Juan Montoya

Fr. Juan Camilo Montoya has a way of belonging quickly. Wherever he is sent, he takes a genuine interest in the people, and it is rarely long before they feel the same way about him.

He came a long way to get here. He grew up in Medellín, Colombia, one of seven children, and studied theology at the Pontifical Bolivarian University before he was ordained a priest in 2010. The road since has carried him far from home, first across the American Southwest and now to Central Florida, but the thing people tend to notice is not the distance he has traveled. It is the warmth he brings when he arrives.

For years he served the parishes around Las Cruces, New Mexico, among them a small historic adobe mission in the village of Doña Ana. He clearly loved it there. He threw himself into the life of the community and its traditions, presiding over the parish's beloved patronal feast, a local fiesta filled with traditional sacred dance and the old plaza lit for the occasion, and the people loved him back, with support that reached well beyond the village itself.

He came to the Diocese of Orlando in 2023 and did what he has always done, quietly settling in, serving two Lakeland parishes before he was entrusted with St. John Neumann in the summer of 2025. It suits him. St. John Neumann is a warm, family-minded parish on the south side of Lakeland, one that has spent nearly fifty years growing into what it is now, the last twenty of them learning to pray in two languages. It first offered Mass in Spanish in 2007, as more and more Spanish-speaking families found their way in, and today the two languages live side by side, in the Masses, the confessions, the marriage groups, the children lining up for First Communion. A bilingual Colombian priest, at home in both, feels almost made for a place like this.

He preaches to his people in both languages, at ease in the faith of whoever is in front of him. He is still new here, still learning names and faces. But if the places he has already been are any sign, it will not be long before this one feels like his own too.