The College Fix

Multiple news outlets are reporting this morning the story of a 19-year-old Missouri girl who was in a horrible care accident after being struck by a drunk driver.

Katie Lentz, is a sophomore at Tulane University. On Sunday morning, the car wreck left her trapped in her car, severely injured. He vital signs were failing, when suddenly a priest showed up to pray with her and anoint her with oil. That’s when the story gets interesting…

The Daily Mail reports:

Pinned inside her mangled Mercedes, seriously injured and fading fast, Katie Lentz turned to her rescuers on the lonely open stretch of Missouri highway and asked them to pray.

Struck head-on by a drunk driver on Sunday morning, emergency workers had been battling for an hour and a half to free Lentz, but to no avail.

But as they joined hands a Catholic priest appeared, even though there were no bystanders and the road was blocked, who offered a prayer and an instruction to the rescuers that they would now be able to free her.

Suddenly, heavy equipment needed to cut through the metal arrived from a nearby town and Lentz was pulled from the wreck in time to be saved – but when they turned to thank the priest, he was gone…

Already this is a great story. But USA Today reports some further mysterious details:

Emergency workers and community members in eastern Missouri are not sure what to make of a mystery priest who showed up at a critical accident scene Sunday morning and whose prayer seemed to change life-threatening events for the positive.

Even odder, the black-garbed priest does not appear in any of the nearly 70 photos of the scene of the accident in which a 19-year-old girl almost died. No one knows the priest and he vanished without a word, said Raymond Reed, fire chief of New London, Mo.

“I think it’s a miracle,” Reed said. “I would say whether it was an angel that was sent to us in the form of a priest or a priest that became our angel, I don’t know. Either way, I’m good with it…”

This story is especially interesting to me because something very similar happened to a close friend of mine when I was a teenager. He was in a car accident. Flipped the vehicle over in a ditch on the side of the road. He was sitting in the vehicle in a state of shock when a stranger came up and prayed for him, then, like the “angel” priest above, disappeared without notice.

In an age as skeptical as ours, there is a thrill in reading a story like this in the mainstream news media. People are drawn to it. It stirs hope, and reveals, I think, a hunger for spiritual encounter that is still very much at the core of the human heart.

Undoubtedly, there will be reporters combing the Missouri countryside for the next week, knocking on the doors of every Catholic church they can find, questioning church staff, and hoping to find this “angel” priest, who, by all accounts, may have helped save this young girl’s life.

I hope they never find him.

Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix and author of the book SEX & GOD AT YALE: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.

Like The College Fix on Facebook.  / Follow Nathan on Twitter @NathanHarden

(via Drudge)