Deacon Michael T. Nugent first felt the call to the priesthood during an eighth grade retreat. “I had a sense of God telling me to do this. And my initial reaction was, ‘Oh, that’s ridiculous, that sounds like something I don’t want to do,’ ” he said.
Born into a tight-knit Navy family, he spent eight years growing in faith formation in Catholic schools in Virginia Beach. While he initially ignored the call to the priesthood, the example of his principal at Bishop Sullivan Catholic High School in Virginia Beach, Msgr. William L. Pitt, now deceased, helped him to “realize that priests are just dudes. They have good days and bad days.”
But it was only after he started college at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville that he began to grow in his spiritual life. Through the Catholic campus ministry at St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish, he discovered more opportunities to receive the sacraments and was inspired by other devout students.
He also began dating a student who helped him on his spiritual journey. “We would go to adoration together, and we would go to daily Mass together,” Deacon Nugent said. “It was one of those relationships where I was growing by her example.” But as graduation approached, the thought of engagement “didn’t feel right at all,” he said. “I realized that something else was going on.”
He then moved to New York City, where he took a job in investment banking. “I had everything I thought I wanted,” Deacon Nugent said. “I was right in the middle of everything, and I was really unsatisfied.”
With St. Patrick’s Cathedral right across the street from work, he returned to daily Mass, frequent confession and prayer, which helped him discern. Still unsatisfied with city life, he moved to Arlington and found an apartment close to St. Agnes Church. After becoming involved in service at the parish and in a local Opus Dei program, he said, “that’s when ideas of the priesthood and the delight of being a priest came back really strongly.”
After four years of discerning within the diocese, Deacon Nugent felt confident in his decision to respond to God’s call. On Ash Wednesday 2016, he received the phone call to enter the seminary, and he went on to attend St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa. in 2016 and the Pontifical North American College in Rome in 2019.
After ordination, Deacon Nugent will serve as a parochial vicar of St. Ambrose Church in Annandale. He currently is enrolled in a co-sponsorship with the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services and will serve as a chaplain in the military after at least three years of service as a priest in the Arlington diocese.
“Growing up in (military) culture has always been a huge part of my life,” Deacon Nugent said. “It was part of my discernment, as I could think of nothing more useful as being the only source of the sacraments to someone who is on a ship in the middle of the ocean.”
