Leo Hodges

Fr. Leo Hodges has spent almost forty years showing up for the people the world would rather forget. It is work he grew up around, and work he has made unmistakably his own.

Steady, warm, and easy to be around, he is the kind of pastor a parish settles into rather than sizes up. Parishioners describe him as loving and relatable, someone whose welcome feels genuine the moment you walk through the door, and the people around St. Andrew tend to say the same thing in different words: that he makes room for everyone. Those who have known him for years describe him not by his title or his years in the pulpit, but by that warmth, a gift for meeting people where they are, and a steadiness he carries into every room he walks into, whether that is a classroom, a prison, or a Sunday Mass. Before any of it, he was an athlete, a hurdler on the Florida State track team who once ran his way to a conference title, and he came to the collar by way of a criminology degree, an unusual road that somehow points straight at the work he would spend his life doing.

That work runs in the family. His father, Clarence Hodges, was one of the so-called "nine old men" who started Kairos Prison Ministry in Florida in 1976, a small effort among friends that grew into an international movement across dozens of states and nine countries. His mother, Christine, worked right alongside him. Both were converts to the faith, and both, as Fr. Leo tells it, carried "compassion for those on the margins of society" and believed the banquet table was "big enough for everyone to sit at." For almost forty years, Fr. Leo has carried that same conviction into prisons himself, for adults and for young people, alongside the retreats and spiritual direction that fill the rest of his ministry. He has said his parents' love for the outcast came out of their own relationship with Christ, the one who "is always for those that no one else is for." It is not hard to see where he got it.

There is more to him than the ministry he inherited. St. Andrew is a diverse, close-knit community on the west side of Orlando, the kind of parish that has been a place of peace for its members for more than thirty years, where Mass is celebrated in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole beneath tall stained-glass windows and the stated hope is simply that everyone, whoever they are, finds a warm welcome and a sense of belonging. It suits him. He is the kind of pastor who writes his own weekly note to parishioners in both English and Spanish, keeps the sick in the community in his prayers, and is as quick to point people toward caring for "the least of these" as toward anything else. He leads the parish and its school, serves as the Central Deanery's Vicar Forane, and helped launch a new Catholic school in the city. But the through-line is simpler than any of those roles. It is the same one his parents lived: make sure the people on the outside know there is a place for them at the table.