WHO We Got To Know in July 2026

Sit in a pew at All Souls Catholic Church on any given Sunday and you will likely hear Fr. Jeremiah Payne weave Frodo Baggins into a sermon, drop a reference to "Breaking Bad," or tell a story from his own life that has the whole church laughing before it has them thinking. Parishioners describe his preaching as engaging and inspiring, the kind that makes faith feel alive and relevant, and the kind that has, on more than one occasion, earned something rare during a Catholic Mass: applause. Fr. Jeremiah hails from Forestville, New York, near Buffalo, where he grew up on a grape farm.

He was not raised in any religion, and after a turbulent stretch following the death of his grandparents, he surrendered his life to Jesus Christ on his own as a teenager. He found a home in a local Pentecostal community and was soon preaching fire and brimstone, fully convinced that the Catholic Church had perverted Christianity. But when his pastor asked him to teach a class on the early church, his own research led him somewhere he never expected. Only one group of people came close to matching what he found in the ancient sources: the Catholics. He came home to the Church in 1998, studied at Franciscan University of Steubenville and St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary, and was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 2007. He has since served in parishes across Central Florida, studied and taught dogmatic theology in Rome, and arrived at All Souls in Sanford after six years as pastor of St. Joseph's in Palm Bay.

His interests read like they belong to several different people at once. He flies vintage World War II biplanes (though a cornea condition has grounded him for now), drives a golf cart he named Shadowfax after Gandalf's horse in "The Lord of the Rings," reads Stephen King, roots for the Buffalo Bills and Notre Dame, and carries what he calls a healthy dose of eighties nostalgia. He once arrived at a parishioner's home for dinner to find candles lit, Gregorian chants playing, and nothing but water to drink. "And I'm like, 'Man, this is great, but where's Led Zeppelin?'" he said. For Fr. Jeremiah, that story says everything about what he wants people to see in a priest: not a saint on a pedestal, but an ordinary man with the same dreams, the same hopes, the same pain, and the same hobbies as everyone else, who met a person named Jesus of Nazareth and whose life was changed. He speaks openly about the longing he once felt for marriage and family, and about the spiritual fatherhood he found instead, giving birth to children in baptism, holding their hands as they marry the loves of their lives, and holding them again as they step from this life into the next.

Fr. Josh Swallows has a way of making everyone around him feel at ease. He is warm, approachable, and far more likely to ask about your day than talk about himself. Brother Sam Gunn, ministry director at UCF's Catholic Campus Ministry, once called him "the modern founder of CCM as we know it," and the parishioners of Most Precious Blood in Oviedo welcomed him back as pastor with a sanctuary so full of joy and excitement. Fr. Josh is a Casselberry native who grew up just down the road from the parish he now leads. He graduated from Lake Howell High School and went on to Florida State University, where he earned a degree in Economics and had his life changed forever during a campus retreat focused on the Eucharist. That retreat brought him back to the Church, back to confession for the first time since childhood, and into the Sacrament of Confirmation. It also planted a seed.

He returned home to serve as the lay campus minister at UCF's Catholic Campus Ministry from 2004 to 2008, helping grow what started as a group of about fifty students into something lasting. The calling deepened, and he entered seminary in 2008. When he was ordained on May 23, 2015, at St. James Cathedral, the people of Most Precious Blood were watching. The parish live-streamed his ordination in the Parish Life Center, the first time they had ever done that. It says something about Fr. Josh that a community would claim him that way, long before he was ever assigned to lead them. He served as parochial vicar at Annunciation Catholic Church in Altamonte Springs before coming home to Most Precious Blood as pastor in June 2023, a homecoming the parish had been waiting for.

