by John Bookser Feister

About the author: John Bookser Feister is an assistant editor for St. Anthony Messenger, a monthly Catholic periodical. He is also the managing editor of Catholic Update.

When I first saw my 39-year-old friend Jim lying in a nursing-home bed, he was barely responsive. I didn’t know what to think. He was emerging from a coma a month after a car wreck near the parish where he served as pastor. He had experienced a terrible blow to the head. His passenger had died. After a disappointing few weeks at a rehab center in 1997, life seemed to offer a bleak and painful future for this young priest.

Consecrated to serve the needs of others, would he now become merely an expensive burden on his small religious order and his family? Or on the...