8 October 2006: More than a year after hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast, rebuilding drags along while the future of many neighborhoods remains uncertain.

My audio interview about reporting in New Orleans

(Photo: Volunters from Columbia First Presbyterian Church prepare to gut the house of Joan Baldo on Warrington Drive in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. September 2006. By Isabelle Roughol.)

In September 2006, I followed a group of volunteers who were gutting houses in New Orleans, 13 months after Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing flooding of the city. This story was born out of another I wrote in Columbia, Mo. for the one-year anniversary of the storm. For a week, TV reporter Jenn Jarvis, photographer Samantha Clemens and I shared the lives of the volunteers, living in the same camp and reporting from the New Orleans neighborhood where they were working. Everyday, I wrote in a blog, which also had photo and video entries. Once back in Columbia, I wrote a narrative story and coordinated the multimedia package.

Read a simple full-text version below.

By ISABELLE ROUGHOL
Columbia Missourian

Yvonne Birdsall’s house at 5200 Warrington Drive, in the Gentilly section of New Orleans, hadn’t changed much in the past year. A moldy stuffed bunny still lies abandoned on the living room floor. Washed-out family photos rested in their broken frames. Plates and cups stood in the dish rack by the sink, dirtier than they had ever been.

Only one thing had changed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: the mud. Dry now, it cracked under the feet of the volunteers from Columbia’s First Presbyterian Church, who entered 5200 Warrington Drive on a Monday morning in September for the first time since it was flooded.

In the next few days, the house would have to be cleared out, gutted and boarded up. But that did not necessarily mean it would be saved. In April, the city of New Orleans passed an ordinance aimed at reducing the number of derelict, unsafe and unsanitary properties that have been left untouched since the flood. The new law mandated that every damaged house be gutted and boarded up by Aug. 29, 2006, the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

In Gentilly, the streets have been cleared of sand and water, and of the 213 residential lots on Warrington Drive, most have been gutted and secured. The residents, however, have been slow to return. Only 36 families have come back to the neighborhood, most of them to live in a government trailer parked in front of their devastated houses. Only one property seems to have been renovated.

The ordinance is also an attempt by city officials to halt the decline of property values for returning residents, many of whom now live near homes that have been abandoned. Property owners must show a good-faith effort toward cleaning or demolishing their houses, or risk losing not only the structures, but their lots as well. For volunteers like Kathy Montgomery, the outspoken organizer of the Columbia Presbyterians’ mission trip, the work they’re doing in New Orleans buys time for homeowners who do not yet know if they will ever return to Gentilly. But, Montgomery says, the uncertainty is frustrating.

“Are our labors thrown away, dispensable? Maybe so,” she says. “At least she keeps her property. … In the ultimate end, we’ve helped her.”

Faith-based groups like the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, the national organization overseeing the work of the Columbia volunteers, have played a huge role in the relief and reconstruction of areas affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This was the third trip to the Gulf Coast by the Columbia group. Many of the volunteers on the recent trip had been there less than a year before, in November 2005. “I was prepared better this time, but it’s still shocking,” Montgomery said. “I was amazed, astounded and very much appalled because there’s been so much of nothing.”

Though they seemed overwhelmed by the devastation, the Columbia group, like all the volunteers who have descended on the city since Katrina, recognize that its work was vital to the future of New Orleans. So after arriving at 5200 Warrington Drive, they grabbed nose masks and wheelbarrows, chased away the wasps that had taken over the residence, and started their work.

“They see the need and the purpose,” Montgomery said of the rest of the group, “and that’s what it’s all about.”

Yvonne Birdsall, who lived in the house on Warrington Drive in the 1960s before turning it into a rental property, called Presbyterian Disaster Assistance for help in June. She sought the help of volunteers to avoid losing her property under the city’s new ordinance — even though she does not know what the future holds for Gentilly.

“It might have to be demolished, but I’m hoping that it can be repaired,” Birdsall said. “If it builds up around here again and people come back, I might end up living back here again.”

When doomsday arrived

Tears well up in Gary Hayes’ eyes when he recalls Katrina’s devastation, which he says reminds him of his time in Vietnam. By the time the storm reached New Orleans on Aug. 29, most of the residents of Warrington Drive had evacuated Gentilly. Gary and his wife, Brenda, a minister, stayed.

She was sitting in her Bible room, pointing a video camera at the horizontal rain and the wind tearing at the branches of the trees. He was standing in their front yard. By 9 a.m., the walls of the London Avenue Canal, just west of Warrington Drive, had begun to bend and water was leaking into the neighborhood. Gary went inside, grabbed another beer and walked to the end of his driveway to inspect the progress of the water.

“Clear water kept on coming,” he said. “Then I saw this black shadow.”

