Before Father Tom Margevicius started grade school, he was already thinking about the priesthood and imitating his pastor’s movements during Mass at his family’s parish in Cleveland, Ohio.
But the high school seminary he attended in ninth grade closed the following year and for a long time, so did Father Margevicius’ pursuit of priesthood.
The vocation was still in the back of his mind as he led wildlife tours in Ohio state parks, worked with youth through NET Ministries and St. Paul’s Outreach in St. Paul and traveled the country with a Gospel music group before he finally entered The St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul in 1995 when he was in 30s.
When Father Margevicius, now 62, told his mother he wanted to be a priest in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis because of a new community of diocesan priests called the Companions of Christ he’d helped found, she said, “Tommy, Cleveland needs priests too. Why don’t you come here?”
Eventually his parents, Lithuanian and East German immigrants who came to the United States after World War II, saw that even though the seventh of their 12 children would live 700 miles away, it was a good move.
Through all his archdiocesan assignments, including current roles as director of the archdiocesan Office of Worship and pastor of four small rural parishes southwest of the Twin Cities, Father Margevicius continues to find community, transparency and accountability through the Companions of Christ.
After his 1999 ordination, Father Margevicius served at Nativity of Our Lord in St. Paul until 2001 and for two years was parochial administrator at St. John the Baptist in Dayton. He began 17 years as a member of The St. Paul Seminary faculty in 2003 and was sent to Washington, D.C., to complete graduate work at Catholic University of America.
When he returned from the nation’s capital in 2005, Father Margevicius served for a year as ecclesiastical notary for the Chancellor’s Office. That year, he also began as sacramental minister to the archdiocese’s deaf community at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Minneapolis, where later he was pastor from 2010 to 2017.
During the pandemic, Father Margevicius served as parochial vicar at Risen Savior in Burnsville, and then as sacramental minister at Our Lady of Guadalupe in St. Paul and St. Dominic in Northfield.
Since 2022, he’s served as pastor of Nativity in Cleveland, Immaculate Conception of Marysburg in Madison Lake, St. Henry in St. Henry (an unincorporated community in Le Sueur County), and St. Mary in Le Center.
Leaving the seminary faculty wasn’t easy, but Father Margevicius now lives with two other Companions in Le Center. His commute to the Archdiocesan Catholic Center in St. Paul is longer but being outside the city gives him opportunities for his longtime love of bird watching.
When asked about his future as a priest, Father Margevicius quoted his longtime Companion friend, the late Father Jeff Huard, in saying that he recommits to his vocation each morning.
“That it’s the daily engaging of the reality, day in and day out,” he said. “Today I’m going to do this and I’m going to try my best to do it. … If I learned something from yesterday’s mistakes, all the better.”
