It had all the earmarks of a great wire-service news story, the kind that reporters hope will fall into their laps one day: a priest mysteriously shows up at the scene of a motor vehicle accident, consoles a victim and prays with her, and then just as mysteriously disappears, before anyone could even offer a word of thanks. The story had legs for a couple of days, with reports of an “angel priest” who appeared and suddenly disappeared, all in the middle of Missouri.
Before long everyone was talking about “the mystery” and, perhaps, a sign from heaven--but just as quickly, all the questions were cleared up. There was no mystery at all; just a priest quietly doing his job.
The priest was Father Patrick Dowling of the Jefferson City Diocese in Missouri, an Irish-born veteran of the diocesan missions in Peru. Ordained in 1982 for Jefferson City, now involved in prison ministry and work with Spanish-speaking residents of the diocese, Father Dowling was a bit bemused by all the speculation the incident had caused. He treated it matter-of-factly, though, and said that if any angels were present it was the emergency personnel who worked “so professionally,”
“I hope the credit goes where it is due,” he said.
The Sunday-morning accident involved vehicles driven by Katie Lentz, 19, and 26-year-old Aaron Smith. Lentz, who was struck head-on, was trapped in her car with serious injuries. Father Dowling, en route from one parish Mass assignment to another, stopped to offer whatever assistance he could. Once he discovered the media attention centered on his presence at the accident, he promptly came forward with a full explanation.
“I asked the sheriff’s permission and approached the scene of the accident,” he said. “I absolved and anointed Katie, and, at her request, prayed that her leg would not hurt. Then I stepped aside to where some rescue personnel and the [helicopter] pilot were waiting, and prayed the rosary silently. I left when the helicopter was about to take off, and before I got to my car it was on its way.”
Father Dowling didn’t stop there, of course. He made sure he visited Lentz in the ICU unit at Blessing Hospital in Quincy, and when she saw him she reached out her hand. And then she cried and offered her thanks.
The thanks, he repeated, belong to the rescue people – “people of faith and prayer,” he called them. “I have no doubt that the Most High heard their prayers, and I was part of his answer . . . but only one part.”
Reflecting on the role he played, he said, “I try to be a priest, not a hero. And I did what a priest does. And every priest that I know, if they would pass by an accident, they would stop and do what I did.”
Is there a lesson to be learned from all this? There sure is, Father Dowling said, and it’s simply this:
“God loves us, he is here close to us, and when we’re in trouble, he’s there.”
(This essay is a recent “Light One Candle” column, written by Jerry Costello, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)
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