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Fr. Kennell Comes Home
Twenty Years after Catholic Noles helped him discover his calling, he returns to help students become who God created them to be.
On a quiet Sunday this July, students lingering after the 5 p.m. Mass at the Co-Cathedral of St. Thomas More met a new face at the ice cream social. Some had already heard his story at Nole Night, where he spoke to a room full of incoming freshmen. What most of them could not know is that Fr. Thomas Kennell once stood exactly where they now stand.
Less than a month into his new assignment, Fr. Kennell is walking familiar halls. He was a Florida State student from 2004 to 2008, drawn to Tallahassee in part because his oldest sister had come through before him, serving as president of the Catholic Student Union her senior year. He watched her faith transform her college years, and he wanted what she had found.
What he found was not a single dramatic moment. It was a community that made room for him. Friendships rooted in faith, upperclassmen who welcomed him warmly, campus ministers who took his questions seriously. In the summer of 2006, he sought out one of them for spiritual direction and began praying with the Scriptures daily. "A whole new world just really opened up for me," he recalled, "and I began to experience an invitation from the Lord to give myself entirely to Him." By senior year, seminary felt like the natural next step, confirmed by a deep and lasting peace. He was ordained a priest in 2016, and after a decade of parish ministry in Gulf Breeze and Panama City, the bishop asked him to return to the Co-Cathedral as its third assigned priest, serving both the parish and Catholic Noles.
Someone once took Fr. Kennell seriously enough to walk with him. That is the ministry he now hopes to offer in return. He names spiritual direction and pastoral counseling as his particular gifts, the patient, one-on-one accompaniment that students are seeking in growing numbers. "I thrive in that sort of one-on-one, journeying with people as they grow in their faith," he said. Even in his first days on campus, he was struck by students who gave him their full attention and welcome, and it reminded him what mattered most in his own formation: "acknowledging the person in front of you, giving them time and attention."
He knows the students arriving this fall are navigating a world he did not face at their age. This year's freshmen were born the year after the iPhone was released. They have grown up entirely inside the internet age, surrounded by constant noise, endless distraction, and competing voices telling them who they should be. "I think we're living in a somewhat destabilized environment," he observed. "People are looking for stability and groundedness. They're looking for truth, and they're looking for goodness."
What the Church offers them is not another program or another demand upon their attention. It is two thousand years of solidity: truth, beauty, the liturgy, the sacraments, and a community of people who will help them listen for God beneath the noise. Young people are surrounded by voices telling them who they should be. The Church offers them a place to encounter the One who already knows and loves them.
That encounter, Fr. Kennell insists, does not flatten anyone. When asked what he sees when he looks at these students, he pointed to St. Catherine of Siena: become who God created you to be, and you will set the world on fire. "I really don't think it needs to be a cookie-cutter kind of thing. The Lord desires that everybody become uniquely themselves in Him," he said. "More themselves, not less themselves. More themselves, enlightened by Christ."
His own life is the evidence. Catholic Noles did not simply point him toward a profession. It helped him become the man and the priest God had created him to be.
This is the pattern Fr. Kennell has witnessed for more than thirty years of Catholic Student Union history: transformed people transform the world. He points to the holy marriages and families that began here, the religious sisters and brothers, the priests, and the countless graduates who left Tallahassee changed and who carried that change into their workplaces, parishes, and homes. "They themselves, having been transformed," he said, "become those who help transform the world."
Now the circle is complete, and yet it is still expanding. Fr. Kennell cannot know which conversation, which confession, which friendship, or which quiet moment of prayer will change the direction of a student's life this year. He only knows that someone once made that space for him.
Now, he has returned to make it for them.
July 2026