Josh Swallows

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.