Taking St Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney, Patron of Parish Priests, as his model, Fr Jonathan Meyer is determined to make his people Saints.
From Crisis
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.
Perhaps the renewal unfolding here—a steady drawing of hearts back to Jesus Christ and His Church—goes largely unnoticed because it’s being led by the holy unconformity of a twister-in-a-cassock named Fr. Meyer who pushes his massive flock to strive for their own canonization. This revival is not powered by programs, platforms, or synodal ways; it is powered by imitation: a priest modeling himself after the Curé of Ars, St. John Vianney—the country pastor who climbed the hard wood of the cross each day to heal a broken Church and nation and became, arguably, the greatest parish priest in history.
The humble flock who worships here seldom speaks of the miracles that have unfolded in this quiet area of Hoosier land. This set rarely speaks of the supernatural; they are men in pickup trucks and mothers raising families—people rooted to the unglamorous rhythm of rural life. But they know that God has been generous to them, especially in sending a priest who seemed to descend a spiral staircase into their souls to hear them out and save their sacred heirlooms.
When the 2013 decision came to close a handful of the historic churches that had dotted the Dearborn County landscape for over a century, the new pastor assigned to carry it out did something unexpected: he listened. Over time, Fr. Meyer began to see what they saw—their German and Irish ancestors baking the bricks, hoeing the mortar, snapping the string lines, and laying the foundation for the red brick-and-steepled churches that had anchored their families and their faith for generations. These were rural shrines, passed down as reminders of what once was, what strong faith demanded, and what devotion to God could still be.
If you want to understand the story of Fr. Meyer—how he helped mend the torn hearts of a fraying community, and how his patron, St. John Vianney, guided his rescue mission—you first need to know the fabric of Dearborn County. Here, it’s not unusual to shake the cracked hand of a grain farmer, machinist, deer hunter, lineman, manufacturer, or self-made entrepreneur. Folks here keep their heads down. Life runs on prayer, early mornings, honest labor, and effort to mold happy families.
But beneath that humility lies a quiet awareness: that grace is real, that the supernatural walks beside the ordinary, and that the intercession of Vianney saved their community. In Dover, St. Leon, New Alsace, Yorkville, Guilford, and all the zero-stoplight towns that surround them, people still believe in miracles, and they know—often—they arrive at the last moment.
Decades before they received their last-second miracle, the people of Dearborn County already knew the story of another small-town Hoosier miracle—one that unfolded in Milan, a speck of a town just a crow’s flight away. At Klump’s Tavern, during parish fried chicken festivals, over Skyline Chilis, and in the American Legion halls scattered across the county, the tale of Milan’s miracle still surfaces—threading into conversation like Larry Bird crashing through the lane. The miracle of ’54 is spoken of with reverence here, like scripture passed down. Folks around here understand something: miracles have a way of showing up in quiet places like theirs—in forgotten corners like Nazareth, Fatima, Lourdes, Ars—and Milan, Indiana.
Indiana’s most famous basketball game is remembered mostly because of a quiet shooting guard who knew he had to act fast—a boy held the ball as the clock ticked toward zero. Few here recall the play-by-play from the game played 71 years ago, but mention the name Bobby Plump at Widolff’s, Klump’s, or the St. Leon Taverns, and a few men will set down their Miller Lites and start flinging their arms around. These men and this tight-knit community know all about Plump’s jump shot and the night the unimaginable happened—when wide shafts of Bethlehem light seemed to cover Indiana’s sky. The night Milan had won.
Parishioners at All Saints will tell you that Plump’s shot and the Milan miracle is the same story of their pastor, Fr. Meyer, who flung a last-ditch Hail Mary into the sky when the closure of Indiana’s most historic churches was all but inevitable. These years later, his last-shot attempt has led to All Saints becoming one of the most authentically Catholic and fastest-growing parishes and counties in America.
“This priest set me on a course that changed my life,” said All Saints parishioner R.J. Beck while watching his son pitch in a Little League baseball game. “But he has done this for many people here. He’s relentless with us. He drives us to pull more from ourselves, like the saints did. Because he believes we should be striving to become canonized saints.”
