José Bautista

Father José Bautista is the kind of priest who leads people toward the quiet center of the faith and gives them a reason to stay there.

When he arrived at St. Isaac Jogues in the summer of 2021, the adoration chapel was still closed from the pandemic, and he found parishioners kneeling outside anyway, peering through the window just to be near the Blessed Sacrament. For a priest who believes the Eucharist is everything, that was all he needed to see. Warm and deeply spiritual, Father José has spent more than thirty years in the priesthood, and it is the reason the people who have known him describe him not just by his title or his training in canon law, but by the way he leads, the way he teaches, and the heart he brings to the Sacrament of Marriage.

For Father José, that chapel is not a program but the heart of the matter. He speaks about the Eucharist the way he lives it, as a relationship. "Some saints have told us He is waiting there for us to let ourselves be loved by Him, and to love Him back," he says. Under his care the chapel now offers Adoration seventy-two hours a week, and he hopes to grow it toward Perpetual Adoration, around the clock, so the Blessed Sacrament is never left alone. It has become one of the gathering places of parish life, where people come to sit with the Lord and, often, with one another. The same devotion runs through his love of the Blessed Mother, seen in the October rosary campaign he once led that gathered more than fifteen hundred rosaries offered to Our Lady.

He carries all of this with the warmth of where he comes from. He came to Central Florida from Colombia, and it still shows, in how he celebrates Mass and gathers his people before dawn in Advent to sing. After these years together, they talk about him the way you talk about family, a shepherd they are grateful for, an example they try to follow, a priest who, as one of them put it, fills the heart with joy.