Orlando Catholic Church Leaders

Fr. Tony Welle is the kind of priest who would rather be in the middle of things than off to the side. Social and outgoing by nature, he has a warmth that makes a parish feel less like an institution and more like a place where people actually know each other.

That instinct shows up in the small things and the big ones. When his old parish was fitting a new sound system, what he cared about most was that everyone could hear him clearly, no matter where they sat, that it would feel like he was standing right beside each person in the pew. It is a small detail, but it says a lot about how he sees the priesthood: not as speaking down to a crowd, but as being close to the people in front of him. He is a man of deep passion, for God and for his family both, and the people who know him tend to describe those two loves as the center of who he is.

Fr. Tony was born in Minnesota and raised in Bismarck, North Dakota, the youngest of six children. He studied business at Minnesota State University before the priesthood called him, and his seminary years even took him to Jerusalem for a year of Scripture and archaeology, a season that left him with a lasting love for the Holy Land. He moved to Florida in 1996, entered the seminary for the Diocese of Orlando, and was ordained in 2007. He spent roughly a decade at Holy Name of Jesus in Indialantic, returned home to North Dakota for a few years, and eventually came to St. Luke Catholic Church in Barefoot Bay, where he now serves as pastor.

Away from the altar, Fr. Tony is happiest outdoors with a rod or a rifle in hand, a passionate hunter and fisherman who carries a bit of the North Dakota country he grew up in. He has led pilgrimages to the Holy Land and hopes to lead more when the time is right, still drawn to the places he first walked as a young seminarian, and glad, wherever he is, to be the same social, outgoing man his parish is happy to have.

Father Gilbert Medina is not the kind of priest who tells people what they want to hear. He will not soften his message just to be liked, and his homilies have a way of staying with people, honest enough to leave them questioning how they have been living, sometimes moved to tears simply because they knew every word was true. Those who know him describe him not just as their pastor, but as a vibrant and deeply spiritual man, plainspoken and God-fearing, who does not bend under pressure. For all that directness, there is nothing cold about him, and the parish he leads reflects it, a warm and welcoming place where visitors say everyone is kind and newcomers feel at home.

He was the seventh of twelve children, born in Weslaco, Texas, and raised on a Michigan farm, and he credits his parents as the backbone of his vocation. Their steady faithfulness to the Church was what first pointed him toward the priesthood, though the road there was anything but short. He studied Russian and moved to Moscow to teach English, and it was in a Catholic church there that he committed his life to following the will of God. He joined the Franciscan friars and spent time in seminary in the Holy Land before a desire to serve closer to his family drew him back to Florida, where he finished his formation and was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 2007.

Anyone who spends time with him soon meets a man who commits fully to what he believes. His faith once sent him on the Camino de Santiago, a five-hundred-mile pilgrimage he walked to give thanks for the gift of the priesthood and to keep a promise he had made to God. That same wholeheartedness shows in his love of history. He is an avid history buff and a member of the Historical Society of St. Augustine, and in 2013, for the five-hundredth anniversary of Florida's discovery, he dressed in a helmet and breastplate to portray the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon before a crowd in St. Augustine. He has carried that care for the past into his parishes, once setting aside a room to preserve a church's history and helping build a small museum to keep its story alive.

For Father Medina, history has never been only about the past. What he tells his parishioners about it reveals as much of the man as any homily. "If we know our history," he once wrote to them, "it forms and frames who we are as a person, a human being, and we carry that into the future.

Father Karl Bergin has a way of making people feel at ease. Warm, upbeat, and honest, he has carried that steadiness through more than two decades of ministry, and it is the reason those who know him describe him not just by his titles or his credentials, but by the way he meets people right where they are.