The shadow — a wall of mud and sand — engulfed Gentilly when floodwall panels on the east side of the London Avenue Canal, about a block from the Hayes’ house, collapsed.

The failure of the floodwall started with a 10- to 20-foot-high “scourhole,” a gap caused by the erosion of the clay and silt that typically covers a levee, in the banks of the canal near the Mirabeau Avenue bridge. As water seeped through the sand beneath the sheet pile that supports the floodwall, the canal started bursting at the seams. The surge of water coming from Lake Pontchartrain into the canal increased the pressure on the entire structure, and the clay, silt and sand supporting the floodwall were pushed away.

The scourhole on the wet side and the loss of material on the dry side weakened the levee until the floodwall was standing in equilibrium with almost no support. Around 9:30 a.m., a 450-foot section collapsed, releasing torrents of water, sand and mud into the Gentilly neighborhood.

Two weeks after the storm, only one pump — known even before Katrina as the “doomsday pump” — was able to start draining the neighborhood.

Al and Gwen Bierria’s house, at 5286 Warrington Drive, is just north of the south breach in the London Avenue Canal. Al likes to speak in metaphors, comparing New Orleans to a beautiful woman who is unkempt and the Corps of Engineers to a drunk driver whose negligence has cost lives. Pessimistic about the state of the city and its future, he is angry at local and federal officials who have not taken responsibility for what happened and residents who have not made their feelings known.

“The people in New Orleans should be very angry,” he said. “When you have a government agency responsible for a certain task, you don’t have it fall apart. I can understand if a storm would come, and the water would come over the levees. But when you build it and it collapses, that’s a whole other story. … Negligence and purpose of killing, to me, are the same thing.”

Bierria’s anger is accompanied by fear. He and Gwen are the only residents who have returned to their block of Warrington Drive; they have been living in a trailer since last October while Al, a contractor, rebuilds their house. He says the Corps of Engineers’ work on the floodwall where it collapsed is almost complete. But, other sections, including the one just behind his backyard, have not been improved.

“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” Al said. “You still have the same chain, the same levee. What’s stopping it from breaking down here?”

Frederick Young, project manager for the Corps of Engineers in New Orleans’ East Bank, said that the levees that did not fail do not need to be improved because the conditions that contributed to the breach at the Mirabeau Bridge were unique; engineers kept the existing I-panels after finding that there were no other scourholes along the structure.

The breach in the floodwall was repaired to pre-Katrina strength before the start of this year’s hurricane season, and the Corps has continued to improve it. The new section of the floodwall was constructed of T-panels, which add a 3-foot concrete base to the standard I-panel. The T-panel is also supported by three sheet piles instead of one, which go 52 and 74 feet into the ground, instead of the usual 16 feet. When the work is completed, the levee will be covered with plastic to protect it from erosion.

The new section looks undeniably safer than the unimproved sections. But the Corps of Engineers’ confidence in the structure is not matched by that of the residents, many of whom still blame the agency for failing to protect their homes.

“A wait-and-see game”

For others who, like the Bierrias, decide to return to Gentilly, the journey will be full of obstacles.

“Everything that you’ve got to do is a hassle right now,” Birdsall says. “A big bureaucratic problem.”

The city government’s immediate worry is cleaning up and rebuilding. Many essential city services have been given a lower priority. Recycling pick-up, for instance, has not yet resumed. Instead, there is a special pick-up for “white garbage”: the old appliances and food-filled refrigerators that, 13 months after Katrina, homeowners are just now putting to the curb.

The lack of recycling worries Jo Ann Foriester and other Columbia volunteers, who can’t fail to notice that they are adding to the city’s trash problems. The 15 volunteers consumed an average of two bottles of water a day for six days, which contributed about 200 water bottles to New Orleans landfills.

Some people have made the cutback in city services work for them. After traveling around the U.S. and Canada doing construction work for two years, Alberto Mejilla arrived in New Orleans three months ago. He drives around the city and rummages through debris to find semi-precious metals. He said he gets 60 cents a pound for aluminum and 80 cents to a dollar for a pound of copper. While the Columbia volunteers worked on Birdsall’s house, he sorted through an enormous pile of wood and drywall and came away with a handful of aluminum bars, probably the remnants of an appliance. Birdsall was glad; at least it wouldn’t end up in a landfill, she said. She then suggested Mejilla look in the backyard for anything else of value.

Since Katrina, Birdsall has lived on her savings and monthly Social Security check. She received about $20,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but very little from her insurance company because she did not have flood coverage. Her own home, on the other side of the canal from her rental house at 5200 Warrington Drive, was so damaged it had to be demolished. The Corps of Engineers is purchasing an easement on her land to repair another breach in the levee, but the agency has not paid her for the property yet.

