The recovery of Catholic parishes, institutions in Joplin, Missouri one year later

Joplin, Missouri, One Year Later
 By Jeannette Cooperman Source: St. Anthony Messenger magazine

 Published: Tuesday, May 22, 2012

 A wooden altar and cross are nearly all that remain of St. Mary’s Catholic Church. At 5:38 p.m. on May 22, 2011, sirens screamed through downtown Joplin, Mo., just minutes ahead of the country’s deadliest tornado in 50 years. Father J. Friedel ushered his new Indian assistant, Father Shoby Mathew Chettiyath, to the rectory basement and tried to explain what a tornado was. When the winds calmed, Father Friedel crossed over to the beautiful, old white-stone church of St. Peter the Apostle. “The tornado touched down on Rangeline,” he told the handful of parishioners, urging them to check on any family or friends in that part of town. Then he said a quick, fervent Mass. He didn’t know the extent of the damage until he emerged from the church and heard someone say the hospital was gone. “What do you mean the hospital’s gone?” Father Friedel asked, unable to imagine the seven floors of St. John’s Regional Medical Center collapsing — let alone Joplin High School, Walmart and thousands of houses and businesses. The tornado had sheared away a wide swath of Joplin, just 12 blocks to the south of St. Peter’s. Click here to read the full article. Father Friedel worked all night, unlocking the Catholic high school so it could be used as a triage station, wheeling the injured in office chairs, organizing supplies and checking on parishioners and his colleague at Joplin’s other Catholic church, St. Mary’s. Father Justin Monaghan, 70, had taken shelter in a bathtub in the rectory, and St. Mary’s Catholic Church had fallen to pieces around him. By the time the winds stopped, only the church’s large cross — and its pastor — remained intact. In the days after the tornado, one of Father Friedel’s jobs was to help people endure unimaginable losses without losing faith — or blaming a malevolent God. Some survivors were having trouble even recovering their loved ones’ bodies; there were rumors of trailers full of unidentified body parts. Others were grieving the senseless loss of young children, spouses or parents. God had to be found, not in nature’s random cruelty, but in the love and generosity of spirit it could not destroy. And more practically, survivors had to find shelter, food and clothing. “Our Catholic Charities efforts were just beginning to expand; we had only one full-time person, and he was down in Cape Girardeau dealing with flooding,” Father Friedel recalls. “So Kansas City and St. Joe and St. Louis sent people, and Catholic Charities USA came in. Soon we had people here from Brownsville, New Orleans, Biloxi — all those other disaster areas — helping us figure out what to do.” Before the tornado, Father Friedel had received a scholarship from the Catholic Church Extension Society to attend a campus ministry program. He almost cancelled it. Then he thought, No, we need to do this. All these campus ministry groups will come in and want to help. Father Friedel had plenty of experience: He’d spent 13 years as director of campus ministry at Southeast Missouri State University and had chaired the executive board for the national Catholic Campus Ministry Association. He decided they would create a program inviting students to come to Joplin and help with the physical work of rebuilding — and to enter into that work spiritually as well. Maryann Mitts, a St. Peter parishioner at Missouri Southern State University and a faculty adviser for campus ministry, agreed to help organize the program. Groups started coming in the fall of 2011, and Mitts and her fellow coordinators made sure nobody’s time was wasted: Every volunteer team knew exactly what it was doing and where, had the tools and supplies it needed and had time for reflection afterward. “We’ve had groups dig out foundations, move shrubs, do Sheetrock and drywall, paint,” she says with satisfaction. The students worked alongside community volunteers from Joplin, heard them talk about surviving the tornado, met kids who’d lost their parents and drank Cokes in the backyard of a 90-year-old husband-and-wife’s crumbled house where they’d lived since they married. “That’s when you see God — it’s in the people,” Mitts says. “And that’s the only way you can make sense of this disaster: Go out and build relationships.” For the evenings, Sister Diane Langford, CDP, director of adult faith formation at St. Peter, put together a guided reflection she called “Immersed in the Paschal Mystery,” so the students could think and talk and pray about what they were observing. “You have the suffering and the death — physical, emotional, spiritual — and now we are starting to see the resurrection,” Mitts explains. “People’s lives have been changed, and you are seeing that they are changed for the better. Six months ago, there was no way you could see how things could be better after something like this.”