Father George comes to All Saints

All Saints Catholic Church will have a new parochial administrator starting June 29 when Rev. Jorge Ramírez succeeds Rev. Daniel Ruiz.

Ruiz was just four years into his service in Lansing when Bishop Salvatore Matano of the Diocese of Rochester asked him to take over three Rochester churches within the Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini Parish: Our Lady of the Americas Church, Church of the Annunciation and Saint Michael’s Church. Ruiz will say his last masses at All Saints, Holy Cross in Dryden and St. Anthony’s in Groton on June 19 and 20.

“Thank you for being patient with me and my many limitations and helping me learn how to be a pastor,” Ruiz said in his farewell message to his parishes. “The invitation to this transition comes at great cost. I have loved you, and leaving you will not be easy. God continues to work to complete in me the work he began and, in the loving care of the good shepherd for me, is calling me to new horizons and growth.”

Father George, as Ramírez likes to be known, comes to All Saints from the four churches of the Our Lady of the Lakes Catholic Community in Penn Yan where he served as Parochial Vicar under Rev. Leo Reinhardt.

Father George and Ruiz were born in the same year — 1981 — and in the same country — Columbia. But where Ruiz’s family was based in the rural town of San Felix, Father George grew up among the 4 million people of Medellin.

“There is a lot of noise — cars and traffic and people,” Father George said. “When I first moved to the country, it was very peaceful, very calm and very boring in the beginning. Nothing was happening. Now, I enjoy the peace and calm. Now, my hometown is too noisy for me.”

Father George attended Catholic schools after first grade, and he was drawn to the priesthood from his childhood.

“I was working in my home parish as an altar server and little by little became more involved in different activities to help the priest,” Father George said. “I could see the priest working in the liturgy, in helping people and feeding the poor.”

Guerilla warfare among government forces, left-wing militias and right-wing paramilitaries escalated in Columbia as Father George was growing up in the 1990s.

“I worked in a school, and the priest there helped educate the children with the requirement that they needed to give him their guns, to take back the guns,” he said. “Little by little, the children didn’t care about the guns anymore. Watching this priest, I started to feel like I would like to do that. So, I entered the minor seminary, like a high school with a focus on vocations, and they helped me with spiritual guidance.”

Father George’s father died in 2003, so he had to leave the seminary. He continued his studies in philosophy, earning a master’s degree with the goal of becoming a school principal. Father George began working as a teacher, following a program to bring philosophy to children.

“I enjoyed it very much,” he said. “I was teaching students from kindergarten to college.”

In 2009, Father Jim Schwartz of the Diocese of Rochester invited him to come to the United States to complete his studies in theology and become a priest. He finished his work at Saint Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore and was ordained June 4, 2016. His first posting was as Parochial Vicar at Holy Cross in Charlotte

“There are two things in particular that I love about being a priest,” Father George said. “I love the celebration of the Eucharist and I think that the Sacrament of Reconciliation is one of the most beautiful things that the Lord Jesus gave us. I have confessed people who haven’t come to church in 20 years. People cry, and I cry. It’s very emotional to be with people and help them find the way.”

Father George is also musical. He plays the flute, keyboards and guitar and sang in the choir in seminary. He follows soccer but prefers basketball, especially Michael Jordan, and he misses playing basketball and is working on improving his physical condition.

“I love to walk the different trails in the woods and to the waterfalls,” he said.

Indoors, he is a gamer, playing video games on the PS4 system and using the Oculus virtual reality platform. And Father George is a techie, often called to service the IT systems at his parishes.

You can learn more about him on his Facebook page and Instagram and on his YouTube channel, Padrejorge (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI6pEHhRRlSl44fQci5hGmw/featured).

“I post every Saturday a reflection on Sunday’s Gospel,” he said.