New Orleans Parishes Brace for Major Changes

Archbishop Alfred Hughes on Saturday began asking Catholics across metropolitan New Orleans, including those far from the flood zone, to prepare for a reorganization of Catholic life befitting a deeply damaged regional church.

In a letter being read from nearly 140 pulpits at weekend Masses, Hughes characterized the 215-year-old Archdiocese of New Orleans, the second-oldest archdiocese in the country, as a "missionary diocese" after Hurricane Katrina. He said "all sectors will share in some of the sacrifices involved" in a massive restructuring plan to be unveiled Wednesday.

It's happening all over - it's like a spreading plague, a virulent disease in which there are no longer enough people alive to support the parishes. Once vibrant, packed parish churches are mere shells of their earlier history. Fewer priests, fewer religious, fewer children.

Such is a result of the poisonous fruits of our "free and liberated society" with its obsessed and destructive contraceptive and abortive mentality. No children - no priests, no religious, no future! When about 1/3 of our unborn children are willfully murdered for sheer convenience and selfish indulgences, can we truly expect to reap anything other than pain, agony, and death?

Of course, some of these New Orleans parishes were damaged during Katrina and have suffered as a result of that devastation.

The regional church must chart a course through a post-Katrina landscape, with 20 percent of the region's 491,000 Catholics still gone, some neighborhoods thinly populated, others growing with transplanted Catholics and $120 million in uninsured flood losses to churches, schools and other buildings.

Moreover, archdiocesan officials said the church now must come to grips with a steadily dwindling corps of priests, which means parishes far from the flood zone may be affected as well. Church officials said they expect during the next five years to lose 18 priests from a corps of 136, including a handful of new ordinations.

It's really sad to hear about this.