Still, what does a magnanimous priest and an iconic basketball game have to do with a French saint being pulled from his tomb to help save some old country churches and heal a grieving community? Quite a bit, if you ask the parishioners of All Saints. Because when their young pastor was swept into their storm—when the community saw him as the diocese’s hired gun sent to shut down their churches—they realized he didn’t face their anger alone. Fr. Meyer had brought with him an obscure saint: John Vianney.
As a young seminarian, Fr. Meyer had discovered Vianney and learned about the violent attacks he endured from Satan. He also learned that Vianney heard more confessions than perhaps any priest in the world. He began to make yearly pilgrimages to Ars, where he came to know the saint’s unorthodox pastoral rhythms, sanctity, and poured-out love as well as any man in America. He saw how Vianney turned a spiritually dead village after the Reign of Terror into a town of willing saints.
So, in those raw and uncertain days in Dearborn County, Fr. Meyer kept turning, again and again, to his patron: John Vianney, what do I do? Or better yet—what would you do?
From that point on, it was as if Vianney traveled across the mysteries of time to plant a seed in Fr. Meyer’s imagination—an idea that began as the faintest pinhole of hope and solution. As it took shape, Vianney seemed to keep whispering into the soul of his spiritual son: Jonathan—look at Bobby Plump. Just days remained before Dearborn County’s rural churches became forever closed. The pastor was in a tight spot. The ball was in his hands.
Before fully grasping how Milan’s miracle merges with the miracle of All Saints, it helps to start with the miracle game, perhaps the most famous high school basketball game ever to be played in America. Folks here know miracles don’t just come like lightning from the sky. Often, they only get stirred to life on the other side of sacrifice, struggle, and lonely nights. Only then can they emerge and begin to flower.
Back in ’54, almost no one—save their die-hard Milan High backers in Butler Fieldhouse and the ones back home clinging to their transistors—believed the undersized boys in black and gold had a real shot in the state title game. Muncie Central was an Indiana basketball dynasty that had taken two of the last three state championships. With an enrollment of 1,660, Muncie was one of the largest schools in Indiana. Milan had just 161 students—and only 73 boys to draw from for its team.
Milan, a humble town down a few winding roads from All Saints, was like countless other Indiana farm towns in the 1950s. At sundown, when the chores were done and the fields had quieted, boys flung basketballs at hoops nailed to barn walls and telephone poles. They dreamed of becoming the next Branch McCracken, sharp-shooter Charlie Secrist, or John Wooden—the three-time All-American known as the “Indiana Rubber Man” for his hustle.
A handful of those dreamers came together to form Milan’s varsity team in ’54. As the season unfolded and Milan began to stack up some victories, the townsfolk began to believe that their boys held promise. The overachieving Indians kept beating just about every rural school in their path. Then, on a cold March morning—as if caught up in a dream—the players boarded cars and headed westbound. They knew they were the reason that a long caravan, filled with nearly the entire town, were following them to Indianapolis to see if they could slay a giant. Waiting for them at the end of the 83-mile stretch was a team superior in size, height, depth, athleticism, and just about everything else.
As the farm boys were led through the stadium’s cold underbelly and into the cavernous fieldhouse, they came into view of their towering city opponents for the first time, and they saw that basketball looked different on the other side of the Ripley County line. Looking up at the force from Muncie, the boys from Milan understood exactly who they were. They were David.
But when the whistle blew for the opening tip, the Milan boys played like farm boys are taught, fighting with the grit they’d learned in the fields. Muncie Central couldn’t shake them. And as the game wore on, their opponent saw will in their eyes, a quiet confidence that seemed to widen with every possession. This wouldn’t be a rout. Muncie had found itself in a dogfight.
With the score tied 30-30, and the last of the thirty-two frenetic minutes bleeding away, a pass was thrown to Plump, who faked left and drove right. Grainy footage shows his high-arching shot released near the free throw line. It is perhaps the most famous jump ever taken in the history of American high school basketball. When the rubber soles of his Converse Chuck Taylor’s touched down, nothing would ever be the same again.
The overflow crowd—and the tens of thousands listening by radio—knew they had become bystanders to a miracle. The unthinkable had happened: Milan, the team of rural, hard-working dreamers, had become the best team in Indiana.
