Krzysztof Bugno

Father Chris Bugno has a way of leaving people a little better than he found them.

Warm, hard-working, and quick to laugh, he is the kind of priest who would rather you just call him Father Chris, and the kind his parishioners talk about not as a distant figure at the altar but as one of their own. He has a soft spot for young people, too. At his first Mass in a new parish he waved the children up to sit around the altar while he preached, and when the parish youth once challenged him to a soccer match, he was happy to admit afterward that the priesthood had been the better career choice.

That warmth was shaped a long way from Florida. Father Chris is a highlander from the Tatra Mountains of southern Poland, born in 1959 in the same corner of the country, and under the same communist shadow, as another mountain son the world would come to know as Pope John Paul II. As a teenager he was drawn into a Catholic youth movement the future pope helped inspire, and he served as his altar boy more than once. Father Chris still calls him his mentor and role model, the example of the kind of priest he hoped to become.

He became that priest with the Salvatorians, ordained in 1985, and has spent his life since going where he was sent, from parishes across Poland to others in New Jersey, New York, and Indiana, and seven years in the L'Arche communities of Europe, sharing daily life with people who have disabilities. He came to St. Teresa of Avila in Titusville in 2009 and has been its pastor ever since, bringing the devotions closest to his heart and a love of celebrating the many cultures in his pews. He is also, quietly, the man who once pulled a drowning friend from the surf at a nearby beach and, untrained in CPR, believed it was God who gave him the strength to bring him back.

For all the miles he has traveled, a part of Father Chris never left the mountains. Ask about his life beyond the parish and he will tell you his favorite sport is skiing, his hobbies are hiking and rollerblading, and his real passions are geography and history. Florida's flat coastline is a long way from the peaks he grew up on, but the people who call him their shepherd, their friend, and their family in faith will tell you he brought the warmth of home with him.