(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.

(Photo: A New York City cab seen from the edge of Central Park. 7 March 2007. By Isabelle Roughol)

By ISABELLE ROUGHOL
Columbia Missourian

MU physics professor Peter Pfeifer has been buying ground corncob by the pound as part of a research project that could put a natural-gas tank in many American cars in the next five years.

Pfeifer and his team heat the ground cobs at high temperatures in an oxygen-free atmosphere to reduce them to carbon, which is then pressed into round one-inch thick briquettes.

“It’s almost like charcoal that you put on your Fourth of July barbecue,” Pfeifer said. “Some people call them the Missouri hockey pucks.”

Then 216 carbon briquettes are placed into aluminum tubes. To the untrained eye, it seems they are taking up space but in fact, the carbon provides greater storage capacity for natural gas than an empty tank.

Natural gas is cheaper and cleaner-burning than gasoline. The equivalent in natural gas of one gallon of unleaded gasoline costs $1.40 — or the price of about a half gallon of gas . Burning natural gas produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and it produces virtually no exhaust. Natural gas is also easier to procure: 85 percent of the current U.S. consumption is produced domestically, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, and most of the rest comes from Canada.

“If it’s such a winning proposition, why aren’t you and I using such cars?” Pfeifer said.

The answer is that while automobile engines can burn natural gas without modification, doing so would require a different kind of fuel tank. Storing natural gas requires heavy steel high-pressure cylinders that are expensive and impractical for use in automobiles.
“You have to give up your trunk space or passenger space,” Pfeifer said.

Only six stations sell natural gas in Missouri, and four of them only sell to local governments who use natural gas vehicles, or NGVs, for public transportation and other government functions. Gas stations resist offering natural gas because of the high cost of storing and distributing it and because there are very few NGVs on the market today.
Kansas City has a central fleet of 218 NGVs. Next month, a team from the Midwest Research Institute led by Phil Buckley, who works with Pfeifer, will mount a prototype low-pressure tank on a pickup truck owned by the city. If the experiment works, Pfeifer and his team will have overcome the biggest obstacle to a wider use of NGVs. They could also help convince the automotive industry to begin building cars and trucks that burn natural gas.

“If we get an investor interested in this technology, it could be revolutionary,” said Sam Swearngin, fleet superintendent in Kansas City.

Pfeifer’s coworkers in MU’s department of physics jokingly call him a “fractalist.” A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in his office is dedicated to the topic of fractals, his life’s work. Fractals are objects in which a pattern is constantly repeated so that no matter the scale, the object always looks the same. Think cauliflower: A head of the vegetable looks like one of the flowers, which is composed of smaller flowers, and so on.

“As you zoom in, the substructure looks like the whole,” Pfeifer said.

Cumulus clouds and human lungs are fractals. So are the pores inside the carbon that is produced by charring the ground corn cobs.

These microscopic cavities in the carbon, “nanopores,” hold the natural gas — 95 percent of which is methane.

“Those pores are almost like a sponge, they suck up the methane,” Pfeifer said. “In this carbon, the methane, at a much lower pressure, is held at almost the same density as it would be in big cylinder tanks.”

Because the pressure is low, 500 pounds per square inch instead of 3,600, the tank can be made flat and rectangular, allowing it to be attached to a car like a regular gasoline tank. Until Pfeifer’s work, that was considered impossible for a natural gas tank because a rectangular shape is less resistant to high pressure.

“At high pressure, this would blow up in your face,” Pfeifer said.

The carbon system could also be used to capture the methane that emanates from landfills and transport it to central processing facilities, thus transforming a pollutant — methane is a greenhouse gas four times more potent than carbon dioxide — into a renewable energy.

If it becomes a reality, Pfeifer’s tank could be another energy-related benefit for the region. Corn farmers already stand to gain from the increasing use of ethanol, and one added advantage of Pfeifer’s tank is that it relies on a waste product that is cheap and abundant.

Pfeifer said he hopes his invention will spark the interest of carmakers, with whom he is seeking partnerships. His grant from the National Science Foundation is running out, but Pfeifer said he hopes it will be renewed. He said he is also hoping the U.S. Department of Energy wil l help fund his research, which is why he is working on applying it to hydrogen, another potential alternative fuel source that has been drawing more attention than natural gas.

Pfeifer said he approves of hydrogen and biofuels initiatives, but does not think they can meet the country’s immediate energy needs.

