Matias Hualpa

Fr. Matias Hualpa never planned to be a priest. For most of his life he was an engineer who fully expected to marry and raise a family, and the calling, when it came, caught him completely by surprise. He was, by his own account, a Sunday Catholic, and the first Catholic school he ever walked into was the seminary. The whole turn, he says, came through the Blessed Mother.

Matias was born in San Juan, Argentina, and spent his early career in information systems, including years at IBM and American Express, the job that eventually brought him to South Florida in 2003. Back in Buenos Aires, a young adult group had drawn him deeper into the faith through the Schoenstatt Movement, a Marian devotion whose spirituality he loved, and he kept helping with youth groups once he settled in Miami. It was on a Holy Week trip to a Schoenstatt shrine in Texas that a priest first asked him if he had ever thought about the priesthood. He said no, but the question stayed with him until he finally said yes. He entered the seminary in 2007, was ordained for the Archdiocese of Miami in 2014, and before arriving at Blessed Trinity he spent years at the seminary helping to form the next generation of priests.

In 2023 he was installed as pastor of Blessed Trinity, a small, old community in Virginia Gardens that people once called the open air parish, back in the days when Mass was celebrated under a tent. He has taken to it with real warmth. He carries the Blessed Sacrament through the neighborhood streets on Corpus Christi, throws himself into the annual parish festival, and gives his time to healing ministry and to speaking on behalf of life. But mostly he just likes his people. As he put it before one festival, it is about "a community of people who love to be together," gathered to unwrap the gift of Jesus Christ in each of them. For a man who once had no plans to be a priest at all, it is a fitting place to have landed.