Nathanael Soliven

Fr. Nathanael Soliven tells the story of his calling with a smile, and usually at his own expense. There was no lightning bolt, he says, and no long wrestling match with God. If anything, he was the last to know. As he puts it, "God calls young boy. Young boy doesn't know he's being called, so God drags him to seminary."

That humor is part of his charm, and the warmth beneath it is part of why people grow attached to him and hate to see him go. Those who have known him reach for words like faithful, inspiring, and devoted, but the affection is plainer than any of them. At the parishes he served on his way to ordination, people still speak of missing him and hoping he might come back, remembering little things like the way he could weave a hymn into a homily. The day he arrived at Saint Anthony in Lakeland, they lined up out the door to welcome their new shepherd.

His path there was never really his own plan. Born in the Philippines, one of four children, he was twelve when his mother decided a high school seminary was where he belonged. He went unwillingly. But something shifted once he was inside it, and in the daily rhythm of prayer and Mass he stumbled into a friendship with God he had not gone looking for, until slowly the boy who had resisted the collar began to want it. Even then he wanted to be sure, so after seminary he stepped away for four years and lived an ordinary life, earning his own way and seeing much of Europe. It was a good life, and still, he says, "something was still not enough." The call kept finding him, and this time he answered it for good, following it through to ordination in 2021. Three years later he became pastor of Saint Anthony, finally doing the things he had waited years to do, saying Mass, hearing confessions, visiting the sick, and hoping the work will carry him into the diocese's schools, where he has always loved being around the young. "I want to be the priest who serves the families," he says, "making an impact in their lives."

Before he was ever a priest, he was a teacher, and languages were his subject and his love, first in the Philippines and later in Spain, where he spent his last year abroad teaching English at a bilingual school. He speaks English, Tagalog, and Spanish, along with two Filipino dialects, and reads enough Greek, Latin, and Hebrew to catch how a single word can shift the meaning of a sacred text. He loves them, he says, because each one opens him up to another culture, almost another world. It is a fitting love for a man who has lived across a few worlds himself, the reluctant boy who grew into a willing priest, and who has a way of belonging wherever he goes.