The fluctuations in the New Orleans real estate market since Katrina add to the uncertainty. Birdsall cannot afford to buy another house: Prices have increased dramatically in areas that weren’t damaged. After the storm, she moved into an $800-a-month apartment that went for $500 before Katrina.

“It’s like a state of limbo, of not knowing exactly how soon this area will develop and how many people will come back, how many people will build back up,” she said. “There’s so many ifs and buts and whys to consider. It’s not a cut-and-dried deal.”

Meanwhile, property values have plummeted in Gentilly and other damaged areas.

“(My) house is worth over $300,000,” Bierria said. “How many people are going to give me $300,000 when they look at this next door and that next door?”

The city of New Orleans has contracted with various architects to plan the rebuilding of the city. In Gentilly, the firm Hewitt-Washington and Associates is responsible for working with neighborhood associations and coming up with a plan that would restore the neighborhood’s residences, businesses and institutions. Visioning meetings have already taken place, but the residents said they were never invited to attend them.

“We don’t get any information, I hate to say it,” Birdsall said. “I think homeowners should be appraised, should get bulletins to keep us abreast with what’s going on, but we don’t get anything.”

To some residents, it seems utopian to think about building parks and restaurants when their most basic needs are still going unmet. They need a place to live and a job. Their neighborhoods are marred by rusty cars, giant heaps of debris and water pooling into giant potholes on every street.

In the meantime, many homeowners are reluctant to rebuild until they know whether their neighbors will. They can’t afford to pay a construction company to gut and repair their homes, so they turn to volunteers, who see contradictions everywhere they go.

“That’s when you begin to run around chasing your tail,” Montgomery said, adding that, like the residents, the volunteers are waiting to see what happens.

Presbyterian Disaster Assistance is committed to participating in the relief effort for seven more years, but Montgomery said the organization is having a hard time finding volunteers. Its five villages are only filled to a quarter of their capacity, and the 15 volunteers from Columbia were the only guests in the Luling, La., camp the week of Sept. 18. Montgomery, a former village coordinator for the Presbyterians, said the last significant influx of volunteers was last spring, when college students on break flocked to the Gulf Coast to do relief work.

The city can’t continue to rely on volunteers alone, she said. Not only are their numbers shrinking, but they cannot do more specialized work like plumbing and electricity, which requires licensed professionals.

“Will it last seven years?” Montgomery wondered one morning as she sat on a porch on Warrington Drive. “The structures might, but I don’t know that the villages will be filled,” Montgomery said. “People still go to Appalachia, and there’s so much work there. And there will be another hurricane.”

Moving in or moving on

The residents of Warrington Drive are reminded of the reality of Hurricane Katrina in the most benign and mundane ways. Watermelons started growing in Birdsall’s front yard; floodwaters had displaced seeds, and they grew into odd floral arrangements all over the neighborhood.

Across the street from 5200 Warrington Drive, Joan Baldo now has several clusters of baby’s breath instead of roses. The Columbia volunteers made sure to preserve them when they started gutting her house.

Baldo is an elegant woman who likes to keep a good home and a beautiful garden. She has a sense of humor, although tears come to her eyes when she finds in the pile of debris in her living room a favorite black-and-gold beaded gown, which she feigns to model for the volunteers.

“I’m sorry you had to see my house the way it is,” she said, adding that at least it looks better now than it did when Warrington Drive was covered in 5 feet of sand. “It looked like beach-front property.”

Joan Baldo has bad knees. So when a new city ordinance required all houses in Gentilly to be raised by 3 feet. She and her husband, Edward, applied for a demolition permit and bought a house in nearby Metairie, which sustained significantly less damage.

“It’s sad, but I said I’m over it and I am,” Joan Baldo said. “I really am.”

Others are not so willing to leave. Leroy Smith is an on-site construction specialist for the Corps of Engineers, in charge of building the new floodgates at the entrance of the London Avenue Canal. He has a personal stake in the project: He lives in Gentilly, too, and he does not want to see his house under five feet of water again. He said he spent so much time working on the canal that he has yet to start work on his own house.

“It still looks like a ghost town in the neighborhood,” Smith said. “We got a long way to go, but we can’t give up the fight. We’re not going to let it die. She will not die.”

For all its flaws, residents like Smith take pride in their city. It’s home. Even those like Bierria, who said “that ‘home’ thing is kind of a cop-out,” New Orleans is hard to turn their backs on, despite its many problems. Bierria mentioned a 2004 quality-of-life poll conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of New Orleans, which found that 40 percent of residents were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their quality of life; that six out of 10 voters thought public elementary education was poor; and that more than one in three thought the city’s problems had gotten worse over the past five years.

“At least Katrina did one thing,” Bierria said. “It got people away from here to see how the rest of the country is doing.”

