Gilbert Medina

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.