Thomas Tassone leads the singing of the responsorial psalm during a Mass at Immaculate Conception Seminary, Huntington, in 2005. TLIC photo/Gregory A. Shemitz

In the dark hours following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Deacon Tom Tassone realized he couldn’t wait for someone else to answer the call to bring Christ’s light to the world.

It was then, he said, that he knew, “God wants you to spread the message that He is God of the living, not a God of destruction.” A Church musician, he was heading to Immaculate Conception Seminary to play the organ for noon Mass. By the time the day was over, “I made my decision” to become a priest. He had started to study for the priesthood in 1988 but left after six months. “I was 25. I just wasn’t ready.”

Deacon Tassone was baptized at Our Lady of the Assumption, Copiague, but as a child attended services at a “Traditional Catholic” church, which broke away from the Roman Catholic Church by refusing to accept the changes of the Second Vatican Council. He stopped going to church altogether in his early teen years. When he was 17, he was working in Amityville and began ducking into the cool comfort of St. Martin of Tours Church there to escape the summer heat. At first, he would just sit in the back. Then he began to walk around the church and pray during his breaks there. By the fall, he had approached the parish priests, Msgr. Jack Skelly and Msgr. Robert Guglielmone, about beginning confirmation instruction.

Deacon Tassone enjoyed music, singing in the school chorus and playing in the band, so he joined the choir at St. Martin’s. “I was always drawn to the beauty of the liturgy,” he said.

He attended Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J., to prepare for a career as a church musician.

In 1988, he was hired as the director of music at Our Lady of the Assumption, and from 1992 to 2003, he was the director of music and liturgy at St. Martha’s Church in Uniondale.

Although he had left the seminary after one semester, “there really wasn’t a day I didn’t think about the priesthood. Through the years, people would come up to me and say I would make a good priest.”

In 1999, his application for the diocesan permanent diaconate program was rejected because admissions interviewers got the impression that what he really wanted was the priesthood. He was advised to take a year and think about it. Meanwhile, he began to study for his master’s degree at the seminary in 2000.

Deacon Tassone hopes to emulate priests like Msgr. Skelly and Msgr. Guglielmone, as well as Fathers Joe Staudt and Sean Gann, who were at Christ the King, Commack, during his pastoral year there, and Father Jim Bowman, pastor at Corpus Christi, Mineola, where he served as a transitional deacon.

“These priests appreciate the sacred and holy, yet they are real in their spirituality. They are down to earth.”

Deacon Tassone considers himself a down-to-earth guy — literally. “I enjoy gardening on a large scale. At Christ the King, there was plenty of land, and I was actually able to successfully grow watermelons,” he said. He worked for a time at Old Bethpage Village as a farmer of the 1850s time period, plowing fields with a team of horses, milking cows and shearing sheep. “Working with the earth and its animals often reminded me of the kind of work that God intended for all human beings to take part in — tending lovingly to his creation,” he said.

Deacon Tassone also served as an enlisted petty officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve; he is presently a chaplain (lieutenant j.g.) in the Reserve. In the summer of 2006, he was stationed aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier out of Norfolk, Va. He was able to “pray with many brave young men and women serving their nation during a time of war.”

He also enjoys sailing, hiking and mountain climbing. “I have scaled Mount Washington in New Hampshire twice in the past six years and am planning to do so again after ordination,” he said.

“I look forward to many years of serving in our wonderful parishes. I have particularly been blessed to get to know the people of Christ the King and Corpus Christi,” he said. “The warm welcome and good spirit that I have felt in these parishes, as well as the parishes where I have ministered as a Church musician, have taught me that wherever I am eventually assigned as a priest, I can expect the support and love of the people and will be able to call it ‘home.’”