Thomas Barrett

If you want to meet Father Tom Barrett, you do not have to look very hard. Most weekends he is standing at the main door of the church before and after Mass, greeting people on their way in and out, the kind of pastor who would rather meet you himself than wait to be found.

That instinct to be present runs through his whole life as a priest, and it may be the clearest thing about him. Father Tom grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, with three sisters, and decades in Florida have not talked him out of where he is from. He still keeps faith with his New England teams, and he is not shy about it. What he asks of the parish, he seems to ask of himself first: that people actually show up for one another. He likes to call St. Brendan a family, and he means it less as a description than as an invitation.

His road there ran the long way. He came south to train for the priesthood in the Diocese of Orlando, and he has given it nearly forty years, serving parishes up and down Central Florida and quietly taking on more than his share of diocesan work behind the scenes, sometimes two or three jobs at the same time. He is, in short, the kind of priest you can hand a hard job and count on to carry it. At St. Brendan, what he has built tells you the most about him. He started a St. Vincent de Paul Society and a thrift store that help neighbors with food, a roof, and the bills that pile up when life gets thin.

Off the clock, Tuesday is his day off, and you might well find him making the rounds of what he jokingly calls the "shrines" of Disney. By Sunday afternoon he is usually settled in to watch a NASCAR race, cheering on his favorite cars, or pulling for the Patriots or the Red Sox, depending on the season. There is a nice accident of geography in that. His parish sits right on the ocean in Ormond Beach, the stretch of Florida sand where American speed racing was born more than a century ago, a fitting landing spot for a priest who loves a fast car. Ask him about any of it, and he stays easy to find, right where he has been for more than a decade, at the door, glad you came.