By Kevin Wells, Crisis Magazine, Oct. 28, 2025
Kevin Wells’s latest book, Coached By the Curé: Lessons in Shepherding with St. John Vianney was just released by Scepter. His memoir, The Hermit: The Priest Who Saved a Soul, a Marriage, and a Family was released by Ignatius Press last autumn. For more information on his books, writing, and speaking, visit kevinwells.org.
Msgr. Wells’ legacy and the unmarked slave graves at Sacred Heart stir the sensus fidei, urging bishops to focus on saving souls over gestures in a faith-fading world.
This October, my uncle Msgr. Thomas Wells has been resurfacing like a ghost of warm memory from the past. At a golf tournament held in his honor, through invitations to speak at his former parishes, and in chance encounters with his old friends, I’ve been told stories of how he impacted lives. After arriving early for an event at one of his former parishes, I sat on a bench beneath an ancient oak tree, just a few feet from where my uncle’s body rests—high on the hill in the old Sacred Heart Cemetery in Bowie, Maryland. The sun was setting behind tall trees, spreading long fingers of light across the ground on the cold night, a beam of which stretched to his grave. Surrounded by hundreds of the tall trees shedding their leaves and the silence of an encroaching night—I looked at his tombstone, carved with the fitting image of the slaughtered Lamb; he had been murdered in his rectory in June of 2000. …
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