Emmitsburg ‘angel’: Travelers in distress find St. Anthony Shrine fortuitous crash site

Candida Montilla came upon the woman she describes as her guardian angel by accident – literally.

“What Karen did, the sacrifices she made to help us, it is unbelievable,” Montilla told the Review. “I thought we were going to die, but she cared for us, and found help for us. I just thank God that when we got in trouble, it was at a blessed place.”

That would be the St. Anthony Shrine in Emmitsburg, where Karen Davis serves as a secretary. Late afternoon June 11, as violent thunderstorms wracked Central Maryland, Davis got a call at home from a parishioner alerting her to an auto wreck on its campus.

Southbound on Route 15 in northern Frederick County, just past Mount St. Mary’s University, Montilla’s Dodge Caravan hydroplaned off the road and on to the shrine grounds, taking out a portion of a fence before coming to a stop. Compounding her predicament, her passengers included her husband, David, who has used a wheelchair for mobility since 1985, when a swimming accident left him paralyzed.

Davis arrived on the scene as the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office filed paperwork. She let the distraught Montilla and her grandson, Brandon Burgos, into parish offices to clean up. When she walked them back to their van, Davis met David Montilla, “and my heart broke in half.”

The Montillas planned to spend the night in their damaged van while they waited on their insurance company, but that would not do for Davis, who mobilized parish and town resources.

Ed Little, a St. Anthony parishioner, has a mobility van. Three volunteers from the Vigilant Hose Company used it to transport the Montillas to the Sleep Inn in Emmitsburg, for what turned into a five-night stay.

Davis called D&J Auto Enterprises and its collision center in Creagerstown, on the other side of Thurmont. It’s owned by her brother-in-law, Dave Ridenour, and her sister, Judy. He towed the Montillas’ van and commenced repairs to its front end, including the radiator.

“I cannot explain how good these people are,” Montilla said from her home in Temple, Pa., north of Reading. “For me, it’s all a miracle from God. I feel like Karen is my sister.”

The Montillas, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic in 1974, could not have found a person more suited to coming to their aid than Davis, whose roots in the parish go deep. 

A lifelong parishioner of the shrine, she went to work for it in 2017, a few months after her husband, Rex, became its maintenance man. 

“Before my father (Thomas Seltzer) passed away, it was his dream that one of us would work for St. Anthony,” said Davis, who had a 30-year career in the banking industry. “My ancestors helped build the church. My grandmother, Alma Seltzer, who helped my father raise us, was in the choir and the organist, and used to clean the linens at the (Mount) Seminary. She is the reason I am who I am.”

Like her grandmother, Davis cleans the linens and decorates St. Anthony Shrine. Her sister, Judy, and Dave Ridenour worship at St. Joseph in Emmitsburg, where he serves as a lector and is a member of a local men’s Bible study, Waterboys for Jesus.

The Montillas, who worship at St. Peter the Apostle in Reading, Pa., were on pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., when the accident occured. In lieu of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, before leaving Emmitsburg they stopped at the National Shrine, Grotto of Lourdes June 16, at the suggestion of Davis.

First, Montilla delivered a bottle of wine and a hug to Davis, who said it was a “team effort.”

Father Collin Poston, her pastor, said that included a higher power.

“This happened on the weekend when we celebrate the feast of our patron,” Father Poston said, of June 13 being the feast of St. Anthony of Padua. “We erected a statue of him at our cemetery on the hill that day. I believe that St. Anthony was interceding throughout, preserving the (Montilla) family from harm.”

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