Ask Fr. Josh what he does on his day off and the answer is always the same. He owns a small bass boat and can almost certainly be found somewhere on the St. Johns River or another local waterway. The parish website puts it plainly: he is addicted to fishing. He dislikes deep-sea fishing, though, and when Bishop John Noonan prompted one of his infamous fishing stories at his installation, Fr. Josh turned it into something deeper. The main challenge of deep-sea fishing, he told the crowd, is that the captain does all the real work. You just drop in the line and wait. Becoming pastor on the Feast of Corpus Christi, he said, was God's way of reminding him who the real captain is. Fr. Josh also serves as the Director of Vocations for the Diocese of Orlando and continues as chaplain to the Catholic Campus Ministry at UCF, the same community he helped build as a twenty-something lay minister.

The students, he says, bring him tremendous hope, and he believes many of them will be future leaders in parishes across the diocese. His hopes for Most Precious Blood include hosting Eucharistic-centered retreats and bringing in ministries that help people hear the voice of God in prayer. Fr. Josh once said that his life has been full of conversion moments, and that the Lord wants us to be open in such moments always. That openness is what brought him home.

Ask Fr. David Scotchie how faith gets passed on, and he will tell you a story. That is what people notice about him first. His homilies land not because they are polished performances but because they feel like something a trusted friend would say to you over coffee, honest and practical and rooted in real life. One longtime parishioner wrote that even though their community never built a brick and mortar church, it was Fr. David's loving guidance that helped them build a real church family. Another described him as a priest whose humble soul is always equipped for leading people heaven bound. That kind of loyalty follows him. Fr. David was ordained in 1993 for the Diocese of Orlando, and his path began at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in Indiana, where he earned a Master of Arts in Christian Studies and a Master of Divinity. He has served in six parishes over more than three decades, spent time as the campus minister at the University of Central Florida, and continued his own studies along the way, earning a master's degree in management from UCF and a Doctor of Ministry in preaching from the Aquinas Institute in St. Louis. He now serves as pastor of Nativity Catholic Church in Longwood, a parish where at least one couple has written that they are simply happy to be with Father David again.

Fr. David is the kind of person people remember long after they have moved on to a different parish or a different season of life. Someone once called him one of the many wise people who have helped them remain happy. An elderly mother, despite struggling with memory issues, heard his name and immediately broke into a huge smile. "He looks good," she said. That is who Fr. David is. He stays with people. He believes that preaching is not just another task for a parish priest but a way of life, and you can see that belief in everything he does. He writes a weekly column for the Florida Catholic that reads the same way his homilies sound, like he is sitting with you and working through something real. Those columns earned him third place for Best Regular Column in Scripture and Theology at the 2026 Catholic Media Association awards. He was invited back to his alma mater, Saint Meinrad, to deliver the annual Marten Lecture in Homiletics, and he teaches homiletics for both Saint Meinrad's Permanent Deacon Formation Program and the Diocese of Orlando's program. He is also the co-author of Rites of Passage: Preaching Baptisms, Weddings, and Funerals. But if you ask Fr. David what his priesthood is about, he will not talk about any of that. He will tell you it is to show and tell in word and deed how much the Lord loves us, so that we live in friendship with God and in solidarity with one another. "As Jesus said," he adds, "'I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.'"

There is a moment one parishioner remembers clearly. Fr. Chris Dorsey was simply walking past his family in church, and what struck him was not a homily or a teaching but something quieter. "I literally saw reverence in him as he walked past us," the parishioner wrote. "Like Lord Almighty reverence." It is the kind of impression Fr. Chris tends to leave. People who have been in his care, whether in a Florida parish or on a military base halfway around the world, say the same thing: they are blessed to have him, and they miss him when he is gone. Fr. Chris is the youngest of three children born to Lee and Mary Dorsey. His father served in the U.S. Air Force and later worked as a contractor with the Department of Defense, and the family moved often, rotating between Washington, California, Alabama, Virginia, and Florida before settling in the Melbourne and Indialantic area. His mother serves as the Director of Religious Education at Holy Name of Jesus Parish in Indialantic Beach. Fr. Chris earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Central Florida, entered seminary, and was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 2015. Four years later, he became a U.S. Army chaplain, first serving with the 84th Chemical Battalion at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri and then as the only Catholic priest the Army had in Japan, at Camp Zama near Tokyo.

