IMAGE: CNS photo/courtesy LÕOsservatore Roman
By Peter Finney Jr.
NEW
ORLEANS (CNS) — When the levees broke in 2005 and Lakeview became Lake
Pontchartrain, Katrina launched its mad-scientist experiment.
What
would three weeks of brackish and corrosive water, chemicals and mud do not only
to St. Dominic Parish’s Aquinas Hall in Lakeview, which housed a small chapel across
the street from the church, but also to the gold-plated, eucharistic monstrance
now laid on its side and entombed in the muck at the foot of the altar?
As
a precaution before the storm, parishioner Susie Veters had removed the Blessed
Sacrament from the monstrance and placed it in the tabernacle. She kept the
empty monstrance on the chapel altar and locked the doors.
The
monstrance was no match for the 8 feet of lake water, which lifted it off the
altar and dropped it to the floor, burying it in mud.
When
Veters pulled the sacred vessel from the mud three weeks later, she didn’t
think it had a chance to be restored, but Michael McGee, a member of the
parish’s contemporary choir, had an avocation for restoring church artifacts in
his spare time and worked as quickly as he could to clean the metal, restore
the gold plating and stabilize the long metal rod that held everything
together.
On
March 15, 2006 — six months after the buried monstrance was recovered —
Veters and her husband, Pat, and Msgr. Christopher Nalty, a New Orleans pastor, were in St. Peter’s
Square where Pope Benedict XVI personally blessed the vessel after his general
audience. He also granted a plenary indulgence to those who prayed before it
and fulfilled other necessary conditions.
The
artifact, ultimately named the “Hope Monstrance,” traveled in 2006 and 2007 to
140 churches across Louisiana and Mississippi to promote the city’s Katrina
recovery and the power of perpetual adoration. The monstrance even made a stop
at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
Now
the monstrance has gone on the road again, offering the gift of hope to
communities that, like New Orleans in 2005, need a large dose of healing.
Over
the next month, the monstrance will travel to three U.S. communities still
reeling from disasters in 2017: Houston (Hurricane Harvey); Las Vegas (the
worst mass shooting in U.S. history); and Santa Rosa, California (wildfires
that destroyed 5,000 homes in Sonoma County). The monstrance also will make an
appearance at the V Encuentro national Hispanic conference outside Dallas.
John
Smestad Jr., a St. Dominic parishioner and director of pastoral planning and
ministries for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, coordinated the stops largely
with the help of Stephen Morris, a longtime friend who is in charge of youth
ministry for the Diocese of Santa Rosa.
“Stephen
called me at the chancery because he had stumbled across the old article about
the monstrance, and he was seeing if they might be able to borrow it because
their bishop wanted to do something to mark the anniversary of the fires in
Sonoma County,” Smestad told the Clarion Herald, newspaper of the new Orleans
Archdiocese.
“Those
fires burned down vast areas. The Catholic high school burned down. Entire
neighborhoods burned down. It was unreal,” he said. “It would be like driving
down (a street) and the left side is gone and the right side is normal and
totally undamaged.”
Morris
called Smestad to ask where he might be able to track down the monstrance.
“Stephen,”
Smestad replied, laughing, “that’s my parish, and I’m sure I can facilitate
this.”
After
getting the approval from Dominican Father John Restrepo, the St. Dominic
pastor, Smestad worked with Morris to start connecting more dots beyond Santa
Rosa. Houston had sustained record flooding from Harvey, and officials there
jumped at the chance to have five parishes and one chapel host the monstrance
for prayer services last week.
“It’s
just a great sign of hope and trust,” said Lazaro Contreras, director of
Hispanic ministry in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. “We still hope and
trust in the Lord after all these catastrophic events that we have
experienced.”
In
the Diocese of Las Vegas, director of faith formation Connie Clough said she
knew 25 people who attended the concert last Oct. 1 in which 58 people were
killed and 851 injured by a lone gunman who sprayed bullets from the top of a
hotel on the Vegas Strip.
St.
Viator Parish, about 10 miles from the shooting location, will host an outdoor
eucharistic procession, beginning at 8 p.m. on Oct. 1 and ending at 10:05 p.m.
— the time the first shots were fired a year ago.
“We
will process into the church with the Blessed Sacrament and have a liturgy of
the word, a short homily and silence,” Clough said.
At
a recent diocesan conference, Clough said, 1,100 people attended and focused on
the idea of “hope.”
“It
centered on remembering not only the victims but also the heroes — the first
responders,” she said. “People understand that hope doesn’t necessarily mean
everything will be OK. Something has changed. But, it’s about knowing that
there is something better. I will always remember the long lines of people who
were donating blood.”
When
the Hope Monstrance completes its tour in Santa Rosa Oct. 7, Morris said, there
will be an anniversary prayer service bringing together the largest number of
Catholic and Protestant faith leaders in memory. Twenty Protestant pastors lost
their homes in the fires. Eighty percent of Cardinal Newman High School was
destroyed.
Morris
said 60 percent of the residents who lost their homes “haven’t taken the first
step in rebuilding,” largely because their insurance coverage had not keep pace
with their homes’ escalating values.
Morris
was studying for his master’s degree in organizational leadership at the
University of San Francisco in 2005 when his professor, who had taught in New
Orleans years earlier, predicted to his students that if Katrina breeched the
levees, New Orleans’ very existence would be imperiled.
Morris
saw a city on its knees that somehow, after a decade of recovery, rose again.
“We’re
trying to share the story of hope with the faithful in the Santa Rosa area,”
Morris said. “It’s not just the physical monstrance. It’s the idea of sharing
our suffering, our death and our resurrection.”
–
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Finney
is executive editor/general manager of the Clarion Herald, newspaper of the
Archdiocese of New Orleans.
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