Today, 13 months after Hurricane Katrina, only half of the city’s pre-storm population has returned. Bierria acknowledged the beauty and culture of the city but said that, given better opportunities, anyone would leave, just as they would if Haiti or Cuba were their home.

Yet he remains.

“New Orleans is a very, very, very beautiful woman, and you’ve got a bunch of people that just sling mud in her face,” he said. “It makes you wanna cry, it’s sick. That’s all I gotta say about this place.”

The house at 5200 Warrington Drive had changed by the time the volunteers from Columbia Presbyterian Church left New Orleans on Sept. 23. The evidence of its sad demise had been cleared out and put to the curb, and a bare structure of wood and concrete stared at a mirror image of itself across the street, and another one and another one again down the road. Each appears naked, except for the X hastily spray-painted on the facade, the only apparent sign that this was once a place called home.

(Photo: A monk at the Preah Vihear temple. 7 November 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

By Isabelle Roughol and Rann Reuy

The Supreme Sangha Council will request of the government that the rock opera “Where Elephants Weep” never again be allowed to be seen in any form in Cambodia, or anywhere else in the world, Supreme Patriarch Non Nget said.

The musical is disrespectful to Buddhism and therefore it should not again be played on stage or broadcast on television, Non Nget said.

“They cannot use monks’ robes to wear and play like that,” he said in an interview Sunday.

“Monks throughout Cambodia completely oppose any attempt to replay or broadcast this story in Cambodia or in the world,” he said, who saw the musical in its first television broadcast Dec 25 on CTN.

In the musical, monks are seen singing and dancing. A young man who had entered the monkhood for three months disrobes early against his abbot’s advice to be with the woman he loves. He eventually separates from the woman and returns to the monkhood.

A complaint from the council already led to the cancellation of a second CTN broadcast Thursday. The complaint requested an apology to Buddhist monks from the show’s director, writer and performers.

Venerable Sao Chanthol, high adviser of the council, said the council would also write to the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications asking that the show’s Web site be blocked.

Though the site is hosted in the US, Minister of Post and Telecommunications So Khun said he would write to Cambodian Internet providers upon receiving the monks’ complaint for them to block the site locally.

Great Supreme Patriarch Tep Vong, however, said he did not take part in the complaint, as he had not seen the show and did not know what in it might offend Buddhist values.

The Buddhist council’s complaint comes at a time when monks themselves have been heavily criticized for a series of scandals involving pornography and alcohol, and even arrests for rape and murder. At an annual Buddhist congress mid-December, Ministry of Cults and Religion Min Khin demanded that monks behave.

“In my opinion, it is monks that first must be worthy of respect,” said Constitutional Council member Son Soubert.

“It is not the opera that doesn’t respect religion, it is those monks, those bad monks.”

Son Soubert said he saw the opera and thought it was spreading a positive message about Buddhism. He added the artists were allowed freedom of expression under the constitution and that the monks had no authority to stop their performances.

Show composer Him Sophy said he had received praises about the show, including from high officials, and was waiting for the government to set up a meeting between him and the Buddhist leaders to settle the issue.

19 November 2006: A new document calls on churches to welcome gays and lesbians into the Catholic community, but gay advocates say the Church still shows no support for homosexuals.

(Photo: A tainted window at the Oratoire St Joseph in Montreal. March 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

By ISABELLE ROUGHOL
Columbia Missourian

As a teenager, Don Dressel stood in the back of the church during Mass. No one told him to, but he felt it was his place.

Dressel had known he was gay since he was 12, but he was confused. He only knew that in his St. Louis church, homosexuality was considered sinful. Others in the parish referred to gays and lesbians the same way they talked about sexual perverts and rapists, he said. The realization that others thought he was deviant was painful. Dressel decided then and there that he would never act on his feelings.

“It was the most horrible time of my life because I was going through a great struggle trying to fight and change my sexual orientation,” Dressel said.

Dressel ostracized himself from his parish, as he felt unworthy to participate. He never opened up to a priest; he was too ashamed and convinced that the church would have no words of comfort for him.

Eventually, denial turned into anger, and Dressel left the Roman Catholic Church in his late teens. “I made the decision that it wasn’t a good place for me,” he said. “It wasn’t a safe place for me.”

Dressel is one of many gays and lesbians raised Catholic who feel rejected and excluded by the church because of their sexual orientation. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has recognized the issue and, on Tuesday, approved with an overwhelming majority a 23-page document that offers clergy guidelines for “ministry to persons with a homosexual inclination.” The document calls on Catholic communities to welcome gays and lesbians, and it condemns violence or discrimination against them.