This is the type of miracle Dearborn County understands and values.
The greatest upset in Indiana basketball history was immortalized in Hoosiers—a film widely considered one of the greatest sports movies ever made. The script opens with small-town suspicion: a new, mysterious coach, played by Gene Hackman, arrives to cold stares and quiet resentment. The townsfolk don’t trust him.
In March of 2014, Fr. Jonathan Meyer walked into a strikingly similar storyline. When he arrived at his new assignment in southeastern Indiana, all four parish communities had already lawyered up—each hiring canon lawyers in a last-ditch effort to save their beloved churches by Vatican appeals. And to many, Fr. Meyer wasn’t a shepherd but a company hatchet man.
Not long after his arrival, while in his cassock and filling his gas tank, Fr. Meyer was verbally assaulted by a parishioner. He had already heard plenty of vitriol—backlash, laments, and pleas made in measured tones. But few in Dearborn County knew then that Fr. Meyer was a pretty good listener.
In seminary, Fr. Meyer set a goal to model his future priesthood after Vianney. So he understood that his patron saint was one of the greatest listeners the world has ever known. Vianney spent up to fourteen hours a day in the confessional, listening to men and women pour out their sin. He listened so often that a special train line was eventually built to carry the tens of thousands who came—first to Lyon, then on foot the remaining 50 kilometers to Ars—seeking his ear and absolution, and, on occasion, to have their souls laid bare before them.
In time, as the detoxification period and the scabs of cynicism began to lift—Dearborn County Catholics saw that Fr. Meyer had been pulled into their undertow of sorrow, and he had begun grieving with them. The priest could see the inside of them; the old churches had become imprints in their souls.
Alone in his rectory at night, when Fr. Meyer prayed and reflected on the tide of his parishioners’ pain, Vianney kept emerging like shafts of variegated light. Fr. Meyer saw him on the winter day in 1818, when he knelt in his empty parish church for the first time and offered God a prayer that has echoed through the ages:
My God, grant me the conversion of my parish. I am willing to suffer all my life, whatever it may please You to lay upon me; yes, even for a hundred years, I am prepared to endure the sharpest pains, only let my people be converted.
Like Fr. Meyer, and like Gene Hackman’s character in Hoosiers, Vianney arrived in town only to be met with anger, suspicion, and closed hearts. But after that first prayer, he began to pour himself out. Thereafter, like pebbles dropped into a pond, the Curé of Ars offered his flock an ever-widening stream of sacrifices: mortifications, penances, all-night prayers, spiritual battles with the devil, and countless unseen acts of love. His self-emptying way sent ripples far beyond the borders of Ars—reaching villages, cities, and hearts across France and beyond.
St. John Vianney is credited with bringing tens of thousands back to the Faith in the wake of Robespierre’s bloody revolution, which had declared a new “age of reason” to replace the old Catholic order. The Mass, the sacraments, miracles—even belief in the resurrected God—were forced aside and replaced in favor of man-made enlightenment and reason. Countless faithful priests and laypeople who refused to abandon their Catholic faith were led up scaffolds, where their heads were removed.
This was the atmosphere in which Vianney grew up as a boy.
Aware of his hero’s willingness to embrace hard things and transform them through sacrifice and God’s grace, Fr. Meyer begged Vianney to implore God for the wisdom to know how to keep St. Paul’s, St. Martin’s, St. John’s, and St. Joseph’s from forever closing.
Then the idea emerged; he would take the four churches and merge them into a single parish—where Mass would still be celebrated at each parish church (that would be renamed “campuses”) on Sundays. This new one-parish home would have one religious education program, one parish council, one youth ministry program, one ladies’ sodality, one men’s group, etc.—one of everything; except for their 21 campuses/buildings.
Eager—if not desperate—to keep their four churches open, the faithful of Dearborn County began to rally around Fr. Meyer’s proposal: a one-parish-multiple-site solution. They asked him to take it to His Excellency, Archbishop Joseph Tobin of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, now a cardinal in Newark. Fr. Meyer pleaded their case—not just for the church buildings but for their souls. His zeal was met with an open heart. Tobin agreed to the model; but two conditions had to be met: future priests would not be overburdened, and the parishes could financially support the new movement to unify the four parish communities.
