Lincoln, Neb., Mar 31, 2019 / 04:01 pm (CNA).- If you ask a Nebraskan how the historic floods over the past few weeks have affected them, they are likely to count their blessings, and to tell you that it could have been worse.
They’ll thank God for sparing their lives, rather than curse him for the destruction of their homes or the washing away of their cattle.
It’s not, so much, a reflection of the severity of the disastrous flooding (which covered a third of the state at its peak, and will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars in property, crop and livestock losses), but rather a reflection of the faith and indomitability found in many a Nebraskan soul.
“We in Nebraska, we come together,” Tony Hergott told CNA. Hergott is the Disaster Relief Chairman for the Knights of Columbus, and has been coordinating groups of Knights to assist in some of the hardest-hit communities in Nebraska, including his own hometown of Columbus, which sits just north of the Loup river right before it meets up with the Platte.
“The biggest challenge we have as Nebraskans is – there’s a lot of pride in Nebraska. People don’t ask for help. You get up, you dust yourself off, you change your clothes, and you fix it – and then you go and help your neighbor, and that’s just the way it is,” Hergott said.
Many people won’t ask for assistance, even if they badly need it, until they are done taking care of their neighbors, he added.
“Its gut-wrenching and heart-warming at the same time,” he said.
On Wednesday, March 14, heavy rains piled on top of already-heavy snows to create the perfect storm of flooding conditions. Rivers and waterways throughout the eastern part of the state overflowed their banks to historic levels, washing away roads, homes, bridges, livestock, and anything else that stood in the way.
To lay down his life for his friends
Fortunately, evacuations and the quick responses of emergency workers resulted in very few lives lost to the floods in Nebraska, though at least one life was lost while trying to save the life of another.
James Wilke, a farmer near Columbus, set out on Wednesday with his tractor, guided by emergency workers, to try and save the life of a motorist stranded in the flood waters on a country road.
When Wilke drove his tractor out over a bridge on Shell Creek, the bridge collapsed under the weight of the tractor and the pressure of the floodwaters, sweeping Wilke and his tractor downstream. Wilke’s body was later found downstream, near his own farm, reported the Omaha World-Herald.
Hergott said that while Wilke was not a Knight of Columbus, he was a “faith-filled man who…embodied all that it is to be a Knight, in service to his brother. ‘I am my brother’s keeper.’ He went out to try to save one life and in return gave his.”
“When you see things like that, it moves you,” he said.
Hergott said the Knights of Columbus immediately reached out to the Wilke family to offer financial assistance and support.
The Knights also sent groups out to the hardest-hit communities in the area, including North Bend, where they talked to families, handed out food, water, cleaning supplies and gift cards, and hosted a fish fry for the other emergency responders and volunteers.
“It’s a Catholic community over there, we wanted to make sure that the Catholics had non-meat to eat on a Friday in Lent,” he said.
“When we were cooking fish and everyone was sitting down to eat, people were joking around like nothing ever happened,” he said. “I mean it’s like your dinner table where you talk and you tell your stories, your good times and bad times, but it’s family time.”
Hergott said the flooding in Columbus and the surrounding areas has been catastrophic, though they are only just beginning to get the full gist of exactly how much property has been damaged or lost.
Some of the greatest needs going forward are going to be hot water heaters and furniture, as well as financial assistance for rebuilding, he said.
He also asked for prayers.
“In North Bend a lady told me, ‘well, all we can do is pray’. And I said, ‘no, the greatest thing we can do is pray’. Don’t downgrade praying, that is the greatest thing. Somebody told me that years ago, and I’ve used that ever since,” he said.
“It’s just stuff that we lost.”
Carol Waldow is a 73 year-old Nebraskan from Bellevue who also spoke of the importance of prayer.
On the day the floods came, Waldow was ordered to evacuate her home by emergency responders.
“I just said: Dear God, what am I supposed to do? And he said: Get out!”
Waldow escaped with her husband and their two poodles. Their home, which sat in a development right next to Offutt Air Force Base, was destroyed.
Waldow and her husband moved in with one of their sons and his family. They’ve already found a new, closer parish to go to in the interim (St. Wenceslaus in Omaha) and are signing the lease on a new, small apartment “so we’ll have somewhere to lay our heads.”
Waldow said that while thinking of her losses can sometimes make her “weepy,” she knows that she still has all of the most important things.
“It’s just stuff that we lost,” Waldow told CNA.
“I didn’t lose my faith, I didn’t lose my family, and I didn’t lose my friends. You know, and I really wasn’t living for all that stuff anyway, I’m living for better rewards in heaven. I’m not living for those knickknacks and pictures and things like that,” she said.
Waldow said she hoped the flood would be a good reminder to everyone that “we don’t live forever.”
