José Muñoz

Fr. Jose Muñoz became a priest because he wanted to be happy. At seventeen, he had drifted from the Church until he met a priest so plainly happy that he wanted that same happiness for himself.

That happiness never really left him. He greets each new parish the same way, glad to be there and warm about the people and parish he calls beautiful and wonderful. Those who spent years around him remember him not just as their pastor but as a friend, someone who showed up for its charities and made himself part of the place. His story began a long way from here, in Ventaquemada, a small town in Colombia where everyone he knew was Catholic and he grew up the youngest after three older sisters, raised by his parents Patrocinio and Florentina.

Faith was all around him there, but it did not really take hold until a day he can still name. On December 15, 1985, he went to a novena Mass, heard a homily he never forgot, and became friends with the priest who gave it. He started going along on the rounds, to the sick and to Masses out in the countryside, and six months later he told the man he wanted to do the same with his life. The road from there was long. He studied in Colombia, came to the Diocese of Orlando in the early nineties, and was ordained in 1996, a moment he still describes in physical terms, lying prostrate on the floor and feeling his whole life change as the bishop laid hands on him. In the decades since, he has counted it a grace to walk with people through their hardest hours, including his own parents and one of his sisters, each of whom he anointed and whose funerals he celebrated himself. He has called that an honor, pain and all.

There is a lighter side to him too. He led St. Isaac Jogues in Orlando for sixteen years, and for much of that time he played on the parish's Knights of Columbus golf team, where he and his teammates won the tournament, or came close, almost every year. He had played in an amateur soccer league back in Colombia, and the competitive streak never quite left him. He leads Holy Redeemer in Kissimmee now, a busy bilingual parish with Masses in English and Spanish, a food pantry, a youth ministry, and a chapel kept for adoration, and he welcomes newcomers there the way he always has, hoping they feel the love of God and a little of the peace of the place. What he loves about the work is simple, and he says it plainly: he likes being with people at the biggest moments of their lives, the baptisms, the weddings, the quiet of the confessional. He enjoys walking with people in their faith.