Class of 2016

SVDP Alumni
Ordination Class

About Joseph House

• Founded 2018, Tallahassee, Florida
• Diocese of Pensacola–Tallahassee
• Trauma-informed reentry housing
• Partner: Equal Justice Initiative
• Partner: Legal Defense Fund
• josephhouseus.org
  

Founder and Former Executive Director | Joseph House, Tallahassee, FL

Fr. Dustin Feddon is a Catholic priest of the Diocese of Pensacola–Tallahassee and a graduate of St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary (Class of 2016). He is the Founder and former Executive Director of Joseph House, a reentry home and community for men released from Florida’s prisons, located in Tallahassee.

Fr. Feddon’s ministry among the incarcerated began when he was a seminarian on his pastoral year internship. It was in 2013 that he began visiting men in Florida state prisons, many in solitary confinement. He witnessed both their profound suffering and their irreducible human dignity. What he encountered there did not move him to pity alone, but to action. In 2018, that conviction became a home.

“We are making a radical statement: that at the moment they are released from prison, they have a place and a people to whom they belong.”

— Fr. Dustin Feddon

The United States holds nearly two million people behind bars. Joseph House exists because 95 percent of those released will return to our communities, and without support, two-thirds will return to prison within three years. Fr. Feddon’s ministry is breaking that cycle, one resident at a time.

Joseph House provides safe, trauma-informed housing rooted in the conviction that true rehabilitation begins not with programs alone, but with belonging. The home offers residents not merely shelter, but a space of quiet, nature, and genuine community, where men are reminded they are seen, valued, and not alone.

Joseph House has partnered with national organizations including the Equal Justice Initiative and the Legal Defense Fund to advance greater justice and mercy for those affected by incarceration. Fr. Feddon is also the author of More Than Half Way Home: A Story of Accompaniment in the Shadows of Incarceration, praised by Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, as “a testament to the power of grace and kindness to heal.”

Alongside the work of Joseph House, Fr. Feddon continues the prison ministry that began during that pastoral year and grew into a deeper vocation. For more than a decade he has accompanied men awaiting execution on Florida's death row, walking with them through their final weeks and, when the hour comes, remaining at their side to pray, to share the sacraments, and to bear witness to the mercy of God. It is among the most demanding ministries a priest can undertake, and it flows from a single conviction that has shaped his priesthood from the beginning: that no person, whatever he has done, is beyond the reach of Christ's love or the dignity God has given him.

In recognizing Fr. Feddon with the St. Vincent de Paul Award, the Seminary honors a priest - one of our own - who has made proximity to the poor and forgotten not merely a pastoral assignment, but a vocation, one rooted in his formation at SVDP and lived out in the world, among the imprisoned and the forgotten, in the fullness of priestly charity.

Since 2018

Lecturer in Medical Ethics

St. Vincent de Paul Seminary

Selected Credentials & Service

• M.D., University of Bologna, 1968
• Board Certified in Obstetrics & Gynecology
• Fellow, American College of Obstetrics & Gynecology
• Fellow, American College of Surgeons
• Fellow, International College of Surgeons
• Lecturer, SVDP Medical Ethics (2017-)
• Chief Medical Officer, Delray Medical Center 2007-2022
• Director of Medical Education, Delray Medical Center
• Associate Dean, Academic Affairs, Florida Atlantic University College of
• Medicine
• Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Florida Atlantic University College of
• Medicine
• Current Vice President, Catholic Physicians Guild Palm Beach County
• EWTN Medical Ethics Consultant
• Sainthood Investigator: Carmelite Father, St. Titus Brandsma
• Sainthood Investigator: Servant of God Maryknoll Father V. Capodanno
• Major, US Army Medical Corps Active Ready Reserves 1971 to 1977
  

Professor of OB/GYN | Florida Atlantic University College of Medicine

Dr. Anthony N. Dardano is a physician whose life has been marked by a rare integration: a distinguished career in obstetrics and gynecology, a deep Catholic faith, and an unwavering commitment to the defense of life at every stage. In 2017, he was invited by then Rector, Monsignor, now Bishop, David Toups, to serve as a volunteer lecturer in medical ethics, at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary, a position in which he continues

to the present.

Born and formed in the Catholic intellectual tradition - earning his B.S. in Biology, Cum Laude, from Niagara University, run by the Vincentian Fathers, with a minor in theology and philosophy, before completing his medical doctorate at the University of Bologna, Italy, Magna Cum Laude. He did his residency in Obstetrics & Gynecology at St. Mary's Hospital, Rochester, NY. Dr. Darda no has brought that integrated formation to bear on decades of clinical and academic work.

He served as Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Utica, New York, for more than thirty years, delivered some five thousand babies and operated on thousands of women during his four decades in active clinical practice. Relocating to Boca Raton, in his "retirement", he served as Chief Medical Officer at Delray Medical Center for sixteen years and currently serves there as Director of Medical Education. Concurrently, he remains Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Clinical Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology, at Florida Atlantic University College of Medicine, where he continues to teach and guide in both the classroom and hospital setting.

“He is an exemplar of a committed Catholic who has sought to have his faith inform his work throughout his career, standing firm in the face of colleagues who wanted to weaken ethical limitations in many cases.”



— Fr. Timothy Cusick, Academic Dean & Vice Rector, SVDP