Changes are taking place in the mountains, with one priest leaving and another taking his place.
Fr. Ryan O’Neill is leaving Annunciation Heights camp near Allenspark and is moving to St. Francis of Assisi parish in Longmont early in May. His replacement is Fr. Jacob Machado currently of St. Stephen parish in Glenwood Springs.
Machado will take over as the chaplain for Camp St. Malo/Annunciation Heights and will begin offering weekend masses at St. Catherine of Siena Chapel on Saturdays at 9 a.m. and Sundays at 10 a.m.
“I am experiencing both excitement and grief at the thought of leaving,” said O’Neill who has served at Annunciation Heights for nearly four years.
O’Neill graduated from high school in Loveland and was ordained in 2012 after attending St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver. Interestingly, he recruited Machado, who was ordained two years ago.
“I was his recruiter and now he is replacing me,” said O’Neill whose new pastoral life will shift from dealing with the camp, its visitors, missionaries, and counselors, to a parish ministry where the emphasis will be on education about the sacraments and sacramental preparation.
In October 2025, the 152-acre property – Camp St. Malo, which includes St. Catherine’s and the nearby Annunciation Heights camp – was designated an archdiocesan shrine by the former Archbishop of Denver Samuel J. Aquila.
Annunciation Heights is two miles north of Camp St. Malo on Highway 7.
Camp St. Malo was founded as a Catholic youth camp in the archdiocese of Denver in 1920. From 1920 to the early 1980s, it functioned as a youth camp. In 1984, the camp closed in order to build a retreat center.
Though Camp St. Malo and the Chapel on the Rock and Tahosa Coffee Shop still host thousands of tourists annually, the youth camp lives on in Annunciation Heights, a continuation of the mission begun over a century ago. The priest assigned to Annunciation Heights lives at the camp full-time.
If you missed saying goodbye to O’Neill, don’t worry. He will return to Annunciation Heights for Family Camp, June 28-July 1, as the keynote speaker.
His replacement, Machado, will be settling into a new life, one that he was happy to accept.
“I am excited to be moving to serve Annunciation Heights and the Shrine,” he said. “I attended several retreats at the old Camp St. Malo and love St. Catherine Chapel on the Rock. I am excited to serve the year-round staff, to work in formation with the young adult missionaries, and to teach and lead the middle- and high school students who will attend the camp.”
Since its designation as a shrine, St. Catherine’s can now offer regular Sunday mass, keep sacramental records of baptisms, confirmations, and marriages, and issue its own sacramental certificates.
A shrine is a church or other sacred place that is approved by the local bishop and visited by the faithful as pilgrims for prayer, worship, devotion, evangelization, and reconciliation.
Camp St. Malo and Annunciation Heights have long operated as one ministry, sharing staff, leadership, volunteers, and pastoral care. The archbishop’s decree formally united the two ministries under the banner of To the Heights Catholic Camps and Retreat Centers.
“I love this state and I especially love the mountains,” said Machado, who was born and raised in Denver. “I am grateful God has called me to serve in this wonderful place I have been privileged to call home my whole life.
“As a diocesan priest, I have promised to be obedient to the Archbishop of Denver, and I am ready to go wherever he sends me in the archdiocese,” Machado added. “We (priests) strive for a disposition of receptivity and responsibility.
“If you choose to want the assignment you are given, you will always receive the assignment you want,” he said.
Machado says he learned about community at St. Stephen Church, his first assignment as a priest.
“More than anything, I learned at St. Stephen that the priest truly is not his own. None of us is an individual isolated from the community. We live with and for one another in Christian charity, showing forth the love of God.”
And at the shrine, nestled at the base of Longs Peak, he will celebrate community in a wild landscape so beautiful that thousands of people visit it annually.
“Beauty speaks to the soul, and tells us the story of the artist,” Machado said. “God’s creation draws us to wonder and points us back to the creator. There is something inside of us as humans that hungers for beauty and wants to co-create beautiful things. This is why we seek wild and beautiful places and climb mountains, this is why we build beautiful churches, make beautiful music, and create beautiful images.
“At the Shrine of St. Catherine Chapel on the Rock we experience these two artistic impulses at the same time. We retreat to a beautiful natural place, nestled in the mountains, which sings the glory of God, and we enter a beautiful church built of stone to reflect God’s own creation.
“The mountain summit is a meeting place of earth and sky, the Church is also a summit, the meeting place of earth and heaven. There is something in us that wants to ascend to the heights, to this meeting place of the summit. It is no wonder that people come from all over to experience the beauty of the shrine and its surrounding landscape.
“I hope to meet many people and share with them awe and wonder at what God has done, is doing and will do in all our lives,” he said.