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Boston bore scant resemblance to the archdiocese he took over in 2002. Founded in 1718 as a French colonial port, New Orleans was Catholic from the start, unlike the heavily Baptist and evangelical upper South. The city was the nation’s largest slave port in the 1840s and a rare social mosaic. “A man might here study the world,” a late-nineteenth-century bookseller wrote. “Every race the world boasts is here, and a good many races that are nowhere else … The air is broken by every language—English, French, Italian and German, varied by gombo languages of every shade.”4

Slaves worshipped in the rear pews of antebellum churches, behind planters, merchants, working-class whites, and free persons of color, many of whom owned slaves. Despite a deep presence of black Catholics, the twentieth-century growth of African American vernacular churches, like Church of God in Christ, and the larger Baptist denominations had broadened the demography of faith. Still, when Katrina hit, the Catholic Church was the largest denomination in the eight-parish area, with 480,000 members in a population of 1.4 million. Parochial schools educated 50,000 students (many of them non-Catholic), nearly as many as were enrolled in the city’s decaying public school system. Despite huge damages from Katrina, the church’s relief efforts were heroic.5

Hurricane Katrina gave Archbishop Hughes a shot at redemption

“I am also a refugee,” a weary Hughes said on a visit to a homeless shelter in Baton Rouge the second day after the storm. He heard confessions of state troopers and aid workers. “It’s not easy to be so drastically dislocated without any early hope of being able to return.”

The church initially announced a $40 million deficit. Over the next three years, $107 million poured in from dioceses, bishops, Rome, individual Catholics, philanthropists, and foundations for rebuilding and relief costs. Volunteers from parishes in many states traveled to New Orleans, gutting houses that had taken four, six, eight, ten feet of water. Catholic Charities provided $7 million in direct relief for survival assistance.

But in the winter of 2006, New Orleans had only 40 percent of its population back. Federal funds to assist home owners whose insurance did not fully cover their rebuilding needs were slow to get congressional approval. The church had reopened 107 of 142 parishes, and 81 of 107 schools. Although the archdiocese would, like many agencies, recoup substantial losses from FEMA, the immediate task was deciding how to allocate its resources across the area. Several parishes had been destroyed; others would have to merge as part of a smaller urban footprint. Hughes entrusted a key part of the planning for this job of enormous complexity to Father Michael Jacques, the white pastor of St. Peter Claver, an African American parish in a downtown neighborhood that was heavily damaged. Jacques was not a seasoned urban planner. He was popular in the community, though overshadowed by Jerome LeDoux, the seventy-six-year-old African American pastor at St. Augustine, ten blocks away in Tremé, a neighborhood steeped in cultural traditions, just outside the French Quarter. Early in his career, LeDoux had spent four years in Rome, earning a master’s in theology and a Ph.D. in church law.

Now in the autumn of his life, wearing dashiki vestments at Mass, LeDoux, with his mop of gray hair, was a charismatic preacher who welcomed jazz musicians to perform at liturgies. For some reason German tourists regularly showed up at his Sunday Mass, taking photographs in the side garden of the Tomb of the Unknown Slave, an exhibit with a large anchor and chains. In a neighborhood reeling from drug violence, LeDoux said the funerals for any family, regardless of faith. Many were too poor to pay for a wake. His sermons flowed with hope and wit. “Why do we welcome Mardi Gras Indians?” he said one Sunday. “Feathers, tambourines, war whoops. Mmm: we hear whoops of peace this fine morn. Scripture tells us, ‘Make a joyful noise unto