Miracles aren’t always welcomed.

In Park Hills, a beautiful spot on the Kentucky side of the river, a group of traditional Catholic newcomers wants to build a grotto, like the one in Lourdes, France, where miracles are said to have happened.

But the preparation for such a miracle is drawing fire from those who worry about the traffic that would come, the changes that would be required of the town of 3,000 and the more narrow mindset that many say is coming with it.

“Everyone is entitled to believe what they want,” said resident Gretchen Stephenson. “I have a problem when those beliefs cross into our secular government.”

Park Hills almost seems like an extension of the adjacent Devou Park. A community garden blossoms with begonias and daisies in the middle of early 20th-century middle-class and upper middle-class homes.

A year ago, Our Lady of Lourdes Church opened.

Not many in the community took note when, in June 2016, Covington Bishop Roger Foys issued a decree consecrating the 80-year-old church building. A year earlier, the nondenominational Christian Faith Church moved out.

Our Lady of Lourdes is now the only diocesan-recognized church in the Cincinnati area devoted solely to the old Latin Mass.

The church faces Park Hills City Hall across the town’s main road, the two-lane Amsterdam Road.

And where some diocesan churches struggle to find a priest, Our Lady of Lourdes has five.

Images of heaven

This is no ordinary Catholic church.

Our Lady of Lourdes is run by a new order of priests called the Missionaries of St. John the Baptist. It’s bringing the devout from as far away as Texas and Louisiana. They call themselves Traditional Catholics.

Their masses are in Latin. Priests wear cassocks. Female parishioners wear veils.

A Franciscan monk sitting outside with a laptop one afternoon in June said the church has given him refuge since his visa expired in Britain.

For many members as well, Our Lady of Lourdes has provided an escape from the rest of the world.

“What I love about it, it takes you out of reality for a while and puts you as close to heaven as you will get here on Earth,” said Maria Merklin, 48, of Independence.

Merklin, like many of the more than 100 members of Our Lady of Lourdes, didn’t grow up with the Latin Mass. She discovered it later in life. Merklin grew up Catholic, lost her faith and careened through different religions as she traveled the world. At one point she almost became Mormon.

Then, in 2006, she attended her first Latin Mass. It was at Sacred Heart Church in Camp Washington.

“It felt like coming in after a big party that stripped the churches and got rid of everything beautiful and everything that made us stand apart as Catholics,” she said. “When I found this, it was like I came home. I got back what was taken away from us.”

Being a Traditional Catholic, however, involves more than Latin phrases. Members value modesty and some of them wear dresses that look ripped from the set of “Little House on the Prairie.”

“We dress modestly all the time,” Merklin said with a laugh. “I don’t wear pants, ever. I feel this is a gift that God gave me.”

She doesn’t dress as strict as some other members. Her long black dress one Sunday covered her feet but wouldn’t look out of place when you see her walking down the street.

You can buy the clothing online, handmade by one of the church members who moved here from Louisiana. But she makes a variety of dresses and robes, some that look like they’re from Biblical times. She declined to be interviewed.

The church’s separation from the outside world is a large part of its appeal. Almost all of the members, 98 percent by some of the congregation’s estimates, homeschool their children. In the basement of the church, parents and the children meet once a week for an educational co-op.

Our Lady of Lourdes is dream come true for Ken Zalewski. The 48-year-old Taylor Mill resident for the past 10 years has led a local effort to find a permanent church for Traditional Catholics.

He said that only a decade ago he lived the rock ‘n roll lifestyle and was in a strained marriage.

“Keith Richards was my idol,” Zalewski said.

Zalewski doesn’t give off a Keith Richards vibe anymore.

Dressed in a black blazer, tie and dress shirt, Zalewski stood in the basement of Our Lady of Lourdes. He’s a member of Una Voce, an international group devoted to spreading the Latin Mass.

“It’s not a lot different than what the pope was doing in the 500s,” Zalewski said. “This is the mass that converted the entire Western world.”

