Stephen D. Parkes

Bishop Stephen Parkes does not tell the story of his life as a straight road to the priesthood. He likes to say that God writes with crooked lines, and his own path is a good example. He wanted to be a doctor once, then found that chemistry was not for him. He earned a marketing degree, worked in retail, and spent three and a half years in banking before he ever thought seriously about the collar. Looking back, he does not see any of it as wasted. He sees a pattern he could not have drawn himself.

Warm and unhurried, he is the kind of pastor people do not want to let go of. When word came that he was leaving his Florida parish to become a bishop, the joy was real and so were the tears. Those who worked with him for years describe a man who never wanted to turn anyone away, whose calendar was always overflowing because he could not say no to the person in front of him. He grew up in a faithful family, the kind where you prayed before meals, went to Mass on Sunday, and were expected to make something of yourself. He was the youngest of three boys, and one of those boys, his brother Gregory, is now a bishop too, which makes them one of only a handful of brother-bishops in the history of the American Church.

He came to the priesthood the way he came to everything, patiently. He describes seminary as a marathon, not a sprint, six years of testing a decision rather than a single lightning-bolt moment, until the day he simply bought the black suit and committed. Ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 1998, he spent most of his ministry there, including a stretch as the founding pastor of a new parish in Oviedo that grew, in just a few years, from a first Mass he was not sure anyone would attend into a community of two thousand families. In 2020, Pope Francis sent him north to shepherd the southern half of Georgia, a vast, largely rural territory he calls true mission country.

What has stayed constant through all of it is how he treats people. He talks about meeting them where they are, listening before deciding what they need, and walking alongside them rather than standing across from them. His heart goes first to the ones easy to overlook, the poor, the forgotten, the family whose home was split in two by a hurricane and still waiting on help months later. He was named for St. Stephen, the first martyr, a man he admires for inspiring others to look beyond themselves. It fits. For a bishop who found his own vocation at the end of a long detour, the work has always come back to something simple, the line he took as his motto and returns to again and again: rejoice in the Lord always.