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The Catholic New World
Archdiocesan priest offers aid

Father Joseph Allen, pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Round Lake, took time Sept. 19 to visit a hardware store in Hattiesburg, Miss. He went to pick up a handful of 6-cent screws to make some repairs to Sacred Heart Parish’s school in Hattiesburg, and as he walked the aisles, he reflected on what he had found in Mississippi in the 10 days he’d been there.

“You know how it looks when a tornado goes through a suburb?” he said. “It’s like that all over.”

Hattiesburg, which before Katrina was a community of about 45,000 70 miles north of Biloxi, did not suffer the brunt of the storm’s fury, but it was bad enough.

Now residents trying to cope with their own storm damage are also hosting between 10,000 and 15,000 people who fled the devastation along the Gulf Coast.

“The coast was terrible, absolutely terrible, but Hattiesburg wasn’t spared either,” said Allen, describing tree trunks stacked 10 feet high along the roadsides. “You drive down streets where there were trees, and they aren’t there anymore. More houses have storm damage than don’t.”

Allen had spent 11 months in Mississippi, mostly in Hattiesburg, starting in 2002, to be close to his niece for whom he was guardian, he said. When he saw the storm damage, he pondered going to help.

“I wasn’t sure if I would do more harm than good,” Allen said. “I’d be another mouth to feed, and another person to house.”

But when he heard his friend, Blake Nettles, had been killed by a falling tree while trying to clear storm damage, he knew he had to go for the funeral. And when he arrived in Hattiesburg, he found a parish left temporarily without priests. The pastor at Sacred Heart had left on a long-planned vacation to Ireland before the hurricane struck.

Allen contacted Cardinal George and received permission to stay in Mississippi for a month. His own parish had encouraged him to go, and had donated about $7,000 for hurricane relief already. They also continued to pay his salary while he was in Mississippi, so he wouldn’t be a burden on the Biloxi Diocese.

Since arriving, Allen celebrated a second funeral Mass—for a man found murdered in his car during the blackout that accompanied the storm.

Once the pastor at Sacred Heart returned, Allen put himself at the disposal of Biloxi Bishop Thomas J. Rodi, and he expected to relieve priests working along the Gulf Coast in the coming days, he said.

But first he wanted to fix some storm damage at Sacred Heart School, which had taken in about 80 students who fled the hurricane in addition to the 460 already enrolled. The added students—who were admitted free of charge—mean more teachers and staff to pay, and the damage left by the storm led the school to cancel its big annual fund-raiser, which usually nets about $30,000, he said.

But when Allen told the people of Hattiesburg that he would pray for them, they told him to turn his prayers to those worse off than they.

“They redirected my compassion to the folks on the coast,” he said. “They believe that God has brought them this far, and he will see them through.”

Then he tried to pay for the screws he needed.

“Is that all?” the man behind the counter asked. “Just take them.”



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