St. Ignatius of Loyola resolved to follow Christ while recovering from a cannonball injury to his leg. Richard M. Thomas, S.J., dedicated himself to the priesthood while recovering from taming a particularly unruly horse. 

Like the cannonball, that horse may one day have a supporting role in the conversion story of a Jesuit saint. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops advanced Father Thomas’s canonization cause on Nov. 11 after Bishop Peter Baldacchino of Las Cruces, N.M., presented his case.

Bishop Baldacchino noted that “countless” individuals in Mexico and the United States have devotion to Father Thomas, and that miracles attributed to his intercession are being reported and documented.

The founder of the Lord’s Ranch, a lay charismatic Catholic community in Vado, N.M., near the border with Mexico, Father Thomas was defined by an “uncompromising devotion to the Lord,” according to Ellen Hogarty, a lay leader for the Lord’s Ranch and personal assistant to Father Thomas for 20 years. In an interview with America, she recounted how the late priest affected those who knew him through his dedication to a life of humble service.

“So many of us were inspired and challenged by Father Thomas,” said Ms. Hogarty. He had a “desire to serve [others] wholeheartedly for the greater glory of God.”

The canonization candidate was not always so eager in his vocation. In his biography of Father Thomas, A Poor Priest for the Poor, Richard Dunstan wrote that Father Thomas was somewhat unenthusiastic about his calling at first.

While he was recovering from his aforementioned encounter with the horse (whom he not so affectionately called “Hitler”), “Father Rick,” as he was known to his friends, heard the voice of God. “God spoke to me so strongly to be a priest. And I had never wanted to be one. I had shut that out of my life, but he made it very clear at that time that I had to be a priest,” Father Thomas said in a 1988 interview.

And so, at the age of 16, he resolved to follow the path he believed God wanted for him. 

Father Thomas was a student at Jesuit High School in Tampa, Fla., when he felt that fateful calling. Born in 1928 to a Protestant father, a phosphate prospector and rancher, and a Catholic mother, a Canadian lawyer, his eclectic life began on a sprawling 20-acre ranch in the rural Florida town of Seffner. The valedictorian of his high school class, he joined the Society of Jesus in the New Orleans Province right after graduating in 1945. 

Ms. Hogarty said that while he always remained obedient to God’s calling, he was reluctant to fully embrace his vocation early in his formation. After three weeks in Louisiana, he told a priest that he wanted to go home, but his confidence in God’s will for him ultimately led him to stay.

After completing the regency stage of his Jesuit formation in 1955, Father Thomas studied theology at St. Mary’s College in Kansas, but health issues led him to finish his studies at Alma College in Los Gatos, Calif. He was ordained in San Francisco in 1958.

He then taught high school in Dallas and New Orleans before being transferred in 1964 to the place where he would carry out his life’s work: Our Lady’s Youth Center, a ministry to the poor in El Paso, Tex.

Taking over as the executive director for his former high school teacher Harold Rahm, S.J., Father Thomas expanded the center to “include ministries to the poor in different areas of Juárez, Mexico, including food banks, medical and dental clinics, prison and mental hospital ministries and schools,” according to the Lord’s Ranch website.

Mr. Dunstan wrote that he once “told his entire 10-state Jesuit province it needed to repent” and “took more advice from his friends from the shantytowns of Juárez than he did from…bishops.” Ms. Hogarty described him as a “lone ranger” priest deeply involved in his local community.

The Pillar reported that Father Thomas was a “beloved figure in both the charismatic and pro-life community” while working in El Paso. He was arrested multiple times for nonviolently protesting outside of abortion clinics. In 1969, he  had a charismatic religious experience at a prayer service.

On Christmas Day in 1972, the canonization candidate’s ministry turned miraculous. 

He went with some volunteers to deliver food to people who worked at a garbage dump in Juárez. They only brought enough to feed 150 individuals, but in a modern recreation of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, they were able to feed over 300, according to the U.S.C.C.B. statement. Leftovers were donated to three orphanages.

Following this event, Father Thomas’s resolve to serve the poor in Juárez was strengthened. The U.S.C.C.B. stated that he “considered it the duty of every Christian to share with the poor and preached on Catholic social teaching and living out the Gospel values taught by Christ.”

Auxiliary Bishop Peter L. Smith of Portland, Ore., spoke highly of Father Thomas and remarked on the reported miracles that were a regular occurrence in his ministry. In supporting the advancement of Father Thomas’s causes, Bishop Smith noted, “He was always very joyful, and faith just radiated from him.”

Father Thomas founded the Lord’s Ranch in 1975 in the desert of southern New Mexico. It was originally meant to serve as a summer camp for the poor children of El Paso. Father Thomas cultivated a missionary community dedicated to serving the poor. There, volunteers harvested crops and produced dairy products to send to the Lord’s Food Bank in Juárez.

“The Lord’s Ranch is alive and thriving,” said Ms. Hogarty. Today, most of their ministries take place in Mexico, and they run several food banks, a Montessori school, a medical clinic and a dental clinic. Volunteers also teach catechism and prepare others for the sacraments.

“It’s a testimony to the foundation that Father Rick Thomas laid,” said Ms. Hogarty.

It is notable that the bishops are advancing Father Thomas’s cause at a point when immigration has come to the forefront of the U.S.C.C.B.’s concerns. He spent decades providing spiritual and material care to the poor along the U.S.-Mexico border, although his ministry was not with migrants specifically. He also worked with others like Ruben Garcia of Annunciation House, an El Paso-based nonprofit that serves migrants in the borderlands, according to Ms. Hogarty.

Father Thomas died in 2006, and calls for his canonization began immediately following his death. In 2011, formal steps for his canonization began after the mandatory five-year waiting period. In 2012, the provincial of the New Orleans province at the time, Mark Lewis, S.J., gave formal permission to publish a prayer card for those seeking Father Thomas’s intercession.

Father Thomas left a challenging legacy that people will use to define this potential saint as his profile rises. Mr. Dunstan provided some sage advice for those who would try to pigeonhole the charismatic leader.

“Rick Thomas isn’t an easy man to get a handle on,” Mr. Dunstan wrote. “Was he an old-fashioned pre-Vatican II Catholic or a radical, a barrio politician in a Roman collar or a supernaturalist fanatic, a slave-driver or a clown?”

In the end, the “common thread” is that he “would go to absolutely any lengths to do what he believed God wanted him to do,” Mr. Dunstan wrote. “And he was convinced that God had zero concern about how crazy it looked.”

With reporting from OSV News.

Edward Desciak is an O'Hare Fellow at America Media.