While I was in Miami recently for the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America, I told a theologian I’d be spending the following week in New Orleans. “It’s the ultimate city of paradoxes,” he said. “It’s Southern, but it’s Catholic. It’s Catholic, but it’s pagan.”
When even the football team has religious overtones (they were founded on All Saints Day in 1966), one can be assured it’s a place unlike any other. Piety meets Bacchanalia, with seafood and beignets to boot.
As in so many American metropolises, New Orleans embodies a complex and layered immigrant history. Yet the intermingling of French, Spanish, Acadian, Creole and Haitian “free people of color,” Italian, African-American, and more recently Latino and Asian populations indelibly mark the city’s cuisine, architecture, music and atmosphere in a unique way.
The state flag of Louisiana is a pelican piercing its breast to feed its children with its own blood – not only a tribute to a ubiquitous native bird, but an explicitly Christian symbol found on altars and stained glass windows throughout the world, calling to mind Jesus’ sacrifice.
It’s also the only state in the country where the subdivided seats of local government are not called “counties,” but rather “parishes,” many named after saints and feasts such as Ascension and Assumption.
The oldest cathedral in North America, the Cathedral-Basilica of St. Louis King of France, originally founded in 1720, is probably the most iconic structure of the city – perhaps only rivaled by the Superdome. The church sits behind Jackson square and serves as the heart of the Vieux Carre, now called the French Quarter. After every Mass there and throughout the archdiocese during hurricane season, prayers are said to invoke the intercession of Mary under her title Our Lady of Prompt Succor, the local patroness.
We visited both the original Ursuline convent where the first miracle attributed to Mary under this title took place and the current national shrine on State Street, closer to Tulane and Loyola universities.
From the French for “quick help,” Our Lady of Prompt Succor (Notre Dame de Bonsecours) is most associated with a French statue dating to pre-revolutionary days depicting the Madonna and child both adorned with jeweled crowns. It is one of, if not the single, oldest such image of the Virgin in the United States. In addition to countless miracles since, Our Lady of Prompt Succor is credited with saving the city from destruction by fire and then invasion during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Each Jan. 8, an annual Mass of thanksgiving is held in honor of the many requests fulfilled by the Blessed Mother under this title. Locals told me she has been invoked often in the rebuilding process after Katrina.
I also was given a private tour of the American Italian Museum in Piazza d’Italia by a Mexican college student named Hugo Garza. We spent time discussing the reality of successive waves of “undesirable” newcomers in our land of opportunity, sometimes forced here by economic turmoil in their homeland and, especially in the South, sometimes arriving via more notorious and deplorable passages.
Catholicism pervades the region. Those esteemed for their personal holiness who spent time in New Orleans – Francis Xavier Seelos, Henriette Delille, Katherine Drexel, Mother Cabrini – are memorialized throughout the city and a section of Chartres Street is today named Place Jean-Paul Deux in honor of the pope’s 1987 visit. The famous above-ground cemeteries – some such as St. Vincent’s are run by the archdiocese – are fascinating. The low water table demands graves move upwards into unusual mausoleums and tombs, instead of downward into the soggy soil.
New Orleans’ most famous celebration, Mardi Gras (French for Fat Tuesday) is of course deeply rooted in Catholic history. The consumption of food and drink forbidden by the Lenten fast on the day before Ash Wednesday led to an ever-increasing “blowout” party which came to be called Carni-vale, from the Latin for “farewell to flesh/meat.” Venice and Rio are also noted for elaborate parties and traditions for the holiday. Louisiana’s is of course, for better or worse, America’s most recognizable celebration of the event and a signature part of the local culture.
Michael M. Canaris is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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