Rev. Thomas LaRussa, SDV, Parochial Vicar, was born on August 20, 1963 in Fremont, California and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. He passed away suddenly on March 26, 2025 at the St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Rectory, Newport, Vermont. He completed his undergraduate studies in California, then headed east to Washington, DC for graduate school. A funny thing happened to him during his final year at Georgetown University Law Center. One day he realized that he no longer had any desire to be a lawyer. It was not a question of what  happened but of who happened. “The answer,” Fr. Tom once explained to us, “is that God happened.”  Fr. Tom told us that he was so busy pursuing his own idea of what he ought to be that he had never bothered to find out what God wanted him to be.

At a loss, he moved to Florida with his parents and spent the next three years helping his father care for his mother during the end stages of Hepatitis C. Fr. Tom would remember later, that during those three years God forced him to see – really see and understand – that he was not the center of the world, not even of his own little world. During this period Fr. Tom rediscovered the Church and found himself drawn deeper and deeper into the love of God and the service of God’s children. After his mother passed away in 2007, he stayed with his father for another year, spending that time to make sure his dad was all right and discerning his own call from God.

In 2008 Fr. Tom entered formation with the Society of Divine Vocations. He would describe that time as “by far the most difficult period of my life – and also the most rewarding. By God’s grace,” he would remember, “I persevered for eleven years of training for religious life and the priesthood.” Along the way, Fr. Tom spent two years in and out of the hospital fighting sepsis. His long illness was followed by six years of full-time study at Immaculate Conception Seminary in South Orange, New Jersey. In the seminary, Fr. Tom fell in love with God all over again through Sacred Scripture. He loved to explain scripture to people, to watch their eyes light up as they see that God has been really at work throughout history, and to realize that our plans are nothing compared to the eternal joy God has planned for each of us since before the creation of the universe.

Fr. Tom’s first profession was in 2011. After spending several years as a Brother, he was ordained to the priesthood on June 22, 2019. Fr. Tom came to Mater Dei Parish in September 2020. He came to us from St. Nicholas Roman Catholic Church in Palisades Park, NJ where he was the Director of Religious Education. He brought to Vermont a love for pastoral care and a deep devotion to personal prayer.

When asked what advice he would give to anyone struggling with their faith life, Fr. Tom’s answer was simple: come back to confession. “So many of us live our lives in constant pain because we cannot believe that God really will forgive us and heal us, or else because we do not deserve His mercy and love. The second statement is probably true,” he added. “I know that I don’t deserve His mercy and love – not by any human standard that is.  But His ways are not like our ways.  God wants to heal each and every one of us so badly that He sent the Holy Spirit among us for precisely that purpose: to forgive sins. Who are we to object?”

God came for Fr. Tom on March 26, 2025. He was a kind and gentle priest who loved people and animals. His favorite hobby was hunting in the Northeast Kingdom with his parishioner friends. Fr. Tom will be sadly missed by his Vocationist family and his Mater Dei Parish family.

Friends and Parish family may call from 10:00 A.M. -11:00 A.M., with a prayer for the dead at 11:00 A.M. on Tuesday April 1, 2025 at the St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Catholic Church, 191 Clermont Terrace, Newport, followed by a funeral service at 12:00 P.M. with Bishop John McDermott and Provincial Superior Fr. Stephen Ehiahuruike, SDV con-celebrating a mass of Christian Burial. Father’s final resting place will be at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in East Hanover, New Jersey.