What defines Fr. Chris is a belief he carries into every assignment: "If you're not going through the bad stuff with people, they're not going to come to you when bad stuff happens." At Fort Leonard Wood, that meant waking at 4:30 in the morning, training alongside soldiers, and turning the chapel into what he called "a place of refuge where the drill sergeants can't yell at you," a space where young soldiers fresh out of basic training could catch their breath, go to confession, serve as lectors, and reconnect with faith. During COVID, he celebrated seven Masses every Sunday to stay within capacity limits and visited the sick in a special infirmary. In Japan, where the nearest English-speaking priest was an hour away and the twelve-hour time difference made even a phone call home difficult, he and his community started a quarterly program to feed the homeless, giving out a hundred meals in less than half an hour. He recalls a soldier, not Catholic, who confided she was pregnant and that her boyfriend wanted her to end the pregnancy. She trusted Fr. Chris and chose to keep the baby. She recently sent him a photo of her with the child. "Rarely do we get to see the fruits that clearly," he said, "to see a baby who might not have been there if not for you." Fr. Chris once said, "You may be the only priest some may ever meet." That is the kind of weight he carries quietly, and the kind of presence he brings now to St. Margaret Mary.

Fr. Rowland Onuegbu is the kind of priest people thank after Mass. Parishioners have told him, "This is so helpful and I loved your homily this morning," and others have simply written, "So true. Have a blessed day." He has a thoughtful way about him, blending his background in psychology with his formation as a priest in how he speaks and how he listens. Originally from Nigeria, Fr. Rowland is a member of the Society of Divine Vocations. His path to Central Florida took him first to the Diocese of Fall River in Massachusetts, where he served as a full-time prison chaplain at the Bristol County Correctional Facility and the Barnstable Correctional Facility, and also filled in as part-time chaplain at Cape Cod Hospital. He saw that work as an expression of the mercy of the Church. In 2019, he was transferred to St. Patrick Parish in Wareham, Massachusetts, where he served as Parochial Vicar and introduced Healing Masses, Eucharistic Adoration, youth visits to the elderly, support groups for married couples and the divorced, and chaplaincy for the Knights of Columbus. The Wareham community celebrated his priestly ordination anniversary while he was there.

Fr. Rowland also holds a PhD in psychology and teaches undergraduate courses at Seton Hall University, but the degree means something different to him than it might to most. His parents never had the chance to attend high school. Their education came from elementary schools run by nuns, yet they read, wrote, and expressed themselves beautifully in English and Igbo, and their love of knowledge shaped his path. When the Dean's approval came through in 2020, Fr. Rowland was packing his bags for Nigeria, his first visit home in nearly three years. His mother was no longer here to celebrate the milestone, but his father was. He went straight to him and said, "I did it. I completed what you and Mom started." His father smiled, tapped his shoulders, and said, "That's goooood." That love of learning his parents gave him shows up in how he ministers. He meets people where they are, offering prayer, self-examination, and communal support rather than judgment. Fr. Rowland arrived at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Mount Dora in 2026, stepping into a parish with a rich history and a diverse congregation of English- and Spanish-speaking families. It is a community that has been shaped by decades of pastors before him. Fr. Rowland brings to it a lifetime of ministry in places where people needed him most, a mind that never stops learning, and the kind of presence that makes people feel welcome. As he once wrote, "If we fight evil together we overcome," and that belief in unity is something you feel the moment you meet him.

