Philip Egitto

Fr. Phil Egitto is the kind of priest who will not let you sit quietly in the pew and slip out the side door. He wants to know your name, and if he does not, he already knows you are visiting.

Warm, funny, and completely direct about what he believes, Fr. Phil has carried that mix through more than three decades at one parish, and it is the reason people describe him not by his title but by how his church feels. One visitor said a single Mass renewed her faith and made her wish her home parish felt the same. Another put it plainly: he is kind, empathetic, and energetic, but most of all, he walks the walk. He would tell you it is not really about him. The parish has a motto he repeats often, loving the God we cannot see by loving the neighbor we can, and he means the second half as an instruction, not a sentiment. Love, in his telling, is not a gushy feeling. It is willing the good of the other and then actually doing something about it.

He came to the priesthood the long way. A Brooklyn kid from a close Italian family, the son of a dentist who treated his work as ministry, he went off to the University of Florida as a pre-med student, switched to psychology, and spent years working with forensic mental-health patients before a college retreat first stirred the idea that would not leave him. He was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in the late 1980s, served in South Orlando and Titusville, and arrived at Our Lady of Lourdes around three decades ago, a tenure so long he jokes the diocese simply did not know what to do with him. What he built there is a justice-and-action parish, and he does not soften it. He leads a busload of parishioners to Florida State Prison for every execution, praying and ringing a bell in the dark. He organizes his people through an interfaith coalition that has pushed for affordable housing and better mental health care, and he insists there are no volunteers at his church, only people called to serve. Yet for all the causes, what he lights up about is the connecting itself, the bagels and leftover pastries after Mass, the dinner churches in people's homes, the crowd he cannot get to go home once the lights come on. Ask him where he finds the sacred and he does not point to a doctrine. He points to the love his people share, and he says you can feel it the moment you walk through the door.