Fr. Tom Pringle
Hi, everyone! My name is Fr. Tom Pringle, I am a priest of the Diocese of Orlando. I was ordained to the priesthood of Jesus Christ on July 25, 2020, in the midst of the craziest year any of us have ever lived through (and, please God, a year like we will never experience again). In the next few weeks, I will be celebrating my one year anniversary of ordination. What a year it has been!
In some ways, it seems like I have only been ordained for a couple of days; in others, it feels like I have been ordained 10 years! There have been so many humbling and awesome things that have happened in these last 11 months. I have witnessed people being healed physically and spiritually at Mass, in the confessional, and through the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. I have walked with others through some of the happiest and most joy-filled experiences of their lives and accompanied others through heartache and tragedy. The emotions and situations one person can experience in a lifetime, I can witness within the span of 24 hours…and I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. With all the ups and downs, it is such an incredible honor to be a priest and I have never been more fulfilled in my life. My road to the priesthood has been filled with many different twists and turns. I first thought about being a priest about a year after becoming an altar server. The more I served at the altar, the more I fell in love with the Eucharist and the Lord used that to draw me deeper into relationship with Him. Throughout middle school and high school, priesthood was something that I was considering and praying about. But I don’t think I took that too seriously until my freshman and sophomore years of college. My prayer during that time changed and I began asking the Lord what He wanted me to do with my life. That was what He needed to wake me up.
I first entered seminary at St. John Vianney College Seminary in Miami in August 2008. I was excited about getting to dive more deeply into the life of the Church and entered formation with so much enthusiasm to follow the Lord. And things were going great…until my nephew was born. That event in the life of our family really opened a space in my heart where I had to really wrestle with the desire to be a biological father. I was still unsure as to whether the Lord was really calling me to be a priest, which resulted in me taking some time away from formation beginning in 2010.
During my time away from seminary, I finished my undergraduate degree at UCF and began working for a couple of parishes in Orlando and St. Petersburg in stewardship and development. The Lord also gave me the opportunity to be a father figure to my nephew in a few ways. He attended the school where I worked in Orlando and I would pick him up from pre-school and spend a few hours with him each day. It was what I needed to see that I would be a great father, but it also showed me that I was still so unfulfilled. In the years that followed, my prayer life took on more importance and I began to discover that the only thing that brought me life and joy was ministry. The Lord used that to get me to reconsider my true vocation. One night in prayer, the Lord very clearly said to me: “Tom, I’m calling you to be a priest. Stop running.” So I did. In 2014, I returned to seminary.