A handful of priests considered the one-parish idea shortsighted, impractical, and even harebrained. Some hinted that Fr. Meyer’s rescue mission was pridefully quixotic and more about him than what he had been ordered to do when he was transferred to Dearborn County—and that was to close down the churches. But at that point, Fr. Meyer’s hand was already on the plow. A large amount of pastoral work lay ahead; four disparate parish communities needed to be fused into one, and for All Saints Parish to survive and become a sustained place of worship and reception of the sacraments, a yawning hole needed to be filled.
Now, the deeper story begins.
As Fr. Meyer set to work to steer the many layers and moving parts of his heaved Hail Mary, no one knew that it wasn’t his own effort guiding things. It was Vianney’s. Fr. Meyer decided to follow, almost to the letter, the exact same pastoral blueprint St. John Vianney used in Ars to bring order from chaos. If the merging of a family from complete strangers worked, it would be because of the Curé of Ars.
“As a father, I needed to lead them through a death, help them grieve, and help to lead and bring them through the process,” Fr. Meyer said.
Thereafter, after listening and hearing them, it was time to help lead them into a new way. The one-parish approach would take a lot of work, but it had so much hope. It was a dream, and as Vianney showed, sacrifice and effort can make dreams real.
So, what does revival look like in Hoosier country, fueled by the example of a French priest from more than two centuries ago?
For starters, because Vianney adored Jesus before the monstrance several hours each day, Fr. Meyer awakened before dawn to spend the first two hours of each day before Jesus’ Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. At Mass, he preached over and over about the lifeblood of the Eucharist; then he opened a Perpetual Adoration Chapel. Later, he opened another in a different part of the county. As you read this sentence, at least two souls, and likely more, are in the heartland of Indiana adoring Jesus in two Perpetual Adoration chapels. “If the spiritual life and the Eucharist is primary,” Fr. Meyer said.
People’s hearts become healed, they are taken back to Jesus and away from the world’s distractions. Two perpetual adoration chapels is something Vianney would have loved because he knew adoration of Jesus was the most vital part of his priesthood, ministry, and parish.
Vianney heard more confessions than perhaps any priest in the history of the world, so Fr. Meyer availed himself every day to absolve sin with scheduled confessions, which eventually led him to offering twelve successive hours of confessions at All Saints once a month. Today, twelve consecutive hours of confessions are offered twice a month.
Vianney built an orphanage for poor and disregarded youth and spent each day of his priesthood catechizing young people. So, Fr. Meyer dove into youth ministry and young adult ministry, and thereafter he began to annually host a weekend retreat for a few hundred teens. He has taken as many as 70 youth to World Youth Days and many more to youth conferences. He tends to teens outside of his parish, coaching the local public high school track and cross country teams.
Much of his time is spent training, recruiting, and shepherding altar boys. Today, an average Sunday Mass at All Saints includes fifteen altar boys, but that often stretches to more than twenty. Meanwhile, many U.S. parishes struggle to find altar servers at all. At All Saints, because of a lack of space, altar boys are often found tucked into tight crevices, where they become hidden behind large plants, whose palms poke their faces.
Vianney consecrated his parish, St. Sixtus, to the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So, that’s what Fr. Meyer did. The Curé once wrote down each of his parishioner’s names, put them in a gold locket, and placed it around Our Lady’s neck, where each name in Ars rested by Mary’s Immaculate Heart. So, Fr. Meyer did the same with every single name of his All Saints parishioners and beyond.
Vianney gave away everything to do whatever he could to find the money to repair and beautify his neglected parish church. The saint knew his flock innately desired to worship before beautiful altars, statuary, tabernacles, stained-glass windows, and ornately-weaved vestments. So, Fr. Meyer aimed for the same. With volunteers, parishioners with gifted trades, and his own paintbrush, he organized volunteers to spend hundreds of hours beautifying each church. Fr. Meyer even looked like Vianney; his fiddlebacks and vestments resembled the same ones displayed in Vianney’s old rectory in Ars. “We dress like our heroes,” Fr. Meyer said. “In the same way that I wore the number 22 on my back playing sports in high school.”
