Roving Priests Attend to Spanish Mass needs
The above headline appeared in LI Newsday…Orlando CardonaCM is one of two Spanish-speaking Catholic priests whose assignments take them from parish to parish on the East End (of Long Island), from Montauk on the South Fork to Greenport on the North Fork. Along with the Rev. Jaime Gonzalez, CM he travels from their home in Southampton each week, greeting hundreds of mostly Latino congregants.”We feel a bit limited,” said Cardona, who arrived on Long Island from his native Colombia six years ago. “It would be too hard to serve all the churches because of the hours that overlap and because of the distance [between churches].”
Cardona and Gonzalez are Vincentian priests, a brotherhood founded by St. Vincent de Paul in the 1600s. Typically, they both drive up to 38 miles each way from Southampton, rotating each Sunday among seven parishes in Greenport, Riverhead, Hampton Bays, Southampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton and Montauk, often to standing-room-only crowds.