Parishioners in Terryville knew him as the priest who kept a canvas in the rectory, the one they called the Painting Padre. The Rev. Edward J. Przygocki Jr., a priest of the Missionaries of the Holy Apostles whose ministry reached from Bristol, Connecticut, to Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Vietnam and Indonesia, died September 27, 2026, in the Archdiocese of Hartford. He was 72.

Przygocki was born August 2, 1954, in Bristol, the son of Edward and Jennie (Polomsky) Przygocki Sr., and graduated from Saint Paul Catholic High School in 1972. He entered the Missionaries of the Holy Apostles in 1977 and studied for the priesthood in Rome and Washington, D.C., earning a Master of Divinity degree, according to the Archdiocese of Hartford. He was ordained a deacon on December 8, 1980, in the Peruvian village of Ricardo Palma, and was ordained a priest on October 1, 1981, by Bishop Peter Rosazza in his home parish, Saint Stanislaus Church in Bristol.

His first assignment sent him to Bogota, Colombia, as vice rector of the Holy Apostles Seminary. He served as a hospital chaplain in New Haven, then Bristol, before his order elected him to its General Council in 1985 while in Peru, and he went on to become vicar general of the cathedral in Los Teques, Venezuela, founding the order's first missionary community there, according to his Legacy.com obituary.

In 1996, fifteen years into his priesthood, he took up painting under Nina Connors. He produced nearly 50 works over the years that followed, sold pieces to patrons and galleries to fund scholarships and missions, and won enough recognition to earn the nickname that stuck for the rest of his life.

He returned to Connecticut in 2000, based at St. Casimir's Church in Terryville while assisting parishes across the Archdiocese of Hartford, and in 2002 returned to teach at Saint Paul Catholic High, his alma mater. He also spent more than a decade as an itinerant catechist with the Neocatechumenal Way, evangelizing in New Orleans, Miami, Cleveland, Belize and South America until 2011. In 2005 he founded the Epiphany Center of Art and Culture in Lima, pairing artists and educators to reach at-risk youth, and partnered with fellow Bristol native Nancy Santullo's Rainforest Flow project to bring clean water filtration to indigenous communities near Cusco.

His order returned him to leadership in 2011, electing him to a five-year General Council term in Montreal, from which he helped open new Missionaries of the Holy Apostles communities in Vietnam and Indonesia. In February 2016, Cardinal Stanislaus Rylko named him international chaplain of the Federation of Blind Catholics, and he arranged a Braille edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for Latin America. He came home that year as temporary administrator of Our Lady of Mercy Church in Plainville and was elected Provincial Animator of the Holy Apostles' U.S. and Vietnam province. Holy Apostles College and Seminary later named him its Chancellor at the college's March 2019 board meeting, and he was serving as priest in residence at St. Junipero Serra Parish in South Windsor when he died.

He was preceded in death by his parents and is survived by his four sisters, Lorraine Neff and her husband John, Joan Mantell, Jean Rasulo and Bertha Lemmon, along with nieces, nephews and cousins. His funeral Mass was celebrated October 3, 2026, at Saint Stanislaus Church in Bristol, the parish where he had been ordained forty-five years earlier, with burial in St. Joseph Cemetery.

Przygocki's ministry never settled into one shape. He was, across a single lifetime, a seminary rector, a hospital chaplain, a vicar general, a Vatican-named chaplain to the blind, a college chancellor and a working painter who signed his canvases with the same hand that raised the host at Mass. The Braille catechisms he arranged still reach readers who cannot see the page, and the water filters he helped bring to villages near Cusco still run. In Terryville, where he kept painting between assignments abroad, the nickname his parishioners gave him, the Painting Padre, outlasted every title his order ever gave him.