Vianney fasted and embraced severe penances for both the souls of his flock and the wayward villagers removed from Christ. So, Fr. Meyer did his best to live ascetically, where he tried to keep up with some of the practices of the mortified priest, who was relentlessly attacked by Satan. He joined Exodus 90 groups year after year, a program designed to strip away technology, alcohol, food, hot showers, sports and news consumption, etc., to enable men to spend more time devoted to Christ, their families, and to living virtuously.
Vianney preached principally and unapologetically on virtue and morality, and of how the soul hungered to live an ordered and virtuous life. Vianney told his parishioners, who had once fallen from the Faith and left the sacraments, that sainthood was still possible for them. So, Fr. Meyer preached and preaches similarly today, imploring his parishioners to strive for virtue and sainthood.
Vianney walked to every home in his parish grounds, inviting those who had abandoned the Faith back to Mass and the sacraments. So, Fr. Meyer, too, began to reach out and visit residents of Dearborn County one by one. He and his deacon visited and blessed more than 300 homes during the Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2016.
“Each parish community needed to be willing to die to themselves and to how they had always seen and done things,” Fr. Meyer said.
So I needed to be willing to do whatever I could as their father to lay down my life for them. As we were working together to become one, I knew that by accepting the deaths of the old ways and customs, that our community could eventually enter into what would seem like a beautiful wedding feast.
In 2021, Fr. Meyer received a new assignment—not to leave All Saints but to become pastor to three more neighboring parishes. The new archbishop, Charles Thompson, entrusted St. Teresa, St. Lawrence, and St. Mary’s to Meyer, affirming and adding on to the way of Vianney, who was regarded by tens of thousands as the spiritual father of France at the time of his death in 1859.
“The people at St. Teresa, St. Lawrence and St. Mary’s are my beloved sons and daughters now. It is wonderful,” Fr. Meyer said. “All of us, All Saints Parish and the three parishes are together in a desire; we strive to live for God alone.”
This past May 31st marked the 100th anniversary of St. John Vianney’s canonization, so of course All Saints parishioners knew Fr. Meyer wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to pull his hero—Dearborn County’s hero—into his Sunday sermon. Parishioners carry an unsentimental clarity of what holiness demands; like Vianney and Fr. Meyer, it is to never count the cost to care for souls in the name of Jesus. No parish in America knows Vianney as intimately as the flock at All Saints and St. Teresa, St. Lawrence, and St. Mary’s.
“I want you all to see that God does astonishing things through small things and small towns,” Fr. Meyer preached that Sunday.
What this man [Vianney] did in the middle of nowhere at a tiny parish in France makes no sense. He helped to convert all of France.
Ars and the parishioners of Ars have set forth a pattern and a model of how a parish and people should live. He is a model of priesthood and parish life for the whole world to imitate; it is a model that should be followed throughout the whole world—all because of Vianney—and only because of Vianney. He is the model for all priests. …the model for all that has transpired here in Dearborn County.
I believe that God does great things with and through small churches and small congregations—and I believe God has done, and is doing, amazing things here, right here in Dearborn County.
So, what has Fr. Meyer learned from his experience ten years later.
“So much in parish life needs to change, but we resist change,” he said. “We fight out of fear and out of fear of losing our small ‘t’ traditions,” Fr. Meyer said.
Clearly, what we had been doing was not working—there was no growth, but we just kept doing it. We needed to stop doing the same thing over and over. Normal is toxic, and it isn’t working in the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church doesn’t always have to do things the same exact way. Of course the customs and norms of the Church must always stay the same, but we can’t keep doing the same things and expect different results. It’s an exciting time to reimagine the priesthood, to reimagine parish life, and realize that it’s not going to be comfortable. Change and transition is never comfortable.
Fr. Meyer continued: “St. John Vianney didn’t do the things that weren’t working, that other priests were doing after the French Revolution. He knew he had to die to everything to love his people as their father. So, he gave them the very best—he gave them his very life!”
