New Orleans rising: Katrina one year later.

Shortly after the epic hurricane, President Bush spoke of "the people down in Katrina"--a poignant malapropism for a new geography in the national mind: the region of devastation in the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coast. New Orleans, fabled as the cradle of jazz, has transmogrified into a media zone of disaster and suffering, intercut with stories of hope and renewal.

Recovery efforts are slowly creeping forward. After months of delays, Congress passed a $4.2 billion spending bill that allows owners of severely damaged property to recoup up to $150,000 of their equity and then rebuild or sell. Funds are expected in the fall. Before Katrina the New Orleans city proper had 467,000 people; about 200,000 had returned as of June, when residents braced for a new hurricane season. No one knows how long it will take before the large swaths of the city where abandoned houses sit like hollow shells will become smaller neighborhoods or open parks.

New Orleans' multiethnic Catholic community has shared the city's journey through the flood. Its vital academic institutions and vibrant parishes especially have struggled to survive, often succeeding despite the odds. For some in the community, however, the final outcome remains to be seen.

The long road back to school

Carrollton Avenue runs like a plumb line along western fringes of the city, from the leafy streets of Uptown on out to pastoral City Park. At the midway point of this long boulevard stand the archdiocesan offices. Cavernous Notre Dame Seminary overlooks Carrollton Avenue. Tucked away in the south corner of the lawn is the archbishop's mansion, where Pope John Paul II stayed on his 1987 visit. The Catholic Book Store on Fig Street is opposite the far side of the seminary. Behind the seminary are the chancery offices and Chateau Notre Dame, an assisted living facility.

This area of Carrollton was hit hard by salt waters from Lake Pontchartrain, several miles north, when the levee broke along the Seventeenth Street Canal--a focus of TV coverage. Lake waters poured into affluent Lakeview, wrecking scores of homes. The water surged down Carrollton Avenue, engulfing cars, sucking oil and carburetor fluids into currents that rose as high as 7 feet.

Jesuit High School, at the corner of Carrollton and Banks Street, has a lineage of illustrious graduates: former mayors Marc Morial and Moon Landrieu; Moon's son Mitch, the lieutenant governor who lost the mayoral runoff; singer Harry Connick Jr.; novelist John Gregory Brown; actor Jay Thomas; Newsday columnist and Fox TV commentator Ellis Henican; retired baseball slugger Will Clark; and editor Jim Amoss, who guided the Times-Picayune's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the storm, among others.

Waters rose to 5 1/2 feet in the ground floor of the large brick school and settled there in excess of two weeks. Many families who had students at Jesuit High fled to Houston. Jesuit arranged for 400 students to take classes from 3:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Strake Jesuit College Prepatory in Houston. In mid-October school president Father Anthony McGinn, S.J. arranged for 800 students to take a similar evening schedule at St. Martin Episcopal School in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie.

On November 28 Jesuit became the first flooded school in the city to reopen, with 900 students. When the new semester began in January, 90 percent of the student body had returned.

"The generosity of our alumni is overwhelming," says development director, Pierre DeGruy, who lost his house in Lakeview. "We are just shy of the halfway mark of our $5 million goal to continue repairs. We had some flood insurance coverage, but like most New Orleanians it was not enough."

Chateau Notre Dame has reopened as well, but finding workers to care for the elderly has been difficult with more than half of the city's residents displaced. The Catholic Book Store has been operating out of a trailer on the seminary lawn.

The greatest damage in Carrollton was directly across from the seminary: An entire city block burned to the ground just after Katrina hit. Although neighbors suspect arson from squatters, a New Orleans Fire Department spokesperson said no cause had been determined.

Salvaging heritage

Flooded out of his Ninth Ward apartment complex with 11 people, including his wife, mother, and a sister in a wheelchair, 59-year-old Sylvester Francis led a 4-mile walk to the Morial Convention Center, where he and his family spent five days on toilet-soaked carpets. A helicopter evacuation to the Louis Armstrong Airport began four nomadic weeks by bus and car, sleeping on gym cots, kinfolk's couches, in motels in three Louisiana towns, and then Dallas.

