“When I was in seminary, this wasn’t on the radar screen,” Father Gross, 36, put it. “When I was ordained, this wasn’t on the radar screen. I thought maybe I’d be a high school teacher. Or I’d be in a typical North Dakota parish with traditional North Dakota families. You go hunting, you meet people at the coffee shop. It’d be the familiar small-town stuff. But everything’s changing at warp speed.”

Image The Rev. Brian Gross ministers at Epiphany Catholic Church in Watford City, N.D. Credit... Diocese of Bismarck

Eighteen-wheelers roar down divided highways that didn’t exist a few years ago. Patches of hurry-up housing — apartments, suburb-like subdivisions, mobile homes tethered to propane tanks, barracks known as man camps — spread over the former fields of soy or cattle. Where the highest building in town used to be the grain elevator, New York investors have put up the Watford City version of a skyscraper, four stories tall. The volunteer fire company had to buy a ladder truck to be able to reach it.

For generations the remote terrain of Scandinavian and German stock, Watford City now attracts roughnecks and roustabouts, geologists and engineers. There are oil patch pros from East Texas, hopeful and desperate immigrants from Mexico, African-Americans escaping the cratered economy of places like East St. Louis. And with a male-to-female ratio estimated as high as 20 to 1, the vices have followed in step: pornography, prostitution, alcoholism, crystal meth.

The sole priest in the only Catholic church for a 20 miles around, Father Gross provides the staples of parish life: Mass seven times a week, confession whenever requested, religious education classes, baptism, first communion. He has begun a discussion group for men, made himself a regular at the town’s nine-hole golf course, and tossed down the occasional shot of tequila with Mexican parents celebrating a child’s baptism.

“You want to sit down and talk about sports? I can do that,” he said. “You want to tell me what you do on your rig? I’m authentically interested. I want to know who you are. And I want to help people realize that a relationship with Christ isn’t some ethereal, pie-in-the-sky, nuns-with-crossed-hands cute thing. When it’s 10 degrees out and the wind is howling, Jesus is a man who gets what you do. He even understands you use the F-word a lot.”

In part, Father Gross’s supple way with theology reflects his personal experience. Though born Catholic, he attended public school and a state university, working toward a degree in information technology. When his college roommate went to Mass, Father Gross stayed in their apartment to watch “The Simpsons.”

So he felt righteously ambushed when he went to confession in 2001 for the first time in 15 years. He gave up partying for Lent and printed out an annotated list of the Ten Commandments to tally up all his sins. A trial weekend in seminary convinced him that he had found the path.