Karl N. Bergin

Father Karl Bergin has a way of making people feel at ease. Warm, upbeat, and honest, he has carried that steadiness through more than two decades of ministry, and it is the reason those who know him describe him not just by his titles or his credentials, but by the way he meets people right where they are.

What first drew him toward America was not a parish but a campus. He grew up in Central Ireland, in a family with its own business, in a country where, as he once said, people "very much take our faith for granted." A season of study in Miami in the late 1980s introduced him to the opposite: young people genuinely excited to be Catholic, some of them drawn toward converting, in a lively, multi-ethnic city he took to right away. "It was something I loved," he said. He went back to Ireland and worked for a few years, but he kept returning, until it was clear where he belonged. He was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 2004 and later became an American citizen, making his home for good in the country that had welcomed him.

Much of his ministry since has come back to children and the schools that form them. He knows the children by name, and he once helped keep a struggling school alive on the conviction that no child should ever be turned away for lack of money. There is a creative, celebratory streak in how he leads, too, the kind of pastor who finds fresh ways to walk a parish through Lent and makes sure the people in his pews feel seen. The work has earned him quiet national recognition, but what people remember is the way he does it.

Today he shepherds the Catholic Church of the Epiphany in Port Orange, and he has found his way back to a college campus as the Catholic chaplain at nearby Embry-Riddle, among the same kind of eager young people who first drew him across the Atlantic. For someone who came to America on an invitation and stayed out of conviction, it is a fitting place to have landed. He tends to put it simply: "The Lord has me in the right place."