The town of Lake Charles, Louisiana is reeling from more than a foot of rain and widespread flooding that occurred earlier this week, as the local Catholic Charities is working to provide necessary supplies to the community.
Despite its regular food distributions being disrupted because of the flooding, the Catholic Charities affiliate announced that it had reopened with mostly regular operations on May 19, and encouraged those in need of aid to come to their office at 1225 2nd Street in Lake Charles.
The organization also requested donations of cleaning supplies, such as mops, buckets, sponges, brooms, bleach, and towels, which it said can be dropped off or shipped to its address.
A call to the affiliate’s office on Friday went unanswered, and the outgoing message stated that the office has closed because of the threat of more flooding.
Monday’s rainfall was the third-highest ever recorded in a single day for Lake Charles. State and local emergency response teams deployed boats to make rescues and requests to evacuate this week, reporting 30 such rescues or requests in one hour on Monday. The town endured two hurricanes in 2020.
A local organization called The Vessel Project, which helps poor and homeless people in the area, is planning to host an emergency supply distribution drive-thru on May 24th from 3 p.m. until 5 p.m.
The organization told CNA that it is in need of monetary assistance, as well as donations of cleaning supplies such as mold and mildew spray, towels, buckets, mops, rakes, shovels, and wheelbarrows.
The Vessel Project says it is assessing community members’ greatest needs by asking them to fill out a Google Form, and they are planning to conduct meal distributions for neighbors in the near future.
Most of the current rainfall in the Lake Charles area fell on Monday, although more rain is expected on Friday. A Flash Flood Watch remains in effect through 7 p.m. Friday evening for Lake Charles, as the city remains under threat of heavier rains throughout the afternoon, KPLC reported.
Hurricane Laura slammed the Louisiana coast last August with 150 mile-per-hour winds, and Hurricane Delta arrived in October, the fourth named storm to strike Louisiana in 2020. The storms wrought an estimated $12 billion in cumulative damages.
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CNA Staff, Jan 29, 2021 / 04:14 pm (CNA).- The polarization of American politics means that Catholics must be a force for unity rather than “divisively tribal,” and clergy especially need to be careful that they don’t let their personal politics compromise their Christian mission, Bishop Donald Hying of Madison has said.
“All Catholics have to be careful to engage in political life in a manner that reflects the Gospel, but clergy need to exercise special caution so that their political activity is consistent with their vocation in the Church,” he said in a Jan. 27 reflection on the “current state of general acrimony.”
Clergy should not voice “overt and purely political opinions regarding individuals, parties, election results, the current news cycle,” nor should they engage in ad hominem attacks.
“Such actions threaten to politicize the Church and divide our people even more,” he said.
“I am not implying that we should be silent in the face of evil, injustice, and wrongdoing, but we need to stick with the moral issues and refrain from the personal attacks,” Hying said.
While bishops, priests and deacons can vote and hold political opinions, Hying said, their task is “to preach and teach the Catholic faith to the laity and to lay out the revealed priority of moral issues.” Pastors who fail to preach the truths of the Catholic faith, however, “fail in loving our people.”
“The task of the laity is to form their consciences and apply the teachings of the Church to the spheres of politics, economy, society, and culture,” said the bishop.
He reflected on the state of the country in January 2021: “the anger and vitriol is palpably toxic.”
“Our cultural, political, and social divisions, exacerbated by COVID; the elections; and the violence in our streets and cities have unfortunately entered into the Church and are seriously wounding our unity in Christ,” he said.
“We now seem to have Biden Catholics and Trump Catholics, perhaps just the latest incarnation of traditional and progressive Catholics, but a division that is louder, angrier, and far less compromising than all the previous rifts in the Body of Christ.”
“Any words of moderation, actions of conciliation, benefit of the doubt given to another point of view, or attempt to find middle ground is dismissed as betrayal and disloyalty to the truth,” he said.
“If we do not even desire to heal the divisions among us, how can we ever rediscover our unity in Christ? The bishop asked. “The painful experience of these past months tells me that we as fallen human beings can become divisively tribal. We instinctively associate with the people who think, act, and live as we do.”
He emphasized that Christ calls members of his body to “a far greater reality, indeed a supernatural unity, founded in the very life of the Most Blessed Trinity.”
“Jesus served, loved, died, and rose from the dead to establish a New Covenant in His Blood, a redeemed humanity of every race, tribe, and tongue, incorporating every culture, nationality, class, and people into the Church,” Hying continued. “For us Christians, water is thicker than blood, for the communion we discover in the waters of Baptism is far deeper and significant than the ties of race, nation, political party, and even family.”