Francis returned October 2. Four days later he reopened Backstreet, the museum he founded in 1999 that celebrates "the second line," the dazzling tradition of New Orleans street parades. On St. Claude Street in Treme, one of America's oldest African American neighborhoods, the museum was the first to reopen in the city.

Backstreet celebrates a mythical street terrain of Mardi Gras Indians, a tradition of symbolic rebellion begun in the 1880s. Black men commemorate Indians who harbored runaway slaves.

The museum is a hub for people in Treme and downriver neighborhoods, like the Seventh and Ninth Wards, which have a long history of social aid and pleasure clubs whose members made color-coordinated costumes for parades that march from autumn through spring--until Katrina. Parading schedules are one more question mark in the city's slow recovery.

With many poor people dispersed, Backstreet's collection of costumes and memorabilia gains historical importance. "This stuff to me is very precious," says Francis. He gestures to a coffin doorplate with an inlaid photograph of a 17-year-old boy who was murdered in a housing project. "His mama gave me that, took it off her own wall," he says.

Francis began filming parades with a Super-8 camera in 1992; in his garage he mounted photographs of jazz funerals and carnival parades.

Several years later the Rhodes family, which operates mortuaries, offered him use of the tiny, old Blandin Funeral Home. "When word got out that I was opening up," he says, "more people started calling, saying 'I got my daddy's stuff, I got my momma's stuff.' And that's how I filled this building up.

"To come to this museum is to ask questions," he ruminated, smoking a Kool as the floor he had been mopping dried. "People leave and have a whole new feeling about the culture. It's spreading the love of our history."

While Francis reassembled costumes of Mardi Gras Indians and artifacts of jazz funerals, St. Augustine Parish across the street became a flashpoint in news coverage. The archdiocese announced that the beloved African American pastor, 76-year-old Father Jerome LeDoux, was being removed and the parish would close, save for a Sunday Mass.

Founded in 1842 and largely built by slaves and free persons of color, St. Augustine is a cultural landmark, drawing tourists to liturgies with jazz musicians backing the choir. LeDoux, in dashiki vestments, gave exuberant, flowing sermons.

The decision to close the parish ignited protests and sit-ins at Mass, causing Archbishop Alfred Hughes to reconsider. Hughes gave the parish a reprieve and concelebrated a Mass with LeDoux. The pastor, though retired, has returned several times for the liturgies that made him popular.

Future courses

Jesuit-run Loyola University, in the heart of Uptown, faces the oak-shrouded streetcar tracks of St. Charles Avenue and dreamy Audubon Park. This area of the city stayed relatively dry, although many homes and buildings in Uptown sustained wind damage. Loyola's physical plant came through relatively unscathed, the least-affected of the major universities. Next door, Tulane University suffered extensive damage, though most of it was in the downtown medical school complex. All the local colleges cancelled their fall semesters.

Although most of Loyola's students returned for the spring, enrollment projections for the coming years hinge on the weather and how fast the city can rebuild its levee system. Loyola President Kevin Wildes, S.J. scaled back the College of Arts and Sciences, ending such majors as Japanese and eliminating the broadcast division of the communications department.

Xavier University, the only historically black Catholic university in America, took far greater damage. The campus fronts a long canal that winds along Washington Avenue, just off Carrollton. Flooding from the canal overflow left much of the campus submerged for several days; however 75 percent of the student body returned for the spring semester. Xavier President Norman Francis, one of the city's influential figures, lost most of his personal library from severe flooding in his own home.

Francis has been a dynamo in the rebuilding effort, both as co-chair of Gov. Kathleen Blanco's Louisiana Recovery Authority--which will administer the Congressional funds to compensate property owners--and as Xavier's president.

When the nation of Qatar responded to hurricane news by offering $60 million in assistance grants to affected areas, Francis moved quickly, winning a whopping $17.5 million for Xavier. The bulk of those funds are being used to add 60,000 square feet to the College of Pharmacy--one of only two pharmacy schools in Louisiana. Xavier will also get $5 million for scholarships for students affected by the disaster.

"It's going to allow us to help those students to finish their educations," says Francis. "That's important because Xavier is the No. 1 producer of African American graduates in the natural sciences, and those students then go on to medical school."

