From the great books,
all the way home.

Tom Brittain was born and raised in Phoenix, the oldest of four, in a faithful Catholic home — his father a convert, his mother from a devout Hispanic family, the Montiels of Tucson. He was given the faith early. He would also, for a time, give it away.

A faith lost

“I abandoned my faith in an instant.”

In 1985 Tom went to Northern Arizona University to play football. The following spring, drawn in by the zeal of evangelical teammates, he left the Catholic Church almost overnight — and became, by his own account, an ardent and anti‑Catholic born‑again Protestant. He set his sights on becoming a pastor, even visiting a Protestant seminary back east. Of his four siblings, all would eventually drift from the faith. Of his twenty‑one cousins, he would one day be the only one still practicing.

A mind awakened

The great books, and a seven‑year tension

When he stopped playing football, Tom did something he had never really done before: he opened books and read them. He fell in love with learning — Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Dostoevsky — and a tension took hold of him that would define the next seven years. His new evangelical world was suspicious of “worldly wisdom”; the secular university was hostile to belief. Caught between the two, Tom found himself asking a question he couldn’t put down: what is the true Church?

The long road home

The leap to Thomas Aquinas College

The dream of a real, integrated education would not leave him. Married, a master’s degree in hand, expecting twins, and driving full‑time for UPS, Tom did the impractical thing: he applied to Thomas Aquinas College — a great‑books school where he would have to start over as a freshman, the only married student on campus, at twenty‑five. By God’s mercy he got in, and the college changed everything.

There he found people who loved Jesus Christ and loved Aristotle, with no war between the two. After his freshman year — and one confession, his first in seven years — Tom came home to the Catholic Church at twenty‑six. His wife, Melissa, who had been afraid of a divided home, soon found herself more ready than he was; she entered the Church months later. On the Feast of the Guardian Angels, October 3, 1993, their four children were received as well. Tom calls it the best day of his life.

A family forged in grace

Eleven children — and an unlikely blessing

Tom and Melissa went on to raise eleven children. It was not a tidy or easy road: there were nine c‑sections, real fears, real struggles. Their twin son and daughter were born with cerebral palsy. A priest told Tom that his son’s suffering would one day become the greatest blessing in the family — and Tom will tell you, with tears, that it did. It was that son’s selflessness, his joy in cheering on his brothers and sisters, that knit the whole family together.

Sports, music, the ordinary rhythms of a big household — Tom is the first to say he was no rigid zealot. “Less is more,” he says of devotions; the one non‑negotiable was never missing Mass. All eleven children have kept the faith. Ten have graduated from Thomas Aquinas College and the youngest is there now; their spouses are devout; the grandchildren — twenty‑eight and counting — are all being raised in the Church.

A new mission

What he treasures most

For nearly thirty years Tom taught speech, rhetoric, and the humanities in classical and Catholic schools across Arizona — and for more than twenty of them served as a head football coach. Having recently stepped out of the classroom, he now gives this new chapter of his life to what he treasures most: speaking about the Catholic faith. He makes the case for it the way he came to believe it — with the mind and with the witness of a life that the faith has made whole.

Thomas Aquinas College  ·  30 years a Catholic educator  ·  Diocese of Phoenix  ·  in good standing / available with diocesan approval