“If we are bound together in Christ as His Mystical Body, then how can we keep tearing each other apart? We are brothers and sisters in Christ,” he said.
He suggested Catholics should spend the time before Easter in deeper prayer, penance, and almsgiving.
“How can I be more patient, kind, gentle, and compassionate to others, especially those I disagree with? Get off social media and get in front of the Blessed Sacrament. Stop watching so much news and start reading the Good News. Spend the time on volunteer service to help the poor instead of writing angry emails,” said the bishop, who added: “Examine your conscience regarding the sins of calumny, rash judgment, violent anger, and malicious speech. And then go to confession.”
At the same time, Hying said vocal partisans are not necessarily representative of Catholicism.
“Most Catholics are simply trying to live their faith, focus on Jesus Christ, become holy, and do God’s will. Many people had questions and concerns about some of President Trump’s policies and actions, as many do about President Biden,” he said.
He said that the Catholic bishops in the US do consider abortion the “preeminent” national issue because it is “intrinsic evil as the deliberate taking of human life in its fragile beginnings.” At the same time, he said, “‘preeminent’ does not mean ‘only’.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has always tried to work with every presidential administration to support moral policies and oppose others, said the bishop.
“The fact that President Biden is a baptized Catholic who attends Mass and asserts faith as the guiding principle of his life gives greater urgency to the need to challenge those of his policies which are opposed to moral teaching based on the natural law,” he said. “Some may mistakenly assume the Church is taking political sides, but Her actions are always inspired by the truth of God’s revelation and the dignity of the human person. And that cuts both ways, as the Word of God is ‘sharper than a two-edged sword’,” said Hying, quoting the Letter to the Hebrews.
To the Madison diocese’s north is the Diocese of La Crosse. Before the 2020 elections, La Crosse diocesan priest Fr. James Altman’s Aug. 30 video went viral for saying “You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat. Period.”
Bishop William Callahan of La Crosse sought to correct the priest, saying he inflicted a “wound” upon the Church.
“Unfortunately, the tone Fr. Altman offers comes off as angry and judgmental, lacking any charity and in a way that causes scandal both in the Church and in society. His generalization and condemnation of entire groups of people is completely inappropriate and not in keeping with our values or the life of virtue,” Callahan said Sept. 9.
Altman’s video won support from Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, who praised him on Twitter Sept. 5.
Father James Martin, S.J., editor-at-large of America magazine, wrote an essay claiming that Catholic leaders’ criticism of President Joe Biden’s stance on abortion helped contribute to the conditions for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. He named Altman and Bishop Strickland, among others, as well as Bishop Richard Stika of Knoxville.
In a brief response, Bishop Stika rejected the claim. He stood by his criticism of Biden’s abortion stand and again noted the contradiction between the president’s professed Catholic faith and his support for abortion.
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 13, 2024 / 16:16 pm (CNA).
After a new Gallup poll found that 7 out of 10 Americans (71%) support legalized euthanasia, Dr. Scott French, a Catholic emergency physician … […]
Religious sisters of the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, sing as the process with the body of their late foundress, Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, on May 29, 2023, at their abbey near Gower, Missouri. The sisters exhumed the nun’s body on May 18 and discovered that it was apparently intact, four years after her death and burial in a simple wooden coffin. / Joe Bukuras/CNA
Gower, Missouri, May 29, 2023 / 20:02 pm (CNA).
The body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, an African American nun whose surprisingly intact remains have created a sensation at a remote Missouri abbey, was placed inside a glass display case Monday after a solemn procession led by members of the community she founded.
About 5 p.m., dozens of religious sisters of the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, carried their foundress on a platform around the property of the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus, reciting the rosary and singing hymns. Some of the thousands of pilgrims who visited the abbey over the three-day Memorial Day weekend followed behind.
Beautiful procession of the remains of Sr. Wilhelmina Lancaster, a Benedictine nun who died in 2019 and now appears to be in an unexpected state of preservation. Her new resting place is inside the church at the sisters’ monastery in Gower, MO. pic.twitter.com/Ax9uYPKXYv
The procession, held in bright, late-afternoon sunshine, culminated inside the abbey’s church, where the nun’s body was placed into a specially made glass case. Flowers surrounded her body and decorated the top of the case, where there is an image of St. Joseph holding the Child Jesus. The church was filled with pilgrims, including many priests and religious sisters from other orders.
Sister Wilhelmina, who founded the Benedictine order in 1995 when she was 70 years old, died in 2019. Expecting to find only bones, her fellow sisters exhumed her remains on May 18 intending to reinter them in a newly completed St. Joseph’s Shrine, only to discover that her body appeared astonishingly well-preserved.
