Scott M. Circe

Fr. Scott Circe calls the hour a person spends at Mass the hour of power. He means it is supposed to carry you through the rest of the week, into the workplace, the school, and the house you go home to. "We've got to live our faith outside the church walls too," he says. It is not an idea he picked up secondhand. He worked in those places himself for years before he ever wore a collar.

Thoughtful and plainspoken, he is easy about the years he took getting there. He describes God as patient with him, patient enough to let him work through what he calls "a lot of the what-ifs in life," and he says it without dressing it up. People who have sat in his pews describe him not just by the offices he has held, but by the smile they mention first, by preaching they grade in superlatives, and by the way a parish keeps claiming him as their own long after he has moved on.

He spent his twenties finding out what else his life could have been. Born in Syracuse and raised in Louisiana, he came to Florida with his family in 1988 and studied television and film production back when Orlando was supposed to become the next Hollywood, working at Nickelodeon Studios and for the Orlando Magic. He had known since he was a boy that God was asking him for something else, and one weekday morning he stayed after Mass at Annunciation in Altamonte Springs and asked the priest how a man goes about entering the seminary. The priesthood has kept sending him back to the places that formed him since, to Annunciation for his first assignment, to his own alma mater to run campus ministry, and into the work of forming other men for a vocation that took him so long to reach himself, before nine years on the Space Coast and now St. Timothy in Lady Lake.

For Fr. Scott, it starts at home. He calls that the domestic church, and he talks about parents and children more than programs, because he believes a faith that is not important to the parents will not be important to their children. So he builds parish life around getting people into the same room, whether that is a picnic in the pavilion after the family Mass, Masses spread across the weekend so hardworking people can find one that fits, or lunch with the pastors of other churches for no reason except to hear how things are going in their communities. He gives the same attention to people at the edges, the hungry, the homeless, and families who cannot find housing they can afford, work he treats as something Christians of every denomination ought to be able to do together. He wrote to his new parish that people come to discover how much God loves them through others, and most of what he does as a pastor is making room for that to happen.