streets on Corpus Christi, throws himself into the annual parish festival, and gives his time to healing ministry and to speaking on behalf of life. But mostly he just likes his people. As he put it before one festival, it is about "a community of people who love to be together," gathered to unwrap the gift of Jesus Christ in each of them. For a man who once had no plans to be a priest at all, it is a fitting place to have landed.

Father Bob Tywoniak is the kind of pastor who is genuinely glad to see you walk through the door. He is friendly, quick with a joke, and warm toward anyone who comes in worn down or unsure they belong. None of us are perfect here, he is the first to say, himself included, and there is always room for one more. "We are faithful," he likes to say. "Come on in."

Public service was almost the family trade. His father served back home in New Jersey as a city councilman and police commissioner, and for a long time Bob assumed he would follow some version of that path, maybe law, maybe elected office. Born in 1957, he had moved to Florida with his family as a boy, and by college he was studying business and pre-law at Stetson University. That is where the plan came undone. On a quiet retreat, he heard what he still describes as an almost audible voice telling him to be a priest. He was ordained in 1983, and more than forty years on, people describe him much the way they always have, less by his titles or his social work credentials than by a plain conviction: faith is something you do, not just something you say.

That conviction has taken real shape for as long as he has worn the collar. Long before Blessed Sacrament, he spent ten years running the child welfare division of Catholic Charities, a trained social worker who liked to joke that God called him to be celibate and then made him "the father of hundreds of kids a year." Over the years he has sat on community boards and a hospital ethics committee and pitched in to feed people who were going hungry. For Bob, the Gospel was never meant to stay in the pulpit. It is something you carry out the door and put to work.

Away from the parish, there is more to him than the collar lets on. He still runs five miles at a time, several days a week, and treats the miles as much like prayer as exercise. He grew up singing and playing the trumpet, and once took the stage in a high school production of "The Sound of Music." He is a longtime fan of "The West Wing," which he thinks captures better than anything else on television just how hard it is to govern. He genuinely likes people, all kinds of them, and has spent much of his ministry in parishes where the pews fill with families from all over.

Through all of it, one thing holds steady. The best part of his week, he has said, is the Sunday liturgy, and everything else makes little sense without it. A line from Mother Teresa, that we are called to be faithful, not successful, has come to mean more to him the longer he has been a priest, especially in the stretches when he built something up only to be moved along before he could see it bear fruit. Ask him what he would most want to be remembered for, and he turns the question around. He hopes people will not really remember him at all, only that being near him felt like being near the love of God, and that afterward they might just wonder, "Who was that guy?"