Tomas Hurtado

Fr. Tomás Hurtado is the kind of priest people call a blessing, and they tend to mean it plainly. On the day he was installed at his last parish, he stood with his hand over his heart and a wide smile, and lifted the keys of the church up toward God. It is a fair picture of the man.

Warm, humble, and steady, Fr. Tomás has carried those qualities through two decades of ministry in the Diocese of Orlando, and wherever he is sent, he brings peace, love, and a little light with him. He is Cuban, a native of Santa Clara, and he carries that heritage with pride.

His path in Central Florida has a way of circling back on itself. He began his priesthood in 2005 as an associate at St. Catherine of Siena, and after twenty years of serving communities around Orlando, his bishop asked him to come home to that same parish, this time as its pastor. The sense of belonging runs deep. Every year he gathers his fellow Cubans for the Mass of Our Lady of Charity, the patroness of Cuba, a day he calls not only an honor but a joy. "There we gather, all those who have come in exile," he has said. "There we unite to remember and to celebrate that charity unites us and, in the love of Christ we are one people."

What moves him most is the Eucharist. When he finally brought a traveling exhibit of eucharistic miracles to the church, one assembled by Carlo Acutis, the Italian teenager who has since become the Church's first millennial saint, he called it a dream that had waited years to come true, a chance for people to stand closer to what he believes is the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine. Yet for all that devotion, Fr. Tomás keeps returning to something simpler. A parish, to him, is not only the house of God. It is a home, and the people in it are family. "Together," he tells them, "we will move forward, guided and renewed by the Spirit of God."