Richard Trout

Ask the people of Corpus Christi about Father Richard Trout and one word comes up again and again: humble. He is an easy man to be around, the kind of pastor who can make a whole church smile in the middle of a homily. His parishioners came to call him the cornerstone of their family, and one of them said it was his kind words that welcomed them back to the Catholic faith after forty years away.

There is a selflessness underneath all of it. He is far more interested in other people than in himself, and after years of knowing him, his parishioners tend to reach past his titles for plainer words: a caring friend, a compassionate mentor, someone they thank God for sending them. He has carried that spirit through more than forty years of priesthood, almost all of it spent close to home. A Central Florida priest through and through, he was born in Melbourne and ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 1985, and he came up as one of several children whose siblings still turn out for the milestones.

His path reads less like a career than a long act of staying put. When he arrived at All Souls in Sanford in the early 1990s, he took over a parish that had worn through six pastors in eleven years, and he stayed for nearly two decades, steadying it and helping it grow. In 2012 he moved on to Corpus Christi in Celebration, where he spent another fourteen years as pastor before retiring in the summer of 2026.

But titles were never really the point with him. Long before any of that, the diocese kept turning to him to look after its own priests, first walking with young men as they discerned whether the priesthood was theirs, then caring for the life and ministry of the clergy, and now, in the role he took up this year, watching over its senior priests. In a real way, he has spent his life being a priest for other priests. He once spoke about the balance of work and rest in a priest's life, and how joy is the fruit that grows out of the labor. Four decades in, he does not sound finished. He has simply turned that same care toward the men who gave their lives to the same work he did.