Perhaps Vianney’s small-font biographies and compilations on his sermons have received short shrift because of the radical subject matter. The French saint gave away his body each day, in persona Christi, as the Slaughtered Lamb, as if he had nailed his priesthood to the hard wood of the Cross. As Christ poured out his Blood on Golgotha, Vianney used the discipline each day, slept only a few hours each night, radically fasted from food, and subjected himself to unseen self-denials, penances, and mortifications throughout each day. He was devoted intensely to prayer, the Eucharist, Our Lady, and the conversion of souls as he amputated all comforts from his life.
A story has been captured by various biographers: as he neared death, Satan appeared to him one last time through the shrieking words of a possessed woman: “If there were three like you on earth, my kingdom would be destroyed.”
Perhaps tales such as these are considered nothing more than pious folklore, and perhaps the Vianney-Meyer vision of priesthood is considered too much and out-of-touch for the Church in 2025. But Vianney’s modern-day imprisoning by clergy members is ironic: he is their very model—the patron saint of parish priests—whom Pope Pius XI, Pope John XXIII, John Paul the Great, Benedict, and recently, Pope Leo, have each taken turns lauding in letters to their priests as one who lived like a tipped-over chalice of poured-out love. In essence, the popes have written and said to them: Don’t take your eyes off of Vianney. He is your model. Still, Vianney’s way seems to have mostly been locked behind unused rectory doors.
So, it should be no surprise that some call Fr. Meyer too much of a priest. And to be fair, it is rather easy to poke fun at him for his devotion to the Curé of Ars. He has turned his bedroom into an exact replica of Vianney’s, complete with yellow and blue curtains that surround his bed and framed pictures of saints on the walls, arranged in the same fashion as in Vianney’s former bedroom.
“Some might think going to sleep and waking up each day in a bedroom that looks exactly like John Vianney’s is too much,” said R.J. Beck, who credits Fr. Meyer for saving his Catholic faith. “But when I was a boy, there was a Bo Jackson poster on my wall. I wanted to become like my hero…St. John Vianney is Fr. Meyer’s hero. And he wants constant reminders of him.”
A local artist spent days painting an image of Fr. Meyer and Vianney, kneeling shoulder to shoulder in St. Paul’s pew. It is a striking portrait; two priests separated by centuries, continents apart, but mystifyingly interchangeable as they unite in prayer before the tabernacle.
Yes—it is easy to scoff at Fr. Meyer. When someone asked him recently what other French pilgrim sites he should visit while in Ars, Fr. Meyer said: “I really don’t know. I’ve never left Ars.” Last year, he opened a large coffeehouse in Dearborn County and named it Ars after the village that Vianney pastored. He said he named it Ars because of Vianney’s ability to listen to people’s burdens, struggles, and shortcomings in his wooden confessional for two-thirds of his life. “That is what I wanted at Ars, a place where people could listen to one another, and enjoy a great cup of coffee,” Fr. Meyer said. “Our world would change if we listened like Vianney.”
On the night of the 100th anniversary of Vianney’s canonization, Fr. Meyer opened his Ars coffeehouse after hours and invited his high school altar boys and their dads to join him and his closest friend, Fr. Hollowell, to watch the premier showing of a movie on the life of St. John Vianney. The following day, Fr. Meyer, who had purchased 750 copies of my new book, Coached by the Curé: Lessons in Shepherding with St. John Vianney, disseminated them to the families of his parish after Mass.
“St. John Vianney has absolutely changed my life. I would not be who I am as a priest without him,” Fr. Meyer said.
He was my formator in seminary. He was my catechist. He was, and is, my model.… I want to be a saint. I want to be a great priest. So I look to keep looking to St. John Vianney to take me there.
It was on this weekend, when I visited All Saints Parish, that a single thought emerged, one I had never seen as clearly: priests exist to bring people to conversion, where even entire towns, counties—and in Vianney’s case—even nations are converted to live for God alone, and one day attain Heaven.
“I used to be intimidated by Fr. Meyer because he was always driving me for more. I think others were like me,” said parishioner Dave Siegel.
But that’s what true fathers, true shepherds, do. They challenge us to do the hard work to become more like Christ. Because Fr. Meyer loves us, he wants us to love and serve the Lord with all that we have. He wants to take us to Heaven.
Pictured: Fr Jonathan Meyer
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