“It’s misleading to believe that this will solve our large-scale problems,” he said. “Hydrogen will not be with us until the year 2020. If (natural gas) became a national goal, we could do this in two or three years.”

(Photo: The famed columns of the University of Missouri are decked out in the school’s colors and motto to welcome new freshmen. August 2005. By Isabelle Roughol)

13 October 2005: This mademoiselle learns the beauty of tailgating, tiger paws and American football.

By Isabelle Roughol
Vox Magazine

Nothing destined me to be an immigrant. There was no particular reason for me to leave my country. In many respects, my homeland of France is actually quite like America. Each adult produces half a ton of garbage every year, high school is the most awkward time of one’s life, and the average family has two kids, a dog and a mortgage. Yet there are subtle differences that fill my days in America with constant awe and occasional incomprehension.

The first adjustment I had to make was to remember that the word football does not refer to my beloved national sport anymore. Instead it designates a sport that involves little foot-to-ball interaction. My favorite game instead bears the unfortunate name of soccer. The passion for soccer in France, and in Europe in general, is not unlike that for football here.

A typical soccer game day involves unusual amounts of alcohol and indistinct grunts and yells. People have their favorite teams and revere them as if they were a divinity, especially every other year when “les Bleus” — our national team — plays either the World Cup or the European Cup. Fans are recognizable by their head-to-toe bicolor attire according to their respective country. English fans are recognizable by the blood streaming down their faces (Germans too, if they happen to be playing against England). The English are notorious for being hooligans; there is never a game without a major fight when one of their teams is involved.

The most fantastic thing about soccer is you can actually see the ball. It’s white. It might seem a small difference, but the NCAA doesn’t seem to understand how hard it is for a myopic person such as myself to see a small brown ball on a 6,400-square yard field while sitting in the nosebleed QQ section. Besides, soccer players actually move the ball with their feet. In football there’s always some player jumping on the ball — often more than one — so that you would need X-ray vision to actually know where it is. Usually I just end up standing up and yelling whenever somebody else does.

Although soccer will always be my first love, football has me hooked. This homecoming game will be the fourth football game under my belt, and I’m slowly starting to get it. So far I know 11 guys are supposed to run down the field (same number as for soccer; they’re making it easy for me), preferably passing a 10-yard line in four tries or fewer. If you can steal the ball from the other team, it’s good, and if you have to beat up a few guys in the process, it’s not an issue. OK, so I don’t have all the rules down yet, but I have the will to learn, and I’m among the loudest fans when it comes to chanting Z-O-U. If I’m not cheering, I’m the one always asking, “What just happened?” I’m sure you’ll recognize me.

Speaking of chanting, my favorite feature of U.S. college sports is undeniably the amazing feeling of school spirit. In France, school teams are virtually nonexistent, and there is no national collegiate competition. A school is usually just a place where you study, rarely a place where you live, never a place you take pride in — except maybe for a couple of very prestigious ones. Wearing black and gold and cheering for my team are new experiences to me and, I must admit, quite exhilarating.

It’s also a true testament to American entrepreneurial zeal that so many companies and merchants can thrive off that noble pride. In a European soccer team store, you’ll find the typical jerseys and hats, key chains, pens and the occasional tie. But here team stores have everything: license plate holders, tiger ears, hands or tails, golf balls, baby clothes and, most amazing of all, a bottle opener that glows in the dark and plays the Tiger fight song! After all, Americans love their beer.

Along with it comes the most brilliant American invention: tailgating! I could never understand this word when reading it, what with its obscure etymology, but walking across the stadium parking lot before our first game this year against New Mexico was explanation enough. It is said that Latin countries — such as Spain, Portugal and France, believe it or not — are more convivial than Anglo-Saxon ones, such as England and Germany, but you wouldn’t know it from visiting Mizzou on a football weekend. Come to think of it, tailgating is all about profit and efficiency. Back home, we celebrate after the game by dancing in the street and driving around honking if we won. If not, we just stay home bawling. With tailgating, you’re sure to get your drinks in, no matter the outcome of the game. Once again, Americans love their beer.

In my few weeks in Missouri, football has definitely become a tradition that I could get used to. This Saturday you’ll find me in the Hearnes Center parking lot, beer in one hand, hot dog in the other, kicking it American-style. But I’ll throw some crepes into the mix.