Jeremiah Payne

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.