Randall Meissen

Fr. Randall Meissen went to college certain he would become a doctor of bodies, and somewhere along the way found out he was meant to be a doctor of souls.

Curious, thoughtful, and genuinely easy to talk to, he treats faith as a conversation rather than a lecture, someone who says he wants to be a partner in the dialogue no matter what a person believes or does not believe. He is quick to push back on the idea that priests are dull. A sad saint is a bad saint, he likes to say, and he sees the priesthood not as a solemn duty but as a real quest for joy. Ask him to describe himself and he keeps it to three words: inquisitive, analytic, compassionate.

He came to it the long way. A farm kid from Salisbury, Missouri, the oldest of four boys, he ran his own small business trapping insects and selling the collections to biology teachers, and paid for his first car that way. Dead grasshoppers for a set of wheels, he calls it, a good trade. That scientific streak carried him to Rice University bound for medical school, until a car accident that took the life of a friend turned him toward the questions medicine could not answer. He was ordained in Rome in 2014, and the curious mind never left him, he went on to study Latin and history and still digs through old manuscripts in archives from Guatemala to Spain for the sheer pleasure of understanding how things came to be.

Everything he has ends up pointed at students. He has walked the Camino de Santiago with them and led them into the mountains of the Dominican Republic to dig water lines for families who had none, asking anyone who wanted to come along a single question: can you dig a hole? Away from the work, he hikes, kayaks, and plays Ultimate Frisbee, still the outdoor kid he was on the farm. His favorite saint is John Paul II, whose gift for making millions of people feel personally seen left a mark on him as a young man. It is the same gift Fr. Randall reaches for now, helping each student feel known, and part of something far bigger than the world they came from.