“On the one hand, it is compassionate, maybe more so than people expect,” said the Rev. Thomas Weinandy, the conference’s executive director for the secretariat of doctrine and pastoral practices, who helped draft the document. “At the same time, it’s still very clear that homosexual activity is still considered wrong and sinful.”

According to Catholic doctrine, human sexuality serves two purposes within the bonds of marriage: procreation and the expression of marital love. Therefore, the church condemns homosexual acts as contrary to natural law.

The document distinguishes between “engaging in homosexual acts and having a homosexual inclination.” It states that there is no sin in being attracted to a person of the same sex, but only in acting on that attraction. The prohibition is similar to the church’s position on premarital sex.

Despite these changes, Dressel still feels he is being persecuted for something he has no control over.

“I’m denied the right to marry,” he said, “therefore I’m denied, in their eyes, the right to express marital love.”

Indeed, the Catholic Church urges gays and lesbians to live a chaste and celibate life. Only then, the document states, can they fully participate in parish life.

The Courage Apostolate is a New York-based ministry seeking to help gays and lesbians who have decided to live in accordance with the Catholic doctrine. The Rev. James Lloyd, a licensed psychologist and a priest, leads an anonymous support group of about 15 men. While some men in Courage support groups have eventually married a woman, Lloyd said that changing sexual orientation is not the purpose of the ministry. Rather, chastity — a virtue for all Catholics, he said — is the goal. For those he calls “same-sex attracted” men, that means renouncing their sex lives.

Lloyd said he prefers the term “same-sex attracted people” because, in his view, homosexuality is simply a tendency, not an essential part of a person’s identity.

“It would be very degrading to define people in term of their sexuality,” he said. “There cannot be an equation where a person says, ‘I am gay.’ We think it’s ridiculous.”

Advocates for gay and lesbian Catholics disagree.

“They continue to call it ‘homosexual inclination,’” said Jenny Truax, a member of the Catholic Action Network, a St. Louis-based group that seeks to expand the Catholic Church’s acceptance of gays and lesbians. “What they’re getting at here is that it’s not a permanent state, and you can control it.”

However, the conference’s document clearly states that gays and lesbians are not required to undergo therapy in an effort to change their sexual orientation. Weinandy said that because therapy has helped some men and women, but not others, “we didn’t want to put anyone under moral obligation when the results were too ambiguous to judge at this point.”

The conference of bishops’ document is in keeping with official Catholic Church teachings and previous statements from the Vatican. The document is similar to a “letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on the pastoral care of homosexual persons” published in 1986 by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. The letter states the unchanging nature of the church’s position, which the letter says is rooted in Old Testament texts and the teachings of St. Paul.

But there again, gay and lesbian rights advocates disagree. “There’s no reason that it can’t be changed,” Truax said. “Jesus didn’t say anything about homosexuality.”

Truax wishes the church would use modern theologists and science.

“The church used to teach that slavery was fine,” she said, “that the sun revolved around the earth. Things change. It just usually takes the church longer to realize that.”

But at the heart of Catholic doctrine lies a principle that makes that change improbable. The church teaches that morality has an objective basis. Moral norms are not, in the Catholic view, just a cultural phenomenon that changes as society changes, but rather something grounded “in the natural order established by the Creator.” It is therefore unlikely that Catholic dogma will change the way the secular society’s position on homosexuality has changed.

In addition to reaffirming the Catholic position, the document provides guidelines for the day-to-day involvement of gays and lesbians in parish life. For instance, it discourages public announcements of one’s homosexuality outside of family and close friends. This secrecy can be harmful, said Joe Kort, a Michigan psychotherapist who specializes in gay and lesbian issues.

“They’re humiliating these people,” Kort said. “The message is really to gays and lesbians, ‘You have something we don’t want to hear about.’ They’re forcing out good parishioners. I call it spiritual abuse.”

While the Catholic Church says it welcomes gays and lesbians, even if they have homosexual relations, and it agrees to baptize children of homosexual couples, gay and lesbian advocacy groups have few kind words for the conference’s document. They say the church is still singling out and excluding certain parishioners — even as its reputation as a sacred institution suffers as a result of scandals involving sexual abuse by priests.

“They might throw in a token statement about heterosexuals having to live a good chaste life, but there’s never any consequences if they don’t,” Truax said. “There’s no pastoral guidelines on what (to do) when a couple uses birth control.”

When Dressel gave up Catholicism, he had already stopped praying and taking the Eucharist. While his anger toward organized religion has subsided, he still refuses to go to Mass. Spirituality is the core of his life now, he said. Dressel does not exclude the possibility of joining the Catholic faith again, but for now he feels the church misunderstands him.

“The problem is, people think it just comes down to sex,” he said. “As long as the church keeps framing that in terms of sex, they will keep missing the boat.”

