David Vargas

When Father David Vargas arrives somewhere new, he is in no hurry to change it. At his last parish he spent close to a year simply getting to know the people before he did anything at all, watching, listening, and, in his own words, discovering the beauty of the ones he had been sent to serve. Only then did he begin.

That patience says most of what you need to know about him. Father David is a listener before he is a leader, more inclined to sit down over coffee and pray about an idea than to rush a decision. He is the first to say the work is not about him, unafraid to admit when he does not know how to do something, and happy to hand a task to whoever does. Fluent in Spanish, English, and Italian, he has a way of making room for whoever is in front of him. People who have worked beside him tend to remember him not for his title or his years in ministry but for something harder to measure: the way he makes ordinary people believe they can actually do something for one another.

Ordained in Puerto Rico in 2002 through the order of Saint Augustine, he joined the Diocese of Orlando in 2019 and has spent his years in Florida among people the wider world tends to overlook. At Holy Spirit in Lake Wales, a rural, largely retirement community he once called the last church of the diocese, he found a small parish food pantry that ran on whatever neighbors dropped off on Fridays. He saw in it the start of something much larger. Working hand in hand with Catholic Charities and a devoted crowd of volunteers, he helped it grow into far more than food: help for immigrants and lonely seniors, English classes for newcomers and Spanish classes for the neighbors who wanted to meet them halfway, care for the sick and the imprisoned. He refuses to take the credit. "It's by the grace of the Lord," he likes to say, "because it's impossible."

Slowing down does not come naturally to him, and he is fine with that. "I'm always busy. I never stop," he says, and then, almost cheerfully, explains why: "people don't allow me to stop." In the summer of 2025 he began again, this time as administrator of Saint Paul Catholic Church in Leesburg, a new community full of names he has yet to learn. If the pattern holds, he will start the way he always does. He will listen first. Because for Father David, it was never really about the programs or the titles. It was about the person sitting across from him, and what becomes possible once someone finally pulls up a chair, pours the coffee, and asks how they can help.