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Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti - The woman wailed outside the ruins of the Notre Dame Cathedral of Port-au-Prince, the iconic Roman Catholic church that symbolized Haiti's religious fervor.

"This is what God did!" she cried Friday morning. "See what God can do!"

Tuesday's earthquake brought down the roof of the enormous pink-and-cream church, filling the apse and nave with tons of rubble. The quake punched out its vivid stained glass windows, twisted its wrought-iron fencing and sliced brick walls like cake. The western steeple, which had soared more than 100 feet, toppled onto parishioners praying at an outdoor shrine to St. Emmanuel. Flies buzzed around the pile of copper, plaster and felled columns.

The senior Catholic figure in the country, Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, was killed in the magnitude 7.0 earthquake. As many as 100 priests were still missing, sacristan Jean Claude Augustin said.

By the cathedral's ruins lay a small blue copy of the New Testament. Sheet music for Christian hymns was scattered through the street.

Haiti is, officially, predominantly Catholic, with some Protestant faiths. But across the board is an underlying belief in, or respect for, voodoo and other indigenous traditions, which are often mixed in with those religious practices.

Former Haitian President Bertrand Aristide was at one time wildly popular in part for his blend of superstitious spirituality, social activism and Catholic faith.

Many have turned to God for an explanation of this catastrophe visited upon Haiti. Tens of thousands of people have been spending the nights in the streets, singing hymns and calling out the Gospel.

Dudu Orelian, whose brother and nephew were killed, stood outside the cathedral.

"God is angry at the world," Orelian said.

Jack Fisner, a Haitian seminarian who lives in the Dominican Republic, came to Port-au-Prince to begin coordinating aid and prepare a report for the pope.

"This has been a terrible blow to the church and the people," Fisner said. "You have to question your faith, but hopefully not lose it."

Augustin, the sacristan, clambered into the interior ruins of the cathedral, nimbly scaling the mounds of rubble and downed chandeliers. He found a young man attempting to loot the collection box of its money and persuaded him to stop. Instead, the two men worked together to salvage the tithes, gathering up the coins and bills in a sheet.

The statue of Notre Dame, familiar to anyone who ever worshiped in the cathedral, was gone, either destroyed or stolen.

Behind the cathedral, the church's pastoral center, where religion classes were held, and the residences of most of the church leadership and its priests were also destroyed.

Hope remained that the church's general vicar, an active, popular priest in his 80s, might still be alive. Father Charles Benoit, buried under a collapsed four-story building that contained his residence, managed to get a cellular telephone call out to Francois Voleile, a lifelong parishioner, two days ago. He said he was unharmed and had water and juice, but no way out.

Voleile had been keeping vigil at the site ever since, while a couple of other people armed with a tiny mallet and pocket flashlight tried to work their way into a small opening on the side of the mountain of rubble. On Friday, they were getting nowhere.

At midmorning, a search-and-rescue team arrived from Mexico, the topos (moles) who go around the world to extract disaster victims caught in terrible circumstances.

The Mexican team boosted the rescue effort at the cathedral into full gear, using ropes to pull off sheets of laminated roofing and expose more rubble below.

With area residents helping, they used pickaxes and shovels to tear into the top of the mound and create three possible entryways.

They thought they heard occasional sounds to indicate life. They cleared plaster, beams, drawers full of papers and clothes, tossing everything into a widening heap. Only occasionally did one of the crew members pause to salvage something: a red priest's stole, then a copper chalice. He gingerly handed them to other members of the team.

"It is overwhelming, such destruction in a place already destroyed," said Sister Berta Lopez Chavez, who said the team had worked the day before at a Catholic school, pulling out three children alive and the bodies of about 30 others. "Haiti lives two realities: this catastrophe, and their catastrophe of every day, of poverty and ignorance and daily hunger. It's like, what else can happen to them? The little they had is gone."

About three hours after the team from Mexico launched its efforts, a team from Lincolnshire County, England, arrived with their black Labrador, Holly. Everyone was ordered off the hill, and the dog ran back and forth to inspect the scene.

But Holly found no definitive sign of life, said team member Andy Ford. The team from England abandoned the search, leaving a smaller Russian team with a dog to do a second survey.

"We are not discouraged," parishioner Voleile said. "We are still alive and we can go on."

wilkinson@latimes.com

prisets missing [latimes.com]

I guess he's a follower of Pat Robertson?

And we continue to blame Him for our sins

And, if anything is responcible for this craziness, it is our sins, and the sin of the whole world. Creation stresses under the weight of our sins.

Hopefully the good Father will be rescued before it is too late.

And hopefully, when the time come to rebuild the Cathedral, it can be reconstructed to be more glorious than ever before.

Alexis

Our pastor said this morning, that 100 seminarians had died in the quake. Almost unimaginable. He also pointed out for contrast, that in our small RC diocese, we have 11 seminarians, total.

I don't agree with Pat Robertson, and have found that I rarely do. But I have wondered why conditions are so bad in Haiti, yet the opposite on the other side of the island in the Dominican Republic. Granted, I have never been to either place, and have no first-hand experiences or observations to draw conclusions from.