Fr. Kenny Aquino is the kind of priest people simply say they love. It is not an elaborate compliment, but it says everything about the way he shows up for those around him. Warm, approachable, and genuinely enthusiastic about his faith, Fr. Kenny carries with him a spirit shaped by a childhood in the Philippines near Naga City, where Catholicism was not just practiced but lived out loud. As a boy, he would ring the church bells at three o'clock in the morning to call villagers to Simbang Gabi, a nine-day Christmas novena Mass that began before sunrise. The missionary priests who served his community left a deep mark on him, from the Spanish priests in his parish to the Irish Jesuit who mentored him spiritually. He was ordained on September 8, 1990, in the Archdiocese of Nueva Caceres, and what he describes as God's providence first brought him to the Diocese of Orlando in 1998 through the local office of the Propagation of the Faith. He returned in 2004 and was incardinated into the diocese in 2009, serving at parishes including St. Joseph in Winter Haven, Holy Family in Orlando, and Our Lady of the Lakes in Deltona before being appointed pastor of St. Vincent de Paul in Wildwood in July 2023.

What makes Fr. Kenny stand out is how naturally his faith and his Filipino heritage come together in everything he does. He serves as liaison for the Filipino Ministry in the Diocese of Orlando, a role close to his heart, and has watched that community grow to include twenty-seven active parish ministries across the region. He has performed concerts with fellow Filipino priests and helped lead celebrations of Simbang Gabi and the feast of Our Lady of Antipolo, traditions that keep the faithful connected to their roots. But his care reaches well beyond culture and tradition. Moved by the needs of disadvantaged children back home in Caceres, he founded The Anawim of Caceres, Inc., and even after moving to Florida, he continued raising support for those children through private donations and the Filipino community in Orlando. At St. Vincent de Paul, he is now leading efforts to help the parish grow and evolve alongside its expanding community. Fr. Kenny once said, "There have been miracles, little and big, extraordinary and ordinary moments that have mixed together and I know everything that has happened, has happened in the right way. I am so grateful that I see God's hand in my life. I am God's instrument."

"You are very blessed to get Father Ralph." That is what parishioners say, and it does not take long to see why. Father Ralph DuWell is the kind of priest who walks with you, not ahead of you. There is something about the way he talks about the sacraments, about families, about being present in the moments that matter, that tells you this is a man who found exactly what he was looking for and never let go. He did not start out on the path to the priesthood. A Pennsylvania native raised in Florida, Father Ralph grew up in the Episcopal Church. He went to the University of Florida, worked in banking for sixteen years, and built what most people would call a solid life. But in his thirties, he felt something pulling him in a different direction. He walked into Ascension Parish in Melbourne one day, just to attend Mass. "I never left," he said. "I attended Mass, and I continued to go back." It was the Eucharist that held him. "The Eucharist is the summit of our faith," he says. "This was what I didn't have in the Episcopal Church." He came into the Catholic Church in 1988, entered St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary at age thirty-nine, and was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 2000. "This is a dream come true," he said at the time. Twenty-five years later, he still says the same thing. "I still believe God wanted me here. This is where I am supposed to be."

Father Ralph carries with him a piece of advice from his seminary days that says a lot about the kind of priest he is. Fr. Steve Olds once told his class, "Gentleman, when the hospital calls at 2:00 AM, don't just roll over, get up and go. It will be a moment of grace." Father Ralph says he was right. That willingness to show up is the thread that runs through his twenty-five years of ministry across Central Florida. He has served in parishes from Deltona to Orlando to Winter Haven, and in 2022 he returned to St. Timothy in Lady Lake as pastor, a parish where he had previously served and where the people already felt like family. In July 2026, he was appointed pastor of St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church in Altamonte Springs. But ask Father Ralph what his favorite part of the priesthood is, and his answer has been the same since the beginning: walking with a family through the sacraments, from marriage to births and baptisms, birthdays and anniversaries, and finally commending them to God. "The sacraments are so important to me," he says. It is what drives him, what gets him out of bed, what makes twenty-five years feel like they passed in a heartbeat. "The message I give people is to put trust in the Lord," he says. "He is our hope. He is the one in control."