The Story of a Priest, an Old Acura, and a Raffle
New cars come to priests in mysterious ways. Here’s how one Virginian got a new ride.
Written by Alex Reale
Reviewed by Lisa Steuer McArdle
There’s no good way to replace your old car right now, what with the
continuing paucity and expense
of available options. So what is an owner of an aging car to do? If you’re tired of scouring Craigslist and refreshing the Tesla homepage, you could just give up on rationality and trust in random good fortune. After all, a broken clock is still right twice a day.Here’s how a Catholic priest with a 13-year-old
Acura
became an unexpected lucky recipient of a new set of wheels.Divine intervention?
Father Francis J. Peffley of St. Mary of Sorrows Church in Fairfax, Virginia, reports
The Arlington Catholic Herald
, made a pastime of joking about the longevity of his 2009 Acura MDX on social media. He and his followers had been awaiting the day that the car would roll past 400,000 miles, and it did so, hilariously, on Father Peffley’s birthday. This mileage milestone wasn’t quite playing the car offstage, but it wasn’t a number to sniff at either. Though there are a few million mile cars out there, they are definitely unicorns—400,000 miles is a lot to put on a typical car. Someone who had been following along with the Father Peffley Acura saga appeared to take notice of this fact.
A month and a half after his birthday, Father Peffley found out that he had won a new
Buick Encore
in a dicoesan raffle. But here’s the kicker: none of the tickets he or any of his friends had bought contained the winning numbers. The moral of the story? Tell your friends and acquaintances when your car is starting to get old, and someone will anonymously find a way to get you a new one.
A new Buick or an old Acura
Father Peffley is still planning to drive his Acura until the wheels fall off, in spite of the new addition to his garage, says the Herald.
Is this the right choice? It’s impossible to say, but for safety purposes, ideally he’d switch to the Buick Encore. Even if “new” meant the first year that the Encore was on the market, that would mean that it was released in 2012, which is a three-year jump on the release date of the MDX.
Why does this difference matter? Even skipping over the old Acura’s factors of wear and tear, it’s generally a good rule of thumb to take an option for a younger car. Automotive safety features improve by leaps and bounds each year, so a three-year gap can be substantial.
Of course, Father Peffley clearly took great care of his Acura, so he could be the exception to the rule. It wouldn’t be the first time.
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