Fr. Patrick McCain was born on 12 December 1985, in Moultrie, GA to a family of Southern Baptists. At the age of seven, he was baptized in the Baptist church his family attended. He grew up in southwest Georgia and attended Colquitt County schools. As a teenager, he discovered the Book of Common Prayer and joined the Episcopal Church. He graduated from Colquitt County High School in 2004. That autumn he matriculated at Wofford College where he increasingly came to identify as an Anglo-Catholic. He was received into full communion with the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil on 22 March 2008. The following weekend, he graduated from Wofford with an undergraduate degree in history and sociology.
Immediately after college, Fr McCain worked in healthcare & social services in Jacksonville, Florida. In 2014, he began his studies for the priesthood as a seminarian for the Diocese of Saint Augustine. He completed one year of pre-theological studies at Mount St Mary’s Seminary (Emmitsburg, MD) and also 1 year of theological studies at St Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary (Boynton Beach, FL). In the spring of 2016, he transferred to the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter and took a pastoral year, splitting his time between the Church of the Incarnation (Orlando, FL), Mount Calvary Church (Baltimore, MD), Christ the King Church (Towson, MD), and St Timothy’s Church (Catonsville, MD).
After completing his pastoral year, Fr McCain then studied for 4 years at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas in Rome & received priestly formation at the Pontifical North American College. He was ordained to the Diaconate on 1 October 2020 at St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, and then to the priesthood on 29 June 2021 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston, TX.