Best Known As Father Charles Viviano, Pastor of Corpus Christi Catholic Church, Celebration, Florida.
Who is Charles Viviano?
Father Charles Viviano is best known as the founding pastor of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Parish in Lake Nona, Orlando, where he established a new Catholic community in 2019 and helped it grow into a thriving parish of nearly 700 registered families. He is also known for his energetic pastoral leadership, dedication to building strong parish communities, use of technology and social media in ministry, and his lifelong commitment to serving others that began when he felt called to the priesthood in fifth grade.
Get To Know Father Charles Viviano
Father Charles Viviano has always had a knack for meeting people where they are, whether that is in a pew on Sunday or through a screen the rest of the week. He will use whatever is at hand, a good story, a song on the radio, the parish website, once even a spot on national television, if it helps open a door back to God.
That instinct showed up early. He grew up in Daytona Beach, a fifth grader at Our Lady of Lourdes when he first felt the pull toward the priesthood, and even then he was already the kind of kid who went looking for the people a parish can miss, the homebound, the sick, the ones who could not see for themselves. That instinct never really changed shape. Years later it is why he is so at ease with a camera or a parish website, why he once even turned up on national television, and why he lights up talking about technology, not for its own sake, but because he sees it as one more way to be, as he puts it, personal with everyone.
More than anything, though, Father Charles is a builder. Give him a new parish and he will grow it, give him a school cafeteria and he will fill it. That is more or less the story of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini in Lake Nona, which he started from nothing in 2019 and watched grow into a parish of hundreds, counting the blessings out loud the whole way. Wherever he has landed he has had the same gift for making a parish feel less like an institution and more like a family. This year he carries all of it to Corpus Christi in Celebration.
For all the websites and the television cameras, what comes through most is his optimism. He has a way of seeing doors where other people see walls, and growth where other people see a school cafeteria on a Saturday night. When he talks about his parish, the note he keeps landing on is gratitude. Even at his twenty-fifth anniversary, asked to sum up the priesthood, he described it as still fresh, alive, connected, and present. Connected. For a man who has spent his life finding new ways to reach people, it is the right word to keep. The Holy Spirit, as he once put it, is alive and well.
WHO: Charles Viviano | WHOist: John Mar Turbanada | 28th August 2026 | Source: Research | Sponsor: GTK ME | Known & Remembered | Verified by: Charles J de Guara
The information presented reflects what was known and inferred at the time of this writing.