Church in the storm's eye

As the city regained basic services in the French Quarter, the downtown commercial district, and the neighborhoods spared the worst flooding, Mayor C. Ray Nagin convened the Bring New Orleans Back Commission to draft a blueprint for urban revitalization.

Like gods come down from Olympus, urban design specialists descended on New Orleans, holding panels, lectures, and community meetings that, at bottom, revolved around a bitterly contentious idea: a smaller urban "footprint." In other words, the city should respond to the flood-wrecked areas by demolishing them and consolidating the population in medium-sized buildings in the "dry ridge" neighborhoods.

On paper, the plans looked fine. But in practical terms, how could elected officials tell working-class folk in the lower Ninth Ward or affluent people in Lakeview that because their homes lay on a geographic flood plain, they could not rebuild?

Nowhere has the confusion over rebuilding efforts been more stark, or poignant, than in the Vietnamese community of New Orleans East and Mary, Queen of Vietnam Parish.

The eastern suburbs were developed in the 1950s on soggy land that historically served as a buffer to flooding on the outskirts of what was then the city proper. After the American retreat from the Vietnam War in the mid-1970s, the archdiocese welcomed 7,000 refugees with programs that assisted them in establishing communities in the metropolitan area. As the Vietnamese population grew, the largest neighborhood was in the sprawling outback of New Orleans East, where ribbons of cane, bitter melon, squash, and sweet potato glistened along waterways, and an industry of fishermen thrived.

Before Katrina New Orleans East was 80 percent African American. Of the 2,000 people who had returned by October 2005, 1,500 were Vietnamese.

Father Vien The Nguyen, pastor of Mary, Queen of Vietnam, rode out the flooding with 350 parishioners. He turned the parish into a recovery center. They lived on food cooked by propane gas.

With generators to provide power for food storage and fans, workers who had returned to the ravaged area used massive tanks to provide water for toilets. By late October 300 homes were occupied when FEMA delivered two 32-foot trailers, which Nguyen installed on a 26-acre piece of parish-owned land across the street.

In June the pastor predicted that "95 percent of our 4,000 people will be resettled in this area." In response to City Hall's request for neighborhood rebuilding plans, the parishioners drew up the first plan in the city on February 3. By then 1,000 Vietnamese American families had returned to their homes in the parish, one of the few bright spots in the many heavily flooded areas.

On February 14, however, the mayor authorized a landfill for hurricane debris near the Vietnamese community, threatening the rich gardens of the Vietnamese with polluting groundwater. The vast Chef Menteur landfill, as it is called, is separated by a canal from Bayou Savage, a 23,000-acre wildlife refuge, the largest of any American urban area.

The Louisiana Environmental Action Network filed a legal appeal to the decision by the city and state, but the government's argument that the mountains of debris generated by Katrina had to go somewhere was a double blow to Nguyen's parishioners. In May the disposal of massive debris began.

"They are proceeding," bristles Nguyen. "Allegedly, experts [from the Department of Environmental Equality] and the city rode in a bus observing the landfill. This is a hole in the ground, literally, where the water level is between 1 and 4 feet deep. It's a mile from the edge of my community. There's a trailer park 2 miles away, at most. The separating canal is only 80 feet wide and that canal directly connects to the body of water surrounding our community. When the levee breached in Katrina, the water went through the canal, and our street flooding was 2 1/2 feet."

The Vietnamese community had 53 businesses before Katrina, of which 45 have returned, he says.

"In many ways the church has been called to be at the center of people's lives," the priest reflects. "I think that in many ways we have been cleansed and allowed to begin anew. We went through different stages to get where we were, in the past, without premeditation. But now we are given a chance to be thoughtful about how we recreate our community. We are doing it more logically, with the environment and ecology in mind, and more deliberately preserving and presenting the culture to the wider community."

Nguyen's words could well summarize the task faced not only by the Catholics of New Orleans but by all those affected by the storm, as they both struggle and wait for the city's rebirth.

JASON BERRY, a native resident of New Orleans, is the author of six nonfiction books, including Vows of Silence (Free Press) and Lead Us Not Into Temptation (Doubleday), and a novel, Last of the Red Hot Poppas (Chin Music), to be published in September.