Esaú Nel García

Fr. Esaú García likes to say that he and everyone who works beside him are only the little donkeys. The Lord does all the real work.

He is Colombian, and he was still young when he entered religious life as a Passionist. His studies in theology later took him to Rome, where he was ordained by Pope John Paul II. He taught for a few years back home in Colombia, then came to the Diocese of Orlando in the 1990s and has been pastor of Holy Cross for more than two decades. He jokes that God pulled him away from finishing a doctorate to give him a different one, the kind you earn leading a parish of four thousand families. "I barely have time to eat," he says, and yet he calls those years wonderful.

At heart, he is a teacher. Ask him to sum up the faith and he will boil it down to three words his parishioners know by heart: creation, redemption, and sanctification. He has a way of making the Eucharist feel like the center of everything. "It is not a thing," he tells them. "It is His body, His blood, His soul, His divinity, the mystery of love here present." He is also the kind of pastor people gather around. More than a thousand once packed the parish parking lot for a single night of prayer, and when a family left to serve as missionaries, he blessed them and sent them off with a line to carry: God "does not call the qualified, but qualifies the called."

What changed him most, though, came quietly. Years ago, a seminarian doing a year in his parish spent his afternoons in the chapel with a small blue book, the writings of Luisa Piccarreta on living in the Divine Will. Fr. García asked what it was, borrowed it, and started reading that night. He could not stop. He still describes it like falling in love, a clear before and after in his life. He is just as open about his own failings, and about the mercy that drew him back.

For all his learning, that is the man people meet. Someone who opens a gathering by reminding everyone that God is multilingual, and who counts himself among the little donkeys. After decades as a priest, he still lets a new idea surprise him, still turns it over before he trusts it, and will still read straight through the night when something takes hold of him.