On a recent Sunday, the Latin phrases, chanted by the priest and congregation in unison, gave the service a hypnotic quality. Incense wafted to the rafters. There were a lot of silence and pauses. The hum of fans filled the church.

Throughout the mass, a line formed in the back of the church. It was a line for confession.

Images of hell

During a service in June, Pastor Shannon Collins ascended the lectern to give a homily. He unfurled a tale about a 10th-century Russian tsar who slaughters people only to later see the error of his ways and convert to Catholicism.

He warned his parishioners about attacks from neo-pagans. Who the neo-pagans are, he didn’t specify. But the church members seemed to understand what he’s talking about.

He ends on a fiery note.

“Christian culture in all its wonders is replaced by a godless culture that is far worse,” Collins said. “How so much we need the Holy Ghost and his Holy Fire to renew the face of the earth. Unfortunately, it looks as if that fire will come first in the form of chastisement in a fiery conflagration.”

Strong stuff.

Away from the pulpit, Collins strikes a more diplomatic tone. The church doesn't want to clash with the community.

Collins said they will go through all the zoning and city approvals needed. They participated in the town's Memorial Day Parade with a float. A church member dressed as the Virgin Mary struck a prayerful pose on a float made to look like a grotto.

But they are clashing with the community.

They’re planning a grotto, like the one that made the peasant girl into St. Bernadette, and the cave into a destination for millions of pilgrims over the past 150 years. (Every year, 350,000 pilgrimscontinue to bathe in the waters of the spring in the grotto, which believers have attributed miraculous healings.)

So intent are the members of Park Hills church on achieving this goal that they are raising $300,000 to $400,000 to have a grotto by 2019, according to the church newsletter.

To some residents, the image of thousands of pilgrims clogging their narrow streets has struck fear in their hearts. It’s happened in Northern Kentucky before. A priest at St. Joseph’s Parish in Cold Spring in 1992 predicted Mary would appear. She didn’t, but thousands– the New York TImes estimated the number at 8,000 -- came.

Those at Our Lady of Lourdes wouldn’t rule out a miracle happening at their grotto but admitted it’s unlikely. (In any case, a bonafide miracle requires significant scrutiny from the Catholic Church’s 2,000-year-old bureaucracy to confirm.)

Without the miracle,the church, in a statement, estimated the grotto will attract 50 people a day. The statue of Mary would be just under five feet.

“Anyone who cares to visit this little cave will find this a peaceful place,” said Father Sean Kopczynski, one of the priests at Our Lady of Lourdes, during a presentation to the Park Hills City Council.

The church has not always used such peaceful language.

A church newsletter in February compared their efforts to St. Bernadette’s.

“At one point,"the newsletter read, "Hell itself seemed to rise up to fight back directly, with a troop of demons making a din in the waters of the nearby.”

Us vs. Them

But images of hell don’t help sell grottos to communities. The whole idea took Park Hills by surprise when it came to light in February. Those shocked included Mayor Matt Mattone who became mayor in 2015, his first public office.

“It’s surreal to me,” Mattone said. “It is kinda like a Twilight Zone I’ve inherited. All this is happening beneath the scenes that no one knew about and suddenly it’s coming to fruition.”

The more you talk to residents and church members, the more the issue goes beyond the church and the grotto. Some neighbors feel the church has attracted an intolerant group of people to the city. The church members feel that they're under attack from a city that doesn't know or care about them.

Residents say they want to accept the church. Without exception, residents make a point to say everyone has a right to believe what they want. And traffic concerns are always the first thing they cite about the church and grotto.

“A place like this grotto, it could attract more people than our city is able to hold,” said Sarah Froelich, who lives on Alhambra above the church.

As Froelich talks on her porch, her black and white cat Pickles at her feet, she explained also how the church led her to fly a rainbow flag on her back porch.

An anti-gay bumper stickeron a car parked in a specific spot in this progressive town has raised her ire.

