Imagine a tornado packing 130 mile-per-hour winds, 100 miles wide and lasting six hours.

That was Hurricane Katrina, Bishop Thomas J. Rodi of the Diocese of Biloxi, Mississippi, told Catholics gathered in the state capitol Sept. 29 for the 12th Missouri Catholic Conference Annual Assembly.

Bishop Rodi thanked Missouri Catholics for their continuing support to the Gulf Coast region which is still far from full recovery from the August 2005 hurricane.

Before Katrina, “we were the Jetsons. We had all the comforts of modern life,” Bishop Rodi said. “By the end of Katrina, we were the Flintstones.”

Of the 433 churches, schools and other church-owned buildings in the Diocese of Biloxi, 428 were either wiped out, or suffered severe damage, the bishop said.

For weeks without electrical power, nothing worked, he said. There was no running water, no sewage treatment, not even the ability to pump gasoline into vehicles to leave, Bishop Rodi said.

One of his priests asked the bishop, “How do we describe to people that we are cavemen with cars?” the bishop recalled.

Another priest told him, “I know our church is gone, but I can’t find where it was,” he said. Hurrican Katrina had destroyed all recognizable landmarks.
But in the midst of misery came the lessons about what in life is truly important, the bishop said.
Almost immediately after the storm ended, swarms of volunteers from around the nation began arriving. The first were the evangelical Christians, all wearing the t-shirts of their churches, bringing truckloads of food, water and precious ice.

Then came the Catholics, much more quietly, who rolled up their sleeves and helped clear debris and gut those homes that could be rebuilt, he said. Then came the money from a national collection in Catholic parishes to help both the Diocese of Biloxi and the Archdiocese of New Orleans rebuild.

“All 17 counties in our diocese experienced sustained hurricane-force winds,” Bishop Rodi said. “There were 65,000 homes destroyed and, worst of all, more than 200 people lost their lives.”

Bishop Rodi said that two years later, some 16,000 families are still living in 8-foot by 26-foot trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“Imagine a family of two, four or eight living inside that trailer for two years,” he said. For many of those families, there is no realistic expectation of getting out of those trailers anytime soon.”

Property insurance rates have quardrupled, he said, further hampering the recovery, particularly for the poor. His own cathedral has seen its insurance bill rise from $60,000 a year to $240,000.

“Unless insurance is available and affordable, landlords are not going to build housing for low-income people because they cannot collect those rents” needed to cover those costs, he said. “But housing is critical. We have to get people out of those trailers and into houses.”

What might have survived the wind succumbed to the sea, as Katrina packed a storm surge of 30-foot waves from the Gulf of Mexico that washed away everything up to 12 miles inland, the bishop said. The storm surge and floods caused the greatest loss of life, he said.

Bishop Rodi told of one young man who watched his grandmother drown as he saved his sister. “He looked at me with hollow eyes and said, ‘I couldn’t save both of them,’” the bishop said.

He also told of meeting a teen-aged girl who told him that the hurricane was harder on her parents and other older people.
“They have lost all their memories,” she told Bishop Rodi.

“No one has come up to me and said, ‘I really miss my entertainment center,’” Bishop Rodi said. “What they do cry about missing is this: One man told me, ‘All the letters my father wrote to my mother in World War II, they are all gone.’”

On the Sunday after Katrina, every parish in the Diocese of Biloxi celebrated Mass, Bishop Rodi said.

“Our Masses those first few weeks were often in parking lots with makeshift altars,” he said. “Some of our parishes are still like this - bare floors, folding chairs, plywood over stained glass windows.”

Any church of any Christian denomination left standing in the diocese soon opened their doors for services to all the other denominations, Bishop Rodi said.

“I have celebrated Mass in a Lutheran church. I have celebrated Mass in a Methodist church. And, praise God almighty, I have celebrated Mass in a Southern Baptist church,” he said.

“We have had the opportunity in southern Mississippi to see the good in others,” Bishop Rodi said. “We have seen neighbor helping neighbor, stranger helping stranger. People from elsewhere in the nation have shown us so dramatically that love is not a noun, it’s a verb.”
Another blessing was the absolute necessity to put complete trust in God, Bishop Rodi said.

“So often in our prayers do we pray only for ‘sunny’ days,” the bishop said. “I hope you have many sunny days. But when the storms of life come, I pray that it will be true to you, as the Bible teaches, that all things work for the good for those who trust in the Lord.”

Article by Kevin Kelly, Associate Editor of the Catholic Key, reprinted with permission.