Best Known As Rev. Derk Schudde, Pastor at Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church | Catholic Priest, Pastor, Vocations Advocate.
Who is Derk Schudde?
Rev. Derk Schudde is the Pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Winter Park, Florida, where he provides pastoral leadership, celebrates the sacraments, offers spiritual guidance, and supports parish ministries. He is recognized for viewing the parish as a family, fostering an inclusive and compassionate faith community, encouraging priestly and religious vocations, and participating in diocesan vocation initiatives. He is also known for his pastoral care of parishioners with unique needs, his emphasis on serving families, and his humble, approachable leadership that has earned the admiration of many within his parish community.
Get To Know Father Derk Schudde
Humble, warm, and always smiling, he has spent more than thirty-five years greeting people after Mass with a handshake and preaching homilies his parishioners call personal and enlightening, the kind that seem written for whatever a person happened to walk in carrying that week. People who have sat in his pews tend to describe him not by his title or his years, but by the way he makes them feel welcome.
One young man still remembers what that felt like. Years ago he came to Orlando for college, new to the city and looking for a church, and he found Sts. Peter and Paul. He never forgot his first Mass there, when a younger priest walked out, introduced himself simply as Father Derk, and preached a homily that felt like it had been written for him. For the first time, the new city felt like home. Over the next two years he came to think of Father Derk as the picture of what a good man looks like, and he watched his own faith deepen because of it. The two never really knew each other, but Father Derk left a permanent mark on him, and years later, when the young man learned that the priest he had admired from the pews had become that parish's pastor, he was glad, sure that plenty of others felt exactly the way he did.
That parish is Sts. Peter and Paul in Winter Park, a leafy town just north of Orlando. It is a large and welcoming community, thousands of families strong, gathered in a church that visitors tend to call beautiful the first time they see it. But ask what makes the place feel like home and people rarely point to the architecture. They point to the man at the front of it, a pastor who leads not as an institution to run, but as people to care for.
Lately he talks often about the future of the Church, and his hope that young people, especially young men, will step forward to lead it. He calls his parishioners his family, and speaks about staying close to the joys and sorrows that come with that word. All these years later, that is still where he puts himself: with his people, treating the parish in front of him as his own.
WHO: Derk Schudde | 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.