(Photo: Catholic church in Pakse, Lao PDR. 11 March 2009. By Isabelle Roughol)

By ISABELLE ROUGHOL
Columbia Missourian

When a group of volunteers from Columbia’s First Presbyterian Church arrived in New Orleans two months after Hurricane Katrina, the Rev. Kathie Jackson was overwhelmed by the devastation.

Jackson, the associate pastor at First Presbyterian, was shocked by the absence of life: There were no birds chirping, no grass, no dogs barking at passers-by.

“It looked like something from a war movie,” she said. “And it was just such a stark contrast, from a city that was alive to the land of the dead.”

Last month, when a group of volunteers from the church returned to New Orleans, they were surprised to see that not much had changed in the eight months since Jackson had been there. In one home, half-packed suitcases rested on the beds, and a newspaper from Aug. 28, 2005, the day before the storm came ashore, lay on the kitchen table. In a school the group was working in, assignments for the day of the storm were still on the chalkboards.

“Things were still intact almost,” said Nathan See, director of youth ministry for First Presbyterian. “I mean, ruined, but just as how they were left.”

First Presbyterian and other faith-based organizations have played an important role in the post-Katrina relief effort, dedicating time, manpower and money. In a report released in February, the White House praised their work.

“These groups succeeded in their missions, mitigated suffering and helped victims survive mostly in spite of, not because of, the government,” the report stated. “These groups deserve better next time.”

Kim Baldwin, director of public policy for The Interfaith Alliance in Washington, D.C., agrees. However, she says, the massive response by faith-based organizations across the country underscored the federal government’s failure to meet its own obligations.

“I think from the second Katrina came ashore, the federal government failed all Americans,” Baldwin said.

She said religious organizations do not have the financial means to provide relief over the long term. Many of the organizations that opened their hearts and budgets to the relief effort are hurting themselves. Indeed, Baldwin said, congregations have been forced to cancel some of their regular programs such as choirs and day care because their funds and facilities are tied up in the relief effort.

“The reason we’re in this position is because the government failed,” Baldwin said. “The religious community picked up the financial slack for those guys.”

Baldwin said it was the mission of religious groups to provide emergency relief and help people in grief, but none of the groups she met expected to have to do so much, over such a long period.

“Houses of worship are there to help people in hurting time,” Baldwin said. “They’re not there to be the sister organization of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency).”

Jackson said the church has had to tighten its belt a little but was fortunate enough to have some contingency funds that will allow a third group of volunteers to go to the Gulf Coast in September. She’s more worried about the long-term ability of the church to respond to the crisis. The Presbyterian Disaster Assistance program’s relief effort along the Gulf Coast is scheduled to last at least seven more years.

“The Presbyterian Church overall is having a more difficult time finding volunteers,” Jackson said.

While churches around the country continue to contribute to the rebuilding efforts along the Gulf Coast, others are still helping the evacuees who came to their communities in the wake of Katrina.

In August, the Mid-Missouri office of Lutheran Family and Children’s Services organized Camp Noah, a one-week gathering for children whose families relocated to the area after the hurricane. The organization estimates that there are still 65 displaced families living in Columbia.

“They’ve just gone through so much,” said program coordinator Kristen Setterlund. “It just helps them to be able to tell their story, over and over again.”

Although many children have recovered, counselors say some are still scared of storms or refuse to talk about the disaster.

“We don’t want them to forget what they’ve been through because they won’t, but we want them to be children,” said Douglas Stevens, a counselor. “We have kids here who have seen dead bodies, have walked in the water.”

Ten-year-old Ashleigh Craig, who attended Camp Noah, was stranded in New Orleans before she could evacuate to her aunt’s home in Columbia with her mother. She says that she would like to return someday to the city where her father still lives, but that there isn’t a house there for her family to go back to.

Kathryn Oberg Roberts, disaster relief coordinator for the Lutheran organization, said many families forced out of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast think it could be a long time before they’ll be able to return home.

“Most of the families have a mind-set that they need to remain here,” Roberts said. “They are definitely torn between being part of a new city and culture, and being with family and their roots in New Orleans.”

Some never had the chance to go home.

The Rev. Archie Lambert Sr. always meant to go back to New Orleans, said his daughter Brenda Brown. When the levees broke, his house in the Ninth Ward flooded, forcing the 80-year-old to his roof, where he lived for four days without food or medication. After being rescued, he joined his family who had relocated in Columbia.

But the ordeal took its toll on him physically. He died Aug. 8.

“He was worried a lot about going home,” Brown said. “Going home, going home, going home.”

Missourian reporter Alice Roach contributed to this story.

(Photo: The altar of the church of Notre Dame in Montreal, Canada. March 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

This is a two-part story. Read part 1 here.