“We bought a gay pride flag,” Froelich said. “This is ridiculous. That kind of intolerance is not acceptable.”

Bob Ford noticed the bumper sticker while working in his garden this February. It was affixed to a gray sedan parked in front of the house he and his husband, Steve Crites, have owned for the past nine years.

Cars often don’t park in front of their home due to the narrow streets.

Church members and residents differ on what the bumper sticker said.

Ford and Crites said the sticker had the phrase “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” implying homosexuality is heretical. Ford and Crites don’t think it was accidental that the car with that bumper sticker ended up parked in front of their home for more than a week.

“No, this does not need to happen here,” Ford said were his first thoughts. “Can you believe this?”

The sticker had been slapped on over an anti-abortion sticker that had been on the car. Those in the neighborhood said it belonged to church members at the end of the street. Church members said the bumper sticker read: “Male and Female He created Them -Genesis 1:27.”

“Obviously with the Catholic Church and the Ten Commandments, which everyone used to believe, there’s a whole tension in a society that’s very divided,” church pastor Collins said.

Some residents rushed to the church’s defense. They see the church as the victim of hate.

It’s everyone else that’s intolerant, said one woman, identified only as Maureen, at a February council meeting.

“There are many undercurrents of intolerance,” she said. “And there’s no room in this world for intolerance anymore. We already have that going on in other religions.”

Some believe the culture clash has become personal here.

Church members won’t say hi to them, Crites said.

“It just seems like it’s set up as an Us vs. Them situation,” Crites said.

A close church and state

Eventually, the grotto will have to come before city council for a zoning approval.

The connection between the church and some current and former city officials doesn’t sit well for some.

City Councilwoman Pam Spoor also serves as director of the Missionaries of St. John the Baptist.

Spoor and former Mayor Don Catchen have been instrumental in the property transfers to the church.

Catchen bought the property for $400,000 in 2015, for about half the assessed value, then transferred it to the church. The church bought the two adjacent buildings that house the church’s priests and the occasional monk. One of the buildings, a four-family home, was sold by a limited liability company formed by former city councilman Mark Cooper.

The church scored a good deal on the land behind the church, where the grotto will be built. It convinced a resident to lease the land to them for 99 years for $1.

Spoor’s son, William Spoor, drew up the lease. City Councilwoman Kathy Zembrodt notarized it.

The property owner, Sheila Burke, declined comment.

Spoor said the lease and property transactions are normal.

Spoor has recused herself from any votes about the church. She believes church members have been the target of undue scrutiny and harassment from the rest of the city.

“I don’t like to hear that from my city,” Spoor said. “I’ve lived in my city for 39 years. All the intolerance and bigotry, there is no room for that in any city.”

Mystery remains

The community and church have circled each other like this for months, eyeing each other with suspicion.

Such was the case for the Feast of Corpus Christi. Five residents stood outside the church, iPhones in hand sweating under the sun. A police officer in front of city hall looked on as well.

It was hot, with only one tree in front of the church for shade.

Stella Snowden stared at the church’s front door waiting for it to move.

“We wanted to see for ourselves,” she said. “We’re just curious. We think they should at least have a permit for the procession.”

A week earlier, church members singing hymns and wearing veils had marched up the street. No permit had been issued from the city.

After a half hour, the doors opened. Men in formal wear. Women in long skirts and veils. They slowly filed out of the doors holding unlit candles.

A barely audible hymn mixed with the wind and birds. A cotton canopy held aloft shaded the priest who was carrying an ornate vessel.

But rather than move up the street, the procession took an abrupt turn to the right. The procession the week before had gone through nearby neighborhoods. This one took a quick lap around the church and went back in as quietly as it came.

The residents said their goodbyes to each other and left without answers.

Mystery is part of the appeal of the church. The Latin and incense give the mass a mystic quality.

That’s comforting to many members.

To others, it is no comfort at all.