Priest Named Bishop of Southern Missouri Diocese Was Named as Hero by the Federal Government in 2005

On January 24, 2008, the Vatican named Fr. James Vann Johnston, Jr., of Knoxville, TN (far right in photo above) as the new bishop of the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in southern Missouri. His consecration as a bishop is to take place on March 31, 2008. By all accounts, this 48 year-old priest seems the answer to many prayers that have been sent up along Interstate 44.

Within his new diocese, "Fr. Vann" (as he is known) will find the Ozarks, a vast area of wilderness with lakes and mountains well-known for outdoor recreation.

Fr. Vann is no stranger to the outdoors. In fact, in 2005 the U.S. Department of Interior gave him (and two of his fellow priests) a rare Citizen’s Award for Bravery for saving the lives of a father and two of his children by pulling them from the rapids of a creek at Glacier National Park in the high country of Montana.

The events surrounding that rescue and its oddly, but happily, humorous aftermath are described below--as earlier reported in Catholic East Tennessee (.pdf)--the journal of the Diocese of Knoxville.

Priests Honored for Rescuing Family

Three Tennessee priests, including two from the Diocese of Knoxville, earned national recognition this month after they saved a father and two of his children from plunging over a waterfall during a hiking vacation in Montana.

Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton presented the Citizen’s Award for Bravery to Father Vann Johnston, Father John Dowling, and Father Kevin Dowling [brothers] on Feb. 2, 2005, at the Department of the Interior’s 62nd Awards Convocation in Washington, D.C.

The award is granted “to private citizens for heroic acts or unusual bravery in the face of danger. Recipients have risked their lives to save the life” of a department employee or anyone else while on department property. Father Johnston is the Diocese of Knoxville chancellor.

Father John Dowling is pastor of St. John Neumann Parish in Farragut, and the other honoree—his younger brother—is a military chaplain at Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana as well as pastor of parishes in Hohenwald, Centerville, and Waynesboro in the Diocese of Nashville.

The priests, longtime hiking companions, had visited Glacier National Park before and began a Sunday morning in August 2002 at Many Glacier with a simple goal of hiking three and a half miles to Iceberg Lake.

The hikers encountered a family of five about an hour into the walk. Father John Dowling passed the father on the trail and needed to look up to the tall man’s 1-year-old daughter, perched high above the trail in a baby backpack carrier.

“I just looked at her and said, ‘Wow, little girl, you’re way up there, aren’t you?’ He was about 6 foot-4 or -5, so she was higher up than I was.”

Nearby were the man’s wife and the couple’s two other children, a son and daughter who were about 8 or 9 years old. Father John Dowling continued toward a hilly perch over Ptarmigan Falls, sat down, and opened a granola bar. Father Johnston approached, with Father Kevin Dowling about 100 yards behind. The family remained near the steep bank of the creek.

The older Father Dowling was having a conversation with a furry friend when the boy fell in the creek.

“I was sitting up there, and there was a little chipmunk that was in the praying, begging position,” he said. “I looked over as I opened the granola bar and said, ‘You’re not going to get any of this.’

“As soon as I said that—here I am, talking to a chipmunk—I hear this scream and look up, and this kid’s on his back going down the creek.”

With the falls about 50 feet ahead of the boy, his father made a natural spur-of-the-moment decision: he jumped in to rescue his son. In doing so, however, he brought a third person into the water: his infant daughter was still in the carrier on his back.

The priests also reacted instantly, forming a human chain, with Father Johnston on shore and the sibling priests in the water.

“We didn’t really think that much about it because we were the only ones there,” said Father Johnston. “Very often we stop at that place when there’s no one else around. It was very providential that the three of us were there so that we could help.”

With slick rocks in the creek bed and nothing to hang on to on the shore, footing was difficult.

“I was hanging on to Kevin, and I tried to keep at least one foot on something that was not slick,” said Father Johnston. “One foot was on the bank, and the other was partially in the water. Kevin was also hanging onto John and trying to stabilize the whole mass of people that was in the water.”