The sisters say they intended to keep their discovery quiet, but the news got out anyway, prompting worldwide media coverage and a flood of pilgrims arriving at the abbey in Gower, a city of 1,500 residents about an hour’s drive from Kansas City, Missouri. A volunteer told CNA that more than 1,000 vehicles came onto the property on Monday but no official count was available.
There has been no official declaration that Sister Wilhelmina’s remains are “incorrupt,” a possible sign of sanctity, nor is there a formal cause underway for her canonization, a rigorous process that can take many years. The local ordinary, Bishop Vann Johnston of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, has said that a “thorough investigation” is needed to answer “important questions” raised by the state of her body, but there has been no word on if or when such an analysis will take place.
Sister Wilhelmina’s body was reinterred in a glass display case inside the church of the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus in Gower, Missouri, on May 29, 2023. Joe Bukuras/CNA
Before Monday’s procession, pilgrims again waited in line throughout the day for an opportunity to see and touch Sister Wilhelmina’s body before its placement in the glass case, where it will remain accessible for public viewing.
Among those who came on Monday were Tonya and William Kattner, of Excelsior Springs, Missouri.
“You’ve got to experience the magic and the miracle of it,” Tonya Kattner said.
“It’s a modern-day miracle and it was just something we had to come to,” William Kattner said. “Especially with everything going on in the world today, something like this brings hope.”
Kate and Peteh Jalloh of Kansas City, Missouri, said it was a “blessing” to view the apparently well-preserved body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster at her abbey in Gower, Missouri, on May 29, 2023. Joe Bukuras/CNA
Kate and Peteh Jalloh, of Kansas City, Missouri, also didn’t want to pass up the chance to see Sister Wilhelmina.
“I strongly believe in the Catholic faith. I believe in miracles and I have never seen anything like this before. I’ve got a lot going on in my life and this is the best time to get that message from a nun,” Kate Jalloh said.
“It could take another hundred years for us to see something like this,” she added.
Janie Bruck came with her cousins, Kristy Cook and Halle Cook, all from Omaha, Nebraska.
“I came to witness the miracle. I believe we’re in a Jesus revolution and he’s sending us lots of signs,” Bruck said. Kristy Cook, a former Omaha police officer, said she was surprised that Sister Wilhelmina’s body had no odor of decay.
The body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, OSB, lies in the basement of the church of the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus outside Gower, Missouri, on May 28, 2023. Joe Bukuras/CNA
The sisters have publicly thanked the many local law enforcement officers, medical personnel, and volunteers who helped manage the influx of pilgrims over the holiday weekend.
Among the volunteers was Lucas Boddicker, of Kearney, Missouri, who joined members of his Knights of Columbus council based at St. Anne’s Catholic Church in nearby Plattsburgh, Missouri, to guide visiting vehicles to a makeshift parking lot in an open field. Other knights from local parishes helped set up tents and handed out free hamburgers, fruit, and bottles of water.
“That’s one thing the Knights do pretty well,” Boddicker said. “They get the word out when we need manpower.”
Priests heard confessions in a large grass field for hours, some using trees for shade, as young children played on the abbey grounds.
Three religious sisters from the Poor of Jesus Christ order, based in Kansas City, Kansas, said they were inspired by seeing Sister Wilhelmina’s body.
One of the religious, Sister Azucena, said she “wanted to cry,” while praying at the nun’s side. “I just had this feeling of peace and love. We share a vocation. Her fidelity to the Lord and her love, I could feel that there,” she said.
Jason and Jessica Ewell were excited to coincidentally be in town visiting Trish Bachicha (far right) when they heard about the discovery of Sister Wilhelmina’s surprisingly intact remains. Joe Bukuras/CNA
A married couple, Jason and Jessica Ewell, both of whom are blind, were visiting Kansas City, Missouri, from Pennsylvania when they heard Monday morning about Sister Wilhelmina’s body.
“It’s just kind of a neat thing to be a part of the beginning of this story,” Jessica Ewell said.
“I was asking for her intercession for children for our marriage,” she said. “A lot of people think ‘Oh, it’s the blindness,’ but no, it’s not that at all,’” she said.
“Yesterday I was kind of in a place where I said, ‘God, I need something right now,’” she said. “We always hear about these miracles. But they’re long ago and far away and always happen to other people.”
Trish Bachicha, Jessica’s mother, said she believes that God is sending a message.
“He saying ‘I’m alive and well and I haven’t forgotten you,’” she said.
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