José Luis Menéndez

Fr. José Luis Menéndez is the kind of priest who would rather trust people to do the work than do it for them. For more than three decades in a long-overlooked corner of Miami, that has been his way, believing in people until they start to believe in themselves. "The first thing you have to do," he says, "is believe that they can do it."

He was born in Havana in 1947 and was twelve when his family left as Castro's revolution took hold. What was supposed to be six months away turned into twenty years in Spain, and it was there, on a retreat as a teenager, that he knew he wanted to be a priest. He was ordained in Madrid in 1977 and came to Miami hoping to serve his fellow Cuban exiles.

The Lord, he likes to say, had a sense of humor about that, because Miami handed him just about everyone except Cubans. In 1988 he took over Corpus Christi, a struggling parish in one of the poorest zip codes in the country. Instead of waiting for a scattered neighborhood to come to him, he went out to it, turning one church into six small missions, one for each pocket of the community. He was reaching the edges of the city long before anyone called it that, and he became a voice for those streets too, showing people who had felt powerless that they could speak up and be heard.

Away from the streets and the missions, there is a quieter side of him that loves beauty. Over the years he has gathered one of the largest collections of colonial religious art and historical records in the country, kept in a church-museum he built on the parish grounds. For him it is not a hobby but part of the same calling. He believes beauty and history can reach people in a way a sermon cannot, and that a poor neighborhood surrounded by both slowly stops seeing itself as poor. And still, he waves off the credit for any of it. "What I have done," he says, "is allow people to do it and discover what they can do."