Yamil Miranda

Father Yamil Miranda has a way of making faith feel like good news you would actually want to hear. Parishioners describe him as a priest who is on fire for God, the kind who spreads the word with laughter and leaves people glad they came.

Kind, funny, and unmistakably at home at the altar, he is the sort of priest people tend to describe not by his title but by the joy he carries, and that joy has roots. He was born in Managua and came to Miami at twelve to join his mother, the youngest of three, and he still calls himself a Little Havana boy. He fell in love with the Church as a kid at St. John Bosco, a parish that reminded him of the one he had left behind in Nicaragua, where he loved serving at the altar and loved the moment the priest lifted the host.

The priesthood, though, was never the plan. As a teenager he walked away from the Church for a couple of years, and by the time he was in college he was set on a career in law, so sure the collar was not for him that he figured, honestly, that priests led a boring life. The calling found him anyway. He likes to say the answer he finally heard came down to two words, follow me, and he has been following ever since.

What he wanted from the beginning was to be close to the people most easily overlooked. Working with the poor, he has said, is something that really brings joy to his heart, and he talks about the rest of ministry with the same plainness. Feed the soul first and the rest takes care of itself. "The first thing is let me save that soul and let me feed that soul," he once said about running a parish. Do that well, he figures, and the money comes on its own.

That instinct to meet people where they are has a way of showing up creatively. When the doors closed during the pandemic, he blessed water through a webcam, sent incense toward the camera, and carried the Eucharist through the streets of Sunrise while a parishioner livestreamed it on an iPhone, sure that if you love the ministry, you will do anything to reach your people. These days that energy lives at All Saints, a bilingual parish that works to make everyone feel at home, with a soup kitchen and a yearly carnival, the kind of place where a Little Havana boy who once loved watching the priest lift the host now gets to lift it himself.