Joseph Shaute

Father Joe Shaute is an easy man to know. He goes by Father Joe, and he tells his own story plainly, the hard parts included. He is the firstborn son of an Army officer from Scranton and an artist from Lowell who met at a wedding and stayed married for fifty-seven years. He was a military kid who moved six times before he started first grade, then settled with his family in Miami, where he grew up speaking Spanish. His last name is an Ellis Island name, Shaute, pronounced SHAY-ute. Before the collar, he spent twelve years working in communications, with a broadcast journalism degree behind him. The pull toward the priesthood did not come from any plan of his own. It came from teenagers. Volunteering with a Life Teen group that tripled in a single year, he kept hearing it from the kids themselves: he had a calling, and he should not be afraid of it. He went to Rome to think it over, then to seminary in New Orleans, and was ordained in 2001. He still lights up around young people, and he likes to say that a school is not just a community's future but its present. He has carried more than his share of hardship. He calls his first year as a priest a baptism by fire, and the years since have not been much gentler. He has beaten cancer twice, the most recent a hard round of lymphoma, and buried both of his parents. Through all of it, his sense of the priesthood has stayed simple, the way he once put it to his parish: word and deed, the conduct of Christ and not of the world. It was his health that finally brought him south, to a warmer climate and a lighter load. What Rockledge got is a priest who has already lived several lives and still meets people the way he always has, openly, with his whole story and his whole heart.