Charles:

There was a news report on Haiti this mroning that may shed some light. It seems that Napoleon demanded payment from the government of Haiti for his loss of it during the slave revolt that freed it of French control. Moreover, that debt to France was just paid off in the latter part of the 20th century. (If memory serves, the reporter from Haiti said it was in the 1970s.) So their dire poverty has been partly caused by their being honorable in the payment of a debt. Would that the French were as honorable in paying off their Marshall Plan debt.

As far as the story goes, we'd heard that the 100 included many of the priests of the archdiocese.

Beyond that, there has always been the corruption of their government and the officials in it. The people have scratched out a living just beyond the point of destitution and now they have absolutely nothing.

On another note, one of my co-parishioners was in Haiti working at an orphanage just miles beyond our twon parish when the quake struck. He was at Liturgy this morning but I didn't have the chance to speak to him. He sent us an email Friday saying that he and his wife had to walk out over the mountains to the Domincan Republic to get out by plane. He'll be at our men's Bible study next Saturday so I may have more of his story then.

BOB

Actually, their poverty is largely the responsibility of Papa Doc Duvallier's long period of misrule. Duvallier may have been a tin-pot dictator, but he understood instinctively how to establish a stable tyranny. Basically, he followed two rules: confiscate from the people everything above subsistence income, plow most of it back into the instruments of state repression, and the remainder into the pockets of his family and his closest associates.

In this way, he avoided the "trap of rising expectations"; i.e., once the people get even a hint of the good life, or the notion that things could be better, they begin to demand improvements, and pretty soon your nice comfortable dictatorship falls apart.

His son, Baby Doc, lacked the ruthlessness and energy of his father, and allowed his cronies to begin fighting for power, instead of holding all power in his own hands. This led to his overthrow, but more than half a century of misrule had destroyed the last semblance of civil institutions and economic infrastructure. Aristede was supposed to be the great democratic reformer, but proved to be just as corrupt as anyone else, and gradually power slipped to shifting coteries of army officers, who raped the country blind. The present democratically elected administration had barely made a dent in the country's problems and will not likely survive this crisis.

The only way I see Haiti recovering is putting it into some sort of receivership, as was done in the 1920s, when, for all intents and purposes, the USMC ran the country. And it is now viewed as a golden age in Haiti, because the Marines brought good government, justice, suppression of banditry, built roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, powerplants and water systems--all of which are now going down the toilet. A decade of Marine Corps rule is just what Haiti needs right now.

But I don't see us standing up and doing it, so pray for poor Haiti--as someone put it, "the Job of Latin America"

Thanks for the info Bob and Stuart.

Prayer need:



Montfortians: nine semiarians dead



Holy Cross: one seminarian



Daughters of Wisdom: three dead



Dominicans: all priests survived

http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.php?id=35226

Haiti: Religious Congregations Count their losses After Quake
1/20/2010
Catholic Information Service for Africa (www.cisanewsafrica.org [cisanewsafrica.org])

Haiti's capital was served by 277 priests, 387 men religious and 1,200 women religious.

The Pontifical Mission Societies has reported huge losses following the catastrophe in Haiti of an earthquake that killed at least 100,000 people.
ROME (CISA) - The Pontifical Mission Societies has reported huge losses following the catastrophe in Haiti of an earthquake that killed at least 100,000 people.

According to Fides, the news agency of the Pontifical Mission Societies transmitted reports it has received from representatives of the various missionary groups.

The Montfort Missionaries lost 9 seminarians and one priest. Three sisters from that spiritual family, of the Congregation of Daughters of Wisdom, also passed away. Three others are still trapped under the rubble.

The Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Haiti have about 130 members. One seminarian was killed along with the nine Montforians.

The Congregation of the Holy Ghost lost one seminarian.

The Christian Brothers (with 15 working in Haiti) reported no deaths or injuries. There was slight damage to its novitiate, which has been converted into a shelter for nuns who were left homeless.

None of the 41 Redemptorist fathers or brothers was killed; only one was wounded. However damage to their property estimated at $2 million.

The seven Dominican men religious also escaped unharmed. The Dominican Sisters of Charity of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin sustained one injured sister; one of their two homes was completely destroyed. One of the children of their school was killed.

The 49 Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary all survived.

The five Camillian seminarians escaped unharmed.

The Salesians reported about the collapse of a school that buried 200 students and the religious working there. The bodies of two Salesian seminarians have been found.

Jesuits reported little damage and no lives lost; just one priest was injured.

The Franciscans also reported that their 16 brothers are alive. However, an Argentinean priest of the order, who worked as a missionary in Haiti for the past two years, is among those who disappeared in the earthquake, his brother reported on a local television station.

According to 2004 statistics, the Archdiocese of Port-au-Prince had some 2.5 million Catholics, which is 74 percent of the total population. Haiti's capital was served by 277 priests, 387 men religious and 1,200 women religious.

See the rest of the piece here [whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com]