“The things that we have are all gifts of God anyway, and we need to remember that to God we shall return, and it’s only through his blessing that we have life anyway,” she said.
When she’s tempted to feel sorry for herself, Waldow said she gets out her Magnificat and says her prayers.
“It’s just such a blessing that I have my faith, because without my faith and my family and my friends I’d have nothing anyway. It just brings me closer to God,” she said.
“We can’t always choose the kind of Lent we will have”
The levels and severity of the flooding was unlike anything most Nebraskans have seen in the state in their lifetimes.
“It came on so fast; I talked to a lady who was in her 90s, and she said that the only flood that was near this was in 1943, so it was kind of a once-in-a-hundred-years type of situation,” said Father Tim Forget, who, like many priests in rural Nebraska, is the pastor of two parishes – St. Jane Frances in Randolph and St. Mary in Osmond.
And, like many rural priests that Wednesday, Forget ended up being stranded away from his parish when the floods hit. Forget, who normally lives in Randolph, drove to Osmond that Wednesday to celebrate Mass and to hold adoration.
But soon after making the trip over, he realized: “Wow, this is really getting bad quick.”
Parents started calling to get their kids from school, and Forget opened up the normally-vacant Osmond rectory to teachers and families who couldn’t get back home. Then he tried to make the trip back to his Randolph rectory, but ended up rerouting to Norfolk, a nearby town, due to the numerous road closures.
Forget said his parishes “thankfully” didn’t sustain any damage, while the Catholic school had some water in the basement. Some parishioners homes were not as lucky.
Despite the damages, “there’s been a lot of positive people, it’s a very tight Catholic parish,” Forget said.
In a reflection in his March 31 bulletin, Forget wrote: “Small town Nebraska has a lot to teach the outside world about coming together and helping. We can’t always choose the kind of Lent we will have but we can choose what we will do when it comes to us. In so many ways I see all of you being such amazing examples of what it means to be a Christian family.”
Fr. Bill L’Heureux is another rural Nebraska priest whose life was made more interesting by the flooding, as he pastors four parishes in northeastern Nebraska: St. Lawrence in Silver Creek, St. Peter and Paul in Krakow, St. Rose of Lima in Genoa, and St. Edward in St. Edward.
After the floods, he offered to help another priest in a nearby parish with adoration.
“I told him I had to go through two time zones, the Pony Express, one Indian reservation and three check stations to get there,” he joked. “It’s kind of fun.”
Every weekend, L’Heureux celebrates one Mass at each parish. Except now, he is cut off from his St. Edward parish due to washed-away bridges and closed roads.
Like in Osmund, St. Edward was able to open up the vacant rectory to host some families who were driven out of their homes by the flooding until they could make more permanent arrangements, he said.
“I’m just so proud of everybody stepping up and helping each other out and taking care of their neighbors, it’s all the stuff we preach about on Sunday,” he said, recalling the Gospel passage about the fig tree bearing fruit.
“I’m just the gardener,” he said.
About 70 miles to the east of the Silver Creek area, the city of Fremont turned into an island after the floods cut off all roads and bridges leading into town.
Fr. William Nolte, pastor of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Fremont, had to be flown back into the town from Omaha after getting stranded during the floods.
“I called my principal and said hey, if you know anybody who has a plane or a helicopter so I can get out of here, whatever it costs, I’m going to need to get back. Within 15 minutes I got a call that it just so happened that a neighbor four doors down flies to work and he had flown in that day and gave me a ride back. It was very providential,” he said. “So it’s amazing how God has been taking care of his family down here.”
Nolte said people in the Fremont area are bracing for the long-haul; recovery from the floods could take months and in some cases years.
“This is not just a one week, two week, one month problem. This is going to be a problem, but an opportunity to take care of one another – this is going to be a several-year opportunity. And so they’re bracing for that,” Nolte said.
Father Kizito Okhuoya is the pastor in the towns of Niobrara and Verdigre, which bore some of the worst of the brunt of the floods when the nearby Spencer dam failed March 14.
“The words I use are devastating, shocking, overwhelming, just unbelievable,” he said.
“People who have lived here all their life have never seen anything like it, some people recall that there was a flood in the ’60s, but it’s nothing close to what they experienced this time around. We were kind of blindsided because nobody saw this coming,” he said.
While the parishes were spared any major damage, many homes were lost or damaged, and farms that had been in families for generations were wiped out. Chunks of ice swept in by the floods made much of the area nearly impassable before they melted.
“Parishioners lost a lot of their possessions,” Okhuoya said. “People lost collectibles, sentimental things, people lost a lot of stuff.”
But people from neighboring communities have stepped up to help, he added, sending crews of people to clean up mud, or pump out water, or haul trash out of flooded basements.
