Vianney, Plump, and Meyer—Indiana’s Miracle Men, by Kevin Wells

Knowing he could not simply keep doing what had been done, a young priest tried something different: an imitation of something old.

The ghost of St. John-Marie-Baptiste Vianney seems trapped in the breezes of Dearborn County, where the old French priest passes through the Indiana skies as an approval of old country ways. Once a humble priest of post-Revolutionary France, he now lingers improbably in this small corner of America—far from his time, farther still from his homeland. And yet he’s become part of the landscape: folded into the rural incense of hayfields, woodsmoke, cattle, and fried chicken. As long as Fr. Jonathan Meyer remains as pastor of All Saints Parish, Vianney will remain—an enduring, spectral presence, as rooted as the country ways he now blesses.

The remedy for the Catholic Church’s unraveling—of youth, of consequence, of authority, of transcendence and wonder—seems buried like a thousand hidden pearls in flyover-country Indiana. The fix for so much of what’s broken in our culture hides in plain sight in this southeastern corner of the state, where rolling hills, slender brooks, and two-lane roads carve through farmland and lush green pastures fed by the Ohio River. ….

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