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He lived in a shambling rectory filled with books and newspapers, a vegan dishing out dollars to homeless people and addicts who came knocking in the night. Many of them he knew by name. LeDoux wrote a column for the African American Louisiana Weekly. He was back at St. Augustine three weeks after Katrina, saying Mass. St. Augustine owed $227,000 in assessments—back taxes—to the archdiocese. Gentrification was edging into Tremé. After the flood, with whole swaths of the city devoid of people, real estate prices were soaring. Church, rectory, parish center, and a huge side yard were a developer’s dream.

In early 2006 Hughes told LeDoux the parish had to close. The public announcement ignited a furor in Tremé. Activists occupied the rectory and church. The media coverage portrayed an aloof archbishop against a black neighborhood as the broken city tried to get back on its feet. In 2009 Hughes would be pilloried in satirical Mardi Gras floats, his visage mocked on the plastic cups that masked revelers dispense as carnival “throws”—a fate traditionally accorded to politicians on their way to jail.

LeDoux was gone when Jacques entered the church in his robes to say Mass on Sunday, March 26, an act by which the parish would be formally closed, its members welcomed by a group from St. Peter Claver. In the fraught atmosphere, some parishioners wept, others seethed. Ten plain-clothes officers accompanied Father William Maestri, the archdiocesan spokesman, who would brook no dissent. When a nervous Jacques took the pulpit to give his homily, people stood and turned their backs; others waved signs in protest. As people began yelling, Jacques could not speak. Maestri made a slicing gesture under his neck, signaling to the cops that Mass was over. “I’m NOPD!” shouted an officer, hustling Maestri and Jacques into a car.6

Hughes denounced “the sacrilege” and canceled Masses indefinitely.

LeDoux, who was in the process of moving out, fired back, saying that police in church “reeked of racial profiling. You have racial profiling when you do not understand an ethnic group or a racial group, and you think that because they are upset, because they’re even a little angry, they are dangerous.”

A French Quarter hotelier from one of the city’s prominent families, Michael Valentino, offered to spearhead a $1 million capital campaign, provided the parish stay open. Another parishioner, Jacques Morial, was a political activist whose father and older brother had both been mayor. He joined Valentino to meet with Father Jacques.

“When you negotiate in a tense situation,” Morial told me later, “you assume the people sitting across from you have good information and a reasonable sense of how to proceed. Hughes would not get directly involved. Father Jacques was in way over his head; he had his plan to close parishes, no appreciation about the impact or really how to achieve it. I don’t think Hughes had any idea of the reaction or that making LeDoux leave would set off so many folk. Tremé has a history of being stomped, politically, by the city, and to make a move like that with so many people just getting back from Katrina, the timing could not have been worse. Look, I’m a parishioner and I’ve got an interest, okay? But if I were a neutral consultant, first thing, you look at the facts. A church built in 1842. Pride of the black community. A pastor everyone loves. Yeah, the guy drinks carrot juice. LeDoux’s eccentric. New Orleans is eccentric. But the city’s in the national media every day because of Katrina. The parish owes two hundred grand plus change to the archdiocese. So what do you do? Launch a national fund-raising campaign! Call Oprah, Bill Cosby, rally people who love New Orleans to help. We knew LeDoux would be essential for fund-raising—he’s a folk hero. Jacques wanted to pastor the two congregations. Hughes, from all I could tell, never thought about an alternative plan.”

Father LeDoux moved to Texas. The parish gained a reprieve, conditioned on its meeting