The father managed to reach the boy first, with Father John Dowling close behind and trying to maintain his own leverage so he could pass the boy along the line to his mother on the bank.

“I reached my right hand over the right shoulder of the man,” he said. “The baby girl was screaming in my ear, and the boy was frantic. The father was trying to hold his daughter so she wouldn’t fall out of the pack. We moved for a while, but then we got wedged in.

“I was trying to pull this young boy out. We put him up on the bank and then kind of pushed the daughter and father up so they wouldn’t fall. Vann was wedging in Kevin, and Kevin was wedging in me while I was wedging the man and the girl.”

The father’s efforts to save his son were hampered once he realized his daughter was still in the carrier. “The father stopped the boy from floating, and then the father started slipping,” said Father Kevin Dowling. The boy ended up about 20 feet short of the falls.

Five others, like the priests nominated by the National Park Service, also received bravery awards at the convocation. Overall, the event recognized the service of more than 100 Interior Department employees, private citizens, and groups in a number of categories.

“Those being honored today have made all of us proud,” said Secretary Norton in her opening remarks at the Sidney Yates Auditorium. “They have gone beyond the decision to serve. They have made their choice their calling.

“For some the choice was made in a heartbeat. They stepped up into a firestorm or jumped into a rescue.”

News of both the awards and the Washington ceremony came to the priests with less than two weeks’ notice. Each speculated that the letter announcing the honors might be a hoax because it stated the awards would be presented by Bruce Babbitt, who was Secretary of the Interior under President Clinton.

The priests told relatively few people about the event, which they said made them wonder how the Department of the Interior got wind of it. The fact that the department’s awards convocations are not held very often—the last was in October 2002—accounted for the large gap between the rescue and the recognition.

“We were all very surprised, partly because it happened two and a half years ago,” said Father Johnston. “We didn’t think too many people were even aware of it.”

The priests’ host in Montana—Father Joe Pat Moran, pastor of St. Richard Parish in Columbia Falls—was most enthusiastic about the rescue and may have notified Glacier officials, though.

“When we come home from a hike, we usually sit around the table with the priests and fill them in on our day’s activities,” said Father Kevin Dowling. “They get a kick out of hearing our tales of the wild. We came home and were pleased to give [Father Moran] a little bit of a thrill in talking about what we experienced that day. He lit up.”

The rescue story the trio told their fellow priests at the rectory had at least one lesson in it.

“We told the priests that God was with us,” said Father John Dowling. “I just remember thinking that God put us in a good place where we could help those people.”

The family never knew their rescuers were priests.

“We weren’t dressed as priests,” said Father Johnston. “After we had gotten them out of the water, they were fairly shaken up. They thanked us and decided to go back in the opposite direction, so we didn’t see them again.”

The priests continued with their day’s outing. “We knew they wanted to get out of there, with the kid all wet,” said Father Kevin Dowling. “We went about finishing our hike. Everyone was happy and hugged each other, and we headed for the hills.”

Having three priest-rescuers available on a Sunday morning, of all times, was a bit unusual. The trio had concelebrated Mass the evening before at the park and thus had their typical busy morning free.

“It’s like that old joke about the minister who plays golf on Sunday morning and shoots a hole-in-one—who’s he going to tell?” said Father John Dowling.

The priests do not know the name of the family they rescued. University of Wisconsin sweatshirts gave a hint to the family’s likely home state, and there may have been a revealing clue about their faith.

“The man had a crucifix around his neck,” said Father Kevin Dowling.

Once the rescue was over, Farragut’s Father Dowling resumed the conversation he had been having.

“I went up back on the bank, and there was that little chipmunk with my granola bar,” he said. “He was eating that thing, and I said, ‘You son of a gun. You did get it, didn’t you?’”

Wow!

As the soon-to-be Bishop Vann Johnston said in the article, "It was very providential that the three of us were there so we could help."

Surely, his arrival to southern Missouri will be providential and helpful for the faithful in those environs as well.

Godspeed soon-to-be "Bishop Vann."

More here (Knoxville newspaper article 1/25/08).

And here.