By ISABELLE ROUGHOL
Columbia Missourian

The Rev. Thomas Saucier, O.P., does not simply stand at the altar when delivering his Sunday homily at Columbia’s St. Thomas More Newman Center. Instead, he walks up and down the chapel’s aisles, addresses his parishioners and makes them laugh while teaching a lesson on God’s generosity.

“His sermons are definitely very different,” said Amanda Gramlich, a junior at MU and a parishioner of two years. “I find myself paying more attention.”

Saucier’s love of teaching is a common characteristic of Dominican friars. He is one of four such friars who started their ministry on July 1 as priests at the Newman Center and Sacred Heart Catholic Church. The Dominicans replaced three diocesan priests — the Rev. Charles Pardee, the Rev. Mark Smith and the Rev. Edwin Cole — who were transferred to other parishes in mid-Missouri.

The Rev. Joachim Culotta, O.P., explained that the initials placed after his name stand for “Order of Preachers.” To him, the initials are as important as the title of reverend.

The friars are Dominicans who happen to be priests. Many Dominican friars are never ordained as priests and are only brothers.

“Priesthood is a vocation; being a Dominican is a life,” Saucier said. “You’re embracing more than a profession. From the time I get up until the time I go to bed, I live my Dominican life.”

The Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, was founded by St. Dominic de Guzman, a canon from Spanish nobility, in the 13th century. While traveling in the south of France, St. Dominic witnessed the influence of the Albigenses, a Christian sect whose teachings he believed were a heresy.

The Order of Preachers was thus created to advocate and educate people about the Catholic faith. Only a few years after creating the order, St. Dominic sent his friars to study and preach in Europe’s leading universities.

Today, Dominican friars are still erudite, and their main occupation is teaching.

“The Dominicans have a long tradition of study and involvement in the intellectual life,” said the Very Rev. Michael Mascari, prior provincial for the Province of St. Albert the Great, which covers the Central U.S. “We, as priests, feel we have something we can contribute to university life.”

Two years ago, Mascari sent offers to several bishops to take over Newman Centers in their dioceses, in an effort to refocus the order’s mission on campus ministry.

The Diocese of Jefferson City was interested in the offer, because it freed up three priests to serve in other parishes, said the Rev. Greg Higley, vicar general of the diocese.

“We knew we were going to get experienced priests who were used to being around college students and also families,” Higley said. “It just seemed like a good fit.”

The Dominicans also took over Sacred Heart and gave the parish a second priest. The Rev. Steve Kuhlmann, O.P., is assisted by the Rev. Thomas Paulsen, O.P.

The four priests live together in a house adjacent to Sacred Heart and established a religious community named St. Raymond of Peñaforte.

Culotta, the oldest, is its religious superior.

“As Dominican priests, we live a community life,” Culotta said. “We are a family.”

The friars’ common life can serve as a model of Catholic living for parishioners, he said. The priests pray together every day after the 7.30 a.m. Mass and are sometimes joined by parishioners.

The priests said they hoped the parishioners might someday form a Dominican laity chapter, but they don’t have immediate plans to create one.

“Once they get to know us a little more, they’ll form it themselves,” Saucier said.

The Dominican friars are hard to miss. Their dress consists of a white habit of their order.

“It’s a way of showing that there’s a difference here,” Saucier said. “The habit can be an important symbol, especially in the classroom, when Father walks in with his rosary beads and his white habit. You’ll be seeing that a lot, initially anyway.”

But the habit isn’t worn everywhere and doesn’t prevent individuality from showing either: Under its long sleeves, Saucier, an avid bicyclist, also wears a yellow “live strong” bracelet.

But the most important function of the habit is to simply show that Saucier, Culotta, Kuhlmann and Paulsen are not only priests, they’re Dominicans.

A Dominican life is a search for the truth, which can be found in science, physics, literature, art and other studies, Saucier said.

“The essence of what God is comes through in all those things,” he said.

One particular study awaiting Kuhlmann and Paulsen is the Spanish language.

Sacred Heart’s weekly Spanish Mass is attended by about 90 people; even though it is not the greatest number of parishioners, it is the only such Mass in the area and is growing quickly.

Every Sunday at 1 p.m., Kuhlmann reads off a Spanish church book, with a distinct American accent. His last Spanish class was in the spring of 1981, when he was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

At his first Spanish Mass, Kuhlmann introduced himself in Spanish and then asked parishioners to have patience with his language skills. By the fifth Mass, he was getting compliments on his progress.

“They’re also very gracious,” Kuhlmann said. “It’ll take time, but I’ll get there.”

At the Newman Center, the priests now prepare for the return of students.

Culotta had to adjust his sleeping habits to be present at the 9 p.m. Sunday Mass, mostly attended by students. The first college Mass will be held Aug. 20 on MU’s South Quad, following a barbecue.

