Rev.
Avelino González-Ferrer is a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington. He was
born in Camaguey, Cuba in 1964 and
immigrated to the U.S.
in 1969. He attended St. Mark’s parochial school and Northwestern
Senior High School in Hyattsville, MD.
He graduated from The Catholic University of America in 1989 where he earned a
bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.
He worked as a mechanical engineer from 1989-2001 for the Naval Surface
Warfare Center
in Carderock, MD in the area of underwater acoustics.
In
May 2001, he earned an M.A. in Sacred Theology from the Notre Dame Graduate
School of Christendom College in Alexandria,
VA. After discerning a call to
the priesthood, he entered the seminary in August 2001. He was sent to Seton
Hall University for philosophical studies and then to the Pontifical North
American College in Rome where he earned a bachelor’s in theology and a license
degree in Biblical Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University.
He
was ordained a deacon at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome
in October 2005 by Bishop Donald W. Wuerl (then ordinary of the diocese of Pittsburg), and to the
priesthood on May 27, 2006, by Theodore Cardinal McCarrick. He has served as associate
pastor at St. Michael the Archangel parish in Silver Spring, MD (Summer 2007),
and St. Martin of Tours parish in Gaithersburg, MD (2008-2011). On July 6,
2011, he was appointed pastor of St.
Joseph’s on Capitol Hill by Cardinal Wuerl. Fr. Avelino also currently serves as the
Director of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs for the Archdiocese.