What first drew him toward America was not a parish but a campus. He grew up in Central Ireland, in a family with its own business, in a country where, as he once said, people "very much take our faith for granted." A season of study in Miami in the late 1980s introduced him to the opposite: young people genuinely excited to be Catholic, some of them drawn toward converting, in a lively, multi-ethnic city he took to right away. "It was something I loved," he said. He went back to Ireland and worked for a few years, but he kept returning, until it was clear where he belonged. He was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 2004 and later became an American citizen, making his home for good in the country that had welcomed him.

Much of his ministry since has come back to children and the schools that form them. He knows the children by name, and he once helped keep a struggling school alive on the conviction that no child should ever be turned away for lack of money. There is a creative, celebratory streak in how he leads, too, the kind of pastor who finds fresh ways to walk a parish through Lent and makes sure the people in his pews feel seen. The work has earned him quiet national recognition, but what people remember is the way he does it.

Today he shepherds the Catholic Church of the Epiphany in Port Orange, and he has found his way back to a college campus as the Catholic chaplain at nearby Embry-Riddle, among the same kind of eager young people who first drew him across the Atlantic. For someone who came to America on an invitation and stayed out of conviction, it is a fitting place to have landed. He tends to put it simply: "The Lord has me in the right place."

If you want to meet Father Tom Barrett, you do not have to look very hard. Most weekends he is standing at the main door of the church before and after Mass, greeting people on their way in and out, the kind of pastor who would rather meet you himself than wait to be found.

That instinct to be present runs through his whole life as a priest, and it may be the clearest thing about him. Father Tom grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, with three sisters, and decades in Florida have not talked him out of where he is from. He still keeps faith with his New England teams, and he is not shy about it. What he asks of the parish, he seems to ask of himself first: that people actually show up for one another. He likes to call St. Brendan a family, and he means it less as a description than as an invitation.

His road there ran the long way. He came south to train for the priesthood in the Diocese of Orlando, and he has given it nearly forty years, serving parishes up and down Central Florida and quietly taking on more than his share of diocesan work behind the scenes, sometimes two or three jobs at the same time. He is, in short, the kind of priest you can hand a hard job and count on to carry it. At St. Brendan, what he has built tells you the most about him. He started a St. Vincent de Paul Society and a thrift store that help neighbors with food, a roof, and the bills that pile up when life gets thin.

Off the clock, Tuesday is his day off, and you might well find him making the rounds of what he jokingly calls the "shrines" of Disney. By Sunday afternoon he is usually settled in to watch a NASCAR race, cheering on his favorite cars, or pulling for the Patriots or the Red Sox, depending on the season. There is a nice accident of geography in that. His parish sits right on the ocean in Ormond Beach, the stretch of Florida sand where American speed racing was born more than a century ago, a fitting landing spot for a priest who loves a fast car. Ask him about any of it, and he stays easy to find, right where he has been for more than a decade, at the door, glad you came.

Father Justin Vakko likes to say that God calls the weak in order to shame the strong, and he counts himself among them. It is a humble way to describe thirty years of priesthood, but it fits a man whose first response to almost any question about his life is thankfulness. "I look at my life and God has always been gracious," he once said. "I can never complain."

That same humility shapes how he sees the priesthood itself. He believes a priest is never really hidden, that his presence speaks before he does. "As a priest, we never go unnoticed," he said. "What we believe, what we stand for, and who we represent is always visible." So he holds on to his faith and, in his own words, holds it out to others. Among the greatest blessings of that vocation, he counts the chance to sit with people and counsel them through the hard seasons of their lives, something he receives as surely as he gives it.

That faith took root early. He grew up in Kerala, India, where the Catholic Church was, as he puts it, like a second home. He and his seven brothers and sisters were there daily, praying together and joining in parish life, and when they were not at church they were at school with the Carmelite convent. Surrounded by that kind of faith, he entered a Carmelite monastery at fifteen and, after thirteen years of formation, was ordained in 1998. He came to the Diocese of Orlando in 2006 and served parishes in Winter Haven, Longwood, Orlando, and Ocala before arriving at Prince of Peace, where he became pastor in 2021. In 2023, on the silver anniversary of his ordination, he was incardinated into the diocese by Bishop John Noonan.

