Héctor Antonio Vázquez Saad

For years, Hector Vazquez Saad kept hearing a knock he could not explain away. He had a career, a good one, but the knocking never stopped. "When God calls, he starts banging at your door and he never stops," he has said. "Sometimes we pretend not to listen." Just shy of forty, he stopped pretending.

Warm, joyful, and easy to be around, Fr. Hector has a way of making faith feel like good news rather than a duty. People at St. Clare talk about his heartfelt homilies and the personal way he connects with them, and they describe a parish that feels welcoming and alive, warm and vibrant, more than nine hundred families who have made it feel less like a building and more like a home. Fr. Hector fits right in, and he wants people to feel that too. It is the kind of place, he says, where people come to escape a world that can leave them almost hopeless and walk out recharged. When he wants to describe the joy of it all, he does not reach for anything solemn. He borrows a line from Buzz Lightyear: "To infinity and beyond."

He grew up in Ponce, Puerto Rico, raised by his widowed mother, an ordinary Catholic who went to Sunday Mass and confession without expecting his life to turn on it. For a long time it did not. He worked as an accountant in Orlando, then went back to Puerto Rico to teach school and counsel students, and even hosted a Catholic radio show where he played easy-listening tunes and offered listeners a word of encouragement. But the knock kept coming, and eventually he answered it, entering St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary and being ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 2008.

What drives him now is people, and getting more of them involved in the life of the parish. At St. Clare he has poured himself into faith formation for every age, welcomed a wave of new babies to baptism, kept a food pantry and clothing ministry going for neighbors who need it, and led a renovation that left longtime parishioners in tears when they saw the sanctuary made new again. He is quick to credit the people who did the work and the pastor who came before him, saying he is only reaping seeds someone else planted. That same lightness has carried him beyond his own parish too, serving as a pilgrimage chaplain and celebrating Mass at Fatima and Lourdes, places he never imagined he would stand. Looking back on how far he came, he keeps it simple. He answered God, he has said, because he wanted to be part of the solution, not the problem. "It's a great feeling.