“It’s been unbelievable the generosity, the outreach, the kindness, the compassion that people have shown us, it’s very humbling for me to see all that,” he said.
The Archdiocese of Omaha has a special collection for flood relief, and he said he’s been getting calls of spiritual and material support from many places throughout the country.
Okhuoya said the clean-up process has been “very emotional”, as people come to terms with the scope of the losses they’ve suffered, so he teamed up with the Methodist pastor in town to offer an ecumenical prayer service where people were able to pray together and read God’s word, he said.
“In my weekend homilies since this happened, I’ve been pushing messages of hope and of God’s love, a message of gratitude. A message that maybe there are lessons here, that God wants us to rethink our priorities and focus on the things are important, because like I said in one of my homilies, sometimes we quibble and fight over nothing. But when this flood hit, nobody was fighting,” he said.
Small towns can sometimes have a way of letting small divisions fester over time, but it shouldn’t take a disaster to bring people together, Okhuoya said.
“Why can’t we stay this way? Why do we have to allow things like this to happen to force us to create that connection and to care and to show compassion? Why can’t we just always do that? We don’t need all these calamities to push us to where we can show that kind of compassion always,” he said.
“So why can’t we learn the lessons and always be the best we can be, as Christians, as Catholics, as citizens of this country, and do the best to work with each other, and do whatever is good, whatever is honorable, or whatever is going to touch the lives of people. For me … I think that’s what I am learning.”
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Vance shows his true colours! Another Benedict Arnold to the unborn! Thought he was too good to be true, there was always something of the night about him; never trust blues eyes, especially in a politician like this apostate catholic!
Never trust blue eyes?
I agree with Lila Rose. Trump has sold out the Pro-Life movement, and if his opponents had not been so abysmal in every single policy area, I would be praying for his defeat. The transformation of the GOP from a Social Conservative party to Trump Personality Cult is one of the most disappointing political developments in my lifetime.
So…who do you plan to vote for? An unknown with no chance of winning? Exactly how will that help stop abortion? Or are you going to “righteously abstain” from voting at all? How will THAT help stop abortion?!
Often in life, we are faced with two alternatives, neither of which is ideal; e.g., House A or House B. You have to have a place to live and choosing House C isn’t an option–your only other option is not having a house and living in your parents’ basement or in your car. So you sigh, hold your nose, and choose between House A and House B and work really hard to try to make your choice eventually become your ideal
Who do you plan to vote for? Someone who will win or lose without your vote?
Or are you under the impression that your state will be perfectly balanced between Democrats and Republicans, and YOUR VOTE will break the time — and that, on top of that, the Electoral College will be essentially tied until your state breaks the tie? Because that is the ONLY way your vote will be actually change the outcome of the election. But you would be better off buying a lottery ticket and donating the winnings to your favorite candidate; your odds of winning a multi-million dollar jackpot are vastly better than your odds of casting the deciding vote.
I remember the 1990s. Bill Clinton was a womanizing narcissist who said he wanted abortion to be safe, legal, and rare, even as he moved his party to the left. Today, Trump is a womanizing narcissist who says he wanted abortion to be safe, legal, and rare, even as he moves his party to the left. Oh, and Ted Kennedy was a Catholic who went along with all that enthusiastically, just as J.D. Vance does today. I didn’t support Clinton or Kennedy. It appears that you at least approve of them now.
As for me, I would not approve of Clinton/Kennedy clones even if I knew I was casting the deciding vote, for reasons only a little less serious than why I would not choose a United Methodist church over a Hindu temple — I reject the false dilemma that tries to make me call the “lesser evil” truth. In reality, I already know which candidate will win the Electoral College votes from my state, probably by a margin of over 10% of the vote. If I would be unwilling to lie and say that Trump & Vance are good men deserving of high office even if I thought it would make a difference, what on earth could compel me to say that lie when I know it will make no difference?
Sure, Harris & Walz are worse. Just like Hinduism is less true than United Methodism. That changes precisely nothing about the situation as I have explained it.
When we have two Presidential candidates who are not pro-life as we Catholics interpret “pro-life”, we need to do some serious thinking about who we will vote for.
In my opinion, voting for a “totally pro-life” candidate who has absolutely no chance of winning unless God performs a miracle and multiplies the votes as He multiplied the loaves and fishes–is just a gesture which will mean NOTHING in this election, and will do NOTHING to help stop abortion and other grave sins that are becoming acceptable as “rights” in the United States!
What we need to do is vote for whichever candidate is most likely to create a “climate” in the U.S. (not talking about weather here!) that will make it more likely that a woman will be able to make a choice for life for her unborn child and a climate in which religious people will have a true voice in helping form public policy.