He has poured himself into the parish ever since. Prince of Peace is a big and busy place, some two thousand families, with a food pantry that logged more than ten thousand visits last year and a thrift store that keeps it running. He looks after that community closely, and he has not hesitated to speak up for it, standing before the county council to defend an entrance his older parishioners depend on. Away from the work of the parish, he keeps life simple, making time for volleyball, basketball, and a little bowling. But ask him what these years have given him, and he returns to where he always does. "I'm always thankful for my vocation," he said. "I'm very grateful for this great life God has given me.

Father John Tizio is the kind of priest a parish holds onto. He has a way of becoming part of a place so completely that he is missed long after he is gone, the kind of pastor whose leaving makes children cry and sends grown parishioners asking, years later, when he might come back.

It was never the grand gestures that won people over. He had a little pug that walked the parish school hallway at his side, and he was the priest who blessed the family pets. When he preached, he liked to step out from behind the pulpit and speak from the front of the altar, often with a prop in hand, so the message landed a little closer.

That warmth is something he came by early, in a big Brooklyn family of eight children. He has always known how to make people feel noticed, and across his priesthood it has shown more in how he treats the person in front of him than in any title he has held. He professed his vows as a Redemptorist in 1979 and was ordained in 1985, and the years since have taken him up and down the East Coast, from Baltimore to Long Island and back.

St. Mary's in Annapolis is the parish he served longest, first as an associate and later as its pastor. One of the largest parishes in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, it is a historic Redemptorist community in the heart of old Annapolis, with two churches, a school, and thousands of parishioners, the kind of full, busy place where he seems most at home.

Through all the moves, one thing holds steady: he simply likes being among people. He would rather stand close to them than speak down at them, part of the crowd rather than above it. It is the kind of thing that stays with a parish, and it is why, wherever he goes, somebody is always hoping he comes back.

For years, Hector Vazquez Saad kept hearing a knock he could not explain away. He had a career, a good one, but the knocking never stopped. "When God calls, he starts banging at your door and he never stops," he has said. "Sometimes we pretend not to listen." Just shy of forty, he stopped pretending.

Warm, joyful, and easy to be around, Fr. Hector has a way of making faith feel like good news rather than a duty. People at St. Clare talk about his heartfelt homilies and the personal way he connects with them, and they describe a parish that feels welcoming and alive, warm and vibrant, more than nine hundred families who have made it feel less like a building and more like a home. Fr. Hector fits right in, and he wants people to feel that too. It is the kind of place, he says, where people come to escape a world that can leave them almost hopeless and walk out recharged. When he wants to describe the joy of it all, he does not reach for anything solemn. He borrows a line from Buzz Lightyear: "To infinity and beyond."

He grew up in Ponce, Puerto Rico, raised by his widowed mother, an ordinary Catholic who went to Sunday Mass and confession without expecting his life to turn on it. For a long time it did not. He worked as an accountant in Orlando, then went back to Puerto Rico to teach school and counsel students, and even hosted a Catholic radio show where he played easy-listening tunes and offered listeners a word of encouragement. But the knock kept coming, and eventually he answered it, entering St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary and being ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 2008.

What drives him now is people, and getting more of them involved in the life of the parish. At St. Clare he has poured himself into faith formation for every age, welcomed a wave of new babies to baptism, kept a food pantry and clothing ministry going for neighbors who need it, and led a renovation that left longtime parishioners in tears when they saw the sanctuary made new again. He is quick to credit the people who did the work and the pastor who came before him, saying he is only reaping seeds someone else planted. That same lightness has carried him beyond his own parish too, serving as a pilgrimage chaplain and celebrating Mass at Fatima and Lourdes, places he never imagined he would stand. Looking back on how far he came, he keeps it simple. He answered God, he has said, because he wanted to be part of the solution, not the problem. "It's a great feeling.