Another challenge for the priests will be to serve both the Newman Center’s students and regular parishioners. Saucier said he hopes he can grab students’ attention at the beginning of the semester, before the demands and distractions of college life take over. He would also like to plug students into the daily life of the parish as much as possible.

“If it’s two separate communities, I’m sort of doomed from the beginning,” he said.

As the school year progresses, Saucier would like to see more intellectual and ethical discussions among the Newman Center, the university community and churches outside the Catholic faith.

“This is where we believe, as Dominicans, we belong,” Culotta said.

(Photo: Devotion to the Agnus Dei in the church of Notre Dame in Montreal, Canada. March 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

This is a two-part story. Read part 2 here.

By ISABELLE ROUGHOL

The Rev. Edwin Cole strolls through the church’s aisles greeting parishioners as he has done for the last 10 years.

But for Cole, the Rev. Charles Pardee and the Rev. Mark Smith, all priests, it will be their last Sunday Mass in Columbia.

“I’ve been telling myself all morning to keep taking deep breaths,” Cole tells the Sacred Heart Catholic Church congregation as he begins his early morning Mass. “I’m still taking deep breaths.”

Three blocks away, Pardee and Smith say goodbye to their parishioners at St. Thomas More Newman Center.

The three departing priests were relocated to other parishes by the diocese of Jefferson City and will be replaced by four friars from the Order of Preachers, better known as the Dominicans.

The changing of the guard reflects a national trend in which the Catholic Church finds recruiting new priests more difficult.

Since 1965, the ratio of Catholics to priests has risen from 778 followers to one priest to 1,513 followers to one priest, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

The reshuffling came after the Very Rev. Michael Mascari, the superior of the order’s Province of St. Albert the Great, offered his order’s help in staffing to the bishops of several dioceses.

Parishioners welcome the new friars but are sad to see the priests leave.

Cole’s homily ended in a standing ovation and the Mass with tears from several parishioners.

“I just think he’s a really good person, and that came through in his ministry to each and every member of this parish,” said Joe Camille, a parishioner of six years . “If you had a model of what a priest should be like, he’s it.”

Cole started his ministry at Sacred Heart in 1996 and spent 17 years in Columbia. He has also been ministering to patients in Columbia hospitals.

Cole said he will miss the aliveness of the Sacred Heart community, but he is looking forward to the slower pace of his new parish of 400 families in Laurie, by the Lake of the Ozarks.

Cole said he has worn a hospital pager five days a week, 24 hours a day for 15 years.

“I turned it off this morning,” he said. “The slower pace will give me more time to practice music.”

Saying goodbye was difficult at the Newman Center , too. Pardee and Smith’s last Sunday in town was celebrated with a barbecue that saw about 200 people take over the center’s parking lot.

“It just shows how much they’re loved, how many people showed up,” said Rebecca Rone, a recent MU graduate. “I don’t think you can put into words how much they’ve affected the students here on campus.”

Pardee arrived at the Newman Center in 1998 and was joined by Smith in 2000. Their assignment was relatively short compared to that of the Rev. Mike Quinn, who spent 21 years at the Newman Center.

“I would be happy to stay another eight or fifteen years, but I can’t be greedy, I’ve had my time here,” Pardee said.

Pardee will serve the Catholic communities in Loose Creek and Bonnots Mill in Osage County, and Smith will minister in Martinsburg and Wellsville, on both sides of the Audrain-Montgomery county line.

Pardee and Smith are credited with getting the Newman Center out of crippling debt.

“Father Charlie brought the community together, and it helps that he’s a very sharp business person,” said Dick Otto, a parishioner of 35 years.

Replacing Pardee and Smith will be two Dominican friars; the Rev. Thomas Saucier will serve as the new pastor, and the Rev. Joachim Culotta will serve as an associate pastor.

The Rev. Steven Kuhlmann and the Rev. Thomas Paulsen were introduced to the Sacred Heart community Sunday as their new pastor and associate pastor, respectively.

Cole said he is glad that Sacred Heart, a parish of 700 families, will now have two priests instead of one.

“I very much support the move,” Cole said. “The Dominicans are a great addition” to the diocese.

Founded in the 13th century, the Dominican order’s mission is to preach in universities, and it has sought to re-establish that ministry in recent years, Mascari said.

The four Dominican friars will add to the diocese’s 70 priests, who serve in 95 parishes and 15 missions, said the Rev. Greg Higley, vicar general of the diocese of Jefferson City

“We’re not as bad off as other dioceses are, but we are in no way near capacity,” Higley said. “We will ordain two priests this year, one in July and one in December, but after that we will have some lean years.”

LaRue Diehl contributed to this report.