The economy is a major factor when it comes to a woman’s decision to keep or kill her unborn child. High taxation, heavy regulation on the development of new companies and businesses, high-cost regulations on businesses when it comes to their commitment to being “green-friendly,” regulations that impose quotas to bring about “diversity”, and many other government regulations that impede the ability of companies to grow and thrive mean less well-paying jobs (with health care benefits) for women and the fathers of their unborn children. Being poor with no realistic way out of poverty and inadequate job skills is one of the major factors that cause a woman to abort.
Lack of affordable health care is a major cause of abortion–and health care in this nation has become a business rather than a vocation. No longer are hospitals managed by local doctors who have decided to leave active practice and devote their lives to creating a “healing center” that will serve their local population. Hospitals are now run by huge companies and millionaires who see yet another source of profit. God help the uninsured in the U.S.A.–but health insurance is also big business which is often too expensive for anyone but the well-off and wealthy! It’s no wonder women choose abortion–yes it costs money, but it’s cheaper than all the pre-natal, birth, and post-natal health care that many poor and low-income women cannot afford. We need a President who understands this and who is an advocate for health care that is available to everyone regardless of income, and we also need a President who can advocate educational programs that ENCOURAGE children and teens to consider good-paying health care careers (which are dangerously short-staffed at this time in America’s history!)
Also, the cost, quality, and availability of educational opportunities is another major factor. When schools emphasize “diversity” and “inclusion” issues and do not teach subjects that adequately prepare young people to discern a job/career, the students end up unemployed, under-employed, and poor (assuming they even finish high school). Although many women who have abortions have good incomes and are financially sound, a large number of abortions are performed for poor and low-income women. We need our schools to educate, not indoctrinate.
Finally, when a political party utilizes hugely-popular entertainers (“stars”) who are unashamedly pro-abortion and pro-sexual promiscuity inside and outside traditional marriage, many Americans will respond with ‘stars in their eyes’ to the stars they love to hear on Spotify or see on Netflix. and vote for the candidates that these entertainment idols endorse without even bothering to examine the policies that the candidates are advocating!
Although it would be wonderful to vote for a committed Catholic who is totally submissive to Holy Mother Church, we need to accept that this will not happen in this particular election (and probably not in many future elections, and even our Catholic presidents in the past have been guilty of moral failures!). Rather than not voting, thinking that our absence will “send a message” to the U.S. government (yes, it will “send a message”–that we are naive!), or rather than voting for a candidate that would literally need a miracle to even gain 1% of the votes, we need to soberly study the two viable candidates and vote for the one who will be most likely (but not guaranteed) to bring about a political climate in which religion can continue to have an influence on public policy and those of us who are faithful can continue to have the right to practice our faith and share it with others.
Mrs. Sharon, Medicaid pays 100% of delivery & prenatal expenses in our state. I don’t know how it works in every other state but we have state sponsored children’s health insurance offered on a sliding income scale.
I really don’t believe healthcare costs are a driving cause of feticides. Every country that offers nationalized healthcare also has feticides committed.
If we support socialized medicine, ok that’s another conversation. All healthcare is costly. Either to the taxpayer or to the consumer & we have finite resources to fund that through taxpayers.
I’ve heard it said — maybe in the Wormwood Letters, it’s been a while — that the devil wants to get our souls and give us nothing in return. He’s already got your acquiescence to at least some abortions. What are you getting in return? Power to decide the election? The math says otherwise.
Trump should absolutely refuse to sign a national ban. What was the purpose of appointing judges to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade? The court determined that there is no legal precedent in American or English common law that guarantees access to abortions at the federal level, so the law was unconstitutional. The decision was thrown back to the individual states, which is where it belongs.
Athanasius, Roe v. Wade wasn’t a law; it was a Supreme Court decision. Overturning it made state law relevant again, but did not preclude a federal abortion ban. In fact, denying a Constitutional right to abortion opens the door to a federal ban. Trump and Vance don’t support one because they think it’s a losing issue, not because it’s unconstitutional. If you are pro-life (ie, believe each human person deserves protection from conception to natural death) you should at least theoretically support a national ban on abortion. A politician insisting that he would work against one is not incrementalism either; it’s just pro-abortion.
Let the states decide.
Nothing precludes a federal abortion ban but this isn’t the moment for that.
If pro-life legislation can be passed at a national level, pro-abortion people can turn that around and pass a law imposing abortion on all the states. I think it’s probably safer to make it a state-by-state thing, though my preference would be for abortion to be recognized as the murder that it is and banned everywhere.
What are the chances that even a Republican-dominated Congress would ever pass a national abortion ban? The hypothetical was put forward to force Vance to either alienate pro-lifers or incite the ghouls who delight in the killing of babies. It was trap put out in the service of the Harris campaign.