Sunday morning I went to St. Augustine church for Mass. I went this Sunday specifically, because on Friday the New Orleans Archdiocese announced that the church (or more specifically the parish) would be closed. Anywhere else in the country (maybe the world) most people would not think of this as any big deal, but here in New Orleans, St. Augustine church was at the heart of some of the most interesting and significant juxtapositions of faith and secularism there are, in a city where faith and secularism daily journey hand in hand.This blend of spiritual and pagan (including the spiritual IN the pagan) is one of the things that makes New Orleans feel to me like it was created from and for my own psyche. Most of the time people who understand my religious side don't really understand my pagan side and those who understand my pagan side (even a little bit) almost NEVER get my religious side. In fact, most of the time, most people are surprised when they learn how deeply I experience either one. In New Orleans, it's like I've found my home country. Here they speak my language. I rarely find it necessary to explain anything about that soul juxtaposition... it's the very thing this place has been based on for nearly three hundred years.
St Augustine's church is the oldest African-American Catholic Congregation (people keep stating that it is the oldest one in the U.S. but it seems to me that saying that is redundant). Every year there is a jazzfest brunch, and every year there is a Satchmo Fest jazz mass. Mardi Gras Indian celebrations, jazz funerals, and numerous second line parades all start a tthe church. People - like myself - who are netiher Catholic nor African-American find a church home, a community, and the opportunity for true celebration in the services led by Father LeDoux. The loss of St. Augustine is a loss for the whole city. Sure, the services will continue, but under the direction of another parish, another priest. The very things that make up what St. Augustine is about will most likely fade away and the church will eventually close. It's a sad reality, and just the latest wound to rise up like a boil on the skin of New Orleans' corporeality.
2 comments:
Have faith.
Priests come and go, but congregations remain. The parish is just an administrative tool. It's the building and the community that uses the building as its hub that makes a church.
I'd be more worried about the water damage to the building than about the combining into another parish.
I know what you're saying about "priests coming and going" but being that I was once a minister (Baptist not Catholic) myself, and I have a number of friends who still are "of the cloth" I am not comfortable with the idea that priests (or priestesses, ministers, shamans, or witch doctors) are simply interchangable.
Father LeDoux (like Cecil Williams at Glide Methodist in San Francisco) is the heart and soul of what occurs there and HE will be leaving. His congreagation understands this and were quite vocal about it on Sunday.
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