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	Church Fates Revealed Today Local Catholics Fear Loss of Community By Bruce Nolan Times-Picayune April 9, 2008 http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-10/1207718444292830.xml&coll=1 Thousands of New Orleans area Catholics still struggling to right their Katrina-damaged lives braced for the possibility of a new blow late this morning, when the Archdiocese of New Orleans announces which beloved but damaged churches will not reopen. The list of closures likely will include weakened parishes and churches in New Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines that never recovered after the 2005 storm because buildings are damaged and surrounding neighborhoods remain stripped of most of their populations. But closings apparently will include some undamaged parishes as well -- perhaps some suburban parishes far from the flood zone. The archdiocese has said the time has come to accommodate a slower-moving disaster: the steady loss of priests to man their pulpits. While most of the attention centered on closings, it's also possible that a few dormant parishes might reopen in communities slowly returning to life. The reorganization surely will have a profound effect on the neighborhoods surrounding the churches slated to be shuttered, many of them still caught in the limbo of hurricane recovery. Community leaders have expressed concern about the drag a shuttered church could have on nearby blocks, particularly if the building is not used for something else or sold. "What happens to a neighborhood when your church is gone?" asked Karen Gadbois, a Carrollton-area community activist who has struggled with the issue since the archdiocese mothballed a church in her neighborhood in 2006. "It's sort of an existential question, but it's literal as well," she said. "What happens to a huge structure that takes up a city block?" Archbishop Alfred Hughes has summoned more than 300 active and retired priests to a convocation today at 9:30 a.m. at Notre Dame Seminary to disclose the full details of the reorganization. A news conference is scheduled for 11:15 a.m. The announcements apparently will be almost as revelatory to priests as to their parishioners. Key archdiocesan officials Tuesday afternoon began notifying priests of changes that would affect their parishes, said the Rev. Michael Jacques, who helped design the reorganization process. But several pastors said they thought most priests had little idea of what might happen to parishes in other parts of the archdiocese. Challenging times The Rev. Ian Bordenave, pastor of St. Anthony of Padua Church in New Orleans, said many of his colleagues are conflicted as they prepare to receive the decision. "On the one hand, they come attached to the parishes they serve, just like the people in the pews. On the other, they know they have to help the archbishop make decisions not just for one parish, but for the archdiocese as a whole," he said. In recent days parish activists cultivating leaks from the archdiocese's closed-door planning process fashioned an e-mail network that whipped lists of rumored closures and mergers around the area. In the 7th Ward, members of 60-year-old Epiphany Parish, a bastion of African-American Creole culture, began gathering Monday evening on the steps of their closed church to pray for its survival. They reappeared Tuesday and said they would assemble again this morning beginning at 9. Uptown, parishioners of 121-year-old Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish, having heard last week they were closing from Monsignor Henry Engelbrecht of neighboring St. Henry's -- also reportedly closing -- said they would announce from the steps of their church a fight to stay open. Parishioners in those two parishes have mounted a letter-writing campaign to Hughes on behalf of their communities. Last weekend, Hughes asked 385,000 Catholics -- those in the seven-civil-parish New Orleans area plus Washington Parish -- to prepare for closings, perhaps out of the flood zone. Gone with the wind On the day before Hurricane Katrina, the archdiocese numbered about 491,000 Catholics in 142 parishes and eight missions. Early in 2006, after Katrina's flood had receded and church officials surveyed the damage, they found that a fifth of the region's Catholics were gone and the archdiocese had sustained at least $120 million in uninsured flood damage. In a temporary reorganization, the archdiocese permanently closed several parishes and missions -- the number eventually settled at nine -- and ordered parishioners in about 21 parishes in Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes to place themselves under the care of designated neighboring pastors until a long-term plan was complete. Those parishes are technically still open -- if dead in practice. Hughes' announcement of a massive reorganization of parish life is expected to start a formal process to formally close many of those parishes -- and perhaps others, presumably because of the growing shortage of priests. Fight to stay open In some parishes, particularly Our Lady of Good Counsel and St. Henry's, parishioners vowed to resist by means they have not yet disclosed. Novelist Poppy Z. Brite, a new Catholic who was received into the church last Easter at Our Lady of Good Counsel, said she found a spiritual home there in its "diverse, multicultural, gay-friendly, open" congregation. "I don't mean to say I'd leave the Catholic church over this," Brite said, but she dreaded the potential loss of the Rev. Pat Collum, who she said led her to the church. She said she will be one of two speakers urging Good Counsel's continuation at a church rally today. But the Rev. Mike Kettenring, pastor of Visitation of Our Lady Parish in Marrero, said the archdiocese is in the grip of another reality. "Every one of us understands in our heads that we've lost something like 60 priests in the last 10 years. The archbishop thinks we're going to lose another 18 in the next five years. I think that's optimistic. I think it's going to be more like 30. "I think right now, people are thinking with their hearts only," Kettenring said. The reorganization of archdiocesan life means that New Orleans joins scores of Catholic dioceses around the country that have had to close dozens of parishes, sometimes more. Elsewhere, those have been adjustments to declining numbers of priests and demographic shifts that saw Catholics leave cities and move to the suburbs. But the New Orleans experience is overlaid with an additional imperative: the shattering effect of Katrina, which laid waste to lower Plaquemines and all of St. Bernard, and depopulated huge swaths of New Orleans. "Mostly I've told my parishioners here to pray," said Kettenring, who said he does not think his parish will be closed or merged. "I've told them to pray for other parishioners, and I've told them to pray for the archbishop," he said. "This is going to be a gut-wrenching, agonizing business. He's beyond retirement. He could have told the pope he didn't want to do another two years. But he didn't, out of love for the people of the archdiocese. "This is like Jesus in the garden. Believe me, he knows what's coming. "This is a no-win proposition."
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