By John-Henry Westen
NEW ORLEANS, March 22, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In the months since the devastation wreaked on New Orleans by hurricane Katrina, the mainstream media has been averse to most discussion of the event as a warning from above. Nevertheless, clergy in the besieged city are still preaching the need of repentance and reminding parishioners that the natural disaster was meant as a ‘purification’ and a call for ‘sin city’ to get morally cleaned up.
Michael Brown, the once mainstream-reporter turned Catholic author who now runs Spiritdaily.com – popularly referred to as the Catholic DrudgeReport – spoke with LifeSiteNews.com last year about his conviction that Katrina was “definitely” a purification for New Orleans. Brown has just returned from a visit to New Orleans and reports that “there is a substantial ‘underground’ of priests who believe precisely that the storm, which caused one of the nation’s greatest disasters, was allowed by God to serve as a sign to the world and to reorient the area.”
“At one dinner party,” relates Brown of his weekend visit, “fully four of five priests present indicated their concurrence, as did a fifth the following morning from the pulpit at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Kenner.” That priest, Father Robert Guste, has been outspoken in calling the hurricane a punishment from God, and the ridicule he has received for his stand has not silenced him. (https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/oct/05100608.html )
A New Orleans native son going back many generations, Fr. Guste told Spiritdaily, “I’ve seen things come into the life and culture of New Orleans that were never there, in the same public and perceptive way, as they are today. This is true of Mardi Gras, the Decadence Festival, gay bars, many Bourbon Street and French Quarters activities, porn joints, devil worship, and casino-connected addictions and prostitution.” Fr. Guste concluded, “Does it not invite Divine judgment today as Jerusalem, Nineveh, and Sodom and Gomorrah of old?”
TheÂpriests are not alone in their assessment of the hurricanes as warnings from above. Politicians both outside (https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/sep/05092903.html ) and inside (https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/sep/05090111.html ) New Orleans have expressed similar sentiments.
Moreover the priests are merely carrying out the advice of the former Archbishop of the diocese, Archbishop Emeritus Philip Hannan, popularly referred to as ‘the pope of New Orleans’. In an interview with Spiritdaily last year, Archbishop Hannan said, “I think it’s up to us to preach very strongly and candidly and directly to say that this was a chastisement from God.” (https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/oct/05100501.html )
One priest told Brown over the weekend that he believes Katrina was “just the tip of the iceberg.” Father Kyle Vincent Dave of Our Lady of Lourdes in Slidell, said, “I saw it primarily as a chastisement . . . I sense that something is on the horizon and that it will get worse before it gets better.”
Brown asked Fr. Guste why he thought the French Quarter, an area of New Orleans where much of the debauchery takes place, was largely left unharmed by the hurricane. Responded, Fr. Guste: “What came to me is that God wants us to take care of correcting that situation.”
See Brown’s full report on his weekend visit to New Orleans here:
https://www.spiritdaily.com/neworleanstrip1.htm