When the levees broke in 2005 and Lakeview became Lake Pontchartrain, Katrina launched its mad-scientist experiment.

Danny Abramowicz is 73 now, and if that doesn’t make you feel old, well, have some avocado toast with alfalfa sprouts and a medium dark roast coffee with soy and a double shot of espresso and join the rest of Generation Z that has no texting clue that old No. 46 in black and gold was perhaps the most beloved player in New Orleans Saints history.

The body of Christ is an image often used to describe how we, through regular acts of charity, can further God’s kingdom on earth, in the here and now, by living out our salvation, as St. Paul says, “with fear and trembling.”

By way of comparison to Dallas or Atlanta or Houston – where shopping malls with spray-foam façades, a Wendy’s drive-thru and a pair of golden arches qualify as historic architecture – Tricentennial New Orleans is old dirt. But compared to Eastern European countries such as Lithuania, where Christianity is measured in terms of many, many more centuries, New Orleans is a babe in arms.

Greg Kandra was a good-enough Catholic, observant and Mass-going, although he admits his wife was by comparison the real lion of the faith as they attended church at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Parish in Forest Hills, New York. Before he got married, Kandra had forged quite a career for himself at CBS through the written and spoken word. His professional arc had started at ground zero. After all, in the early 1980s, when interest rates on home mortgages were on the Evita Perone side of 16 percent, an English degree from the University of Maryland and a dollar bill could fetch a cup of coffee. “I graduated in the middle of the last big recession in 1981, and I couldn’t find a newspaper job to save my life,” Kandra recalled. “The Washington Star had just gone out of business. The Baltimore News-American was in bad shape. Nobody was hiring. I found myself spending entirely too much time at home, driving my parents crazy.” At a dinner party, his father ran into a news producer for CBS and wistfully pleaded with him, “I’ve got this kid who needs a job.”

What I need more than anything right now is a little Sermon on the Mount. As Catholics, we believe in transubstantiation, the sublime mystery in which the priest, impelled by Jesus’ words and example at the Last Supper, transforms unremarkable bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, the crown jewel and eternal banquet of our faith.

Capuchin Franciscan Father Teodoro Agudo is 89, well past the normal retirement age for members of his congregation in Spain and for priests serving in the Archdiocese of New Orleans. But as Father Agudo talks passionately about his little jewel of a church adjacent to the Warehouse District – 170-year-old St. Theresa of Avila – his eyes brighten in light of what he has seen in his 49 years of service at the church, the last 45 as pastor.

Because the reality was so abhorrent – the pervasive sexual abuse of minors by members of the Roman Catholic clergy – and because the church was so exposed in its reluctance or even refusal to act, the secular media narrative, even 15 years after Armageddon in the Archdiocese of Boston, is difficult to shake. Bishop Timothy Doherty  of the Diocese of Lafayette, Indiana, was in New Orleans last week for a national Catholic conference on child protection and how parishes and schools can create safe environments and provide better accountability.

I am not a gambler. I work too hard for my money. I thank God for that special blessing because I’ve heard and read many stories about what a gambling addiction can do. When the thrill of plopping down cash, or bitcoins, on the nose of a horse or a 19-year-old freshman quarterback with girlfriend troubles takes precedence over groceries, medicine and electricity, it ruins the lives of entire families, not just the life of the gambler.

Linda Phoenix Teamer was 19 years old in 1970, the year after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. One of Teamer’s wistful teenage dreams as a student at Joseph S. Clark High School in New Orleans was to become NASA’s first African-American female astronaut, but first she had to come to grips with the mysterious forces of social gravity, something incapable of being plotted by Sir Isaac Newton.

In the summer of 2015, National Right to Life held its three-day annual convention in New Orleans. The news coming out of that conference was rich in hope – the millennial generation, the young church and scientists using 4D technology that showed more clearly the humanity of the unborn child were leading the charge against more than 40 years of cultural headwinds that enshrined individual “freedom” as the gold standard when assessing which rights are inalienable or not.

He wrestled, played football and threw the javelin at Holy Cross, started at linebacker for the United States Military Academy at West Point, served 24 years in the Army, ran a school for troubled teens in Chicago and spent five years hauling hazardous chemicals 1 million miles throughout all 50 U.S. states and 10 Canadian provinces, sleeping at night behind the steering wheel in a 6-by-8-foot cab he had transformed into a rolling monastic chapel.

Jane Helire, an educational and vocational coordinator at Covenant House New Orleans, handed the stack of white, handwritten flash cards to Dashea, a teenager and a single mother. Dashea had finished 10th grade but had dropped out and did not have her GED.

Phillip Anglin, 54, grew up as a Southern Baptist Pentecostal and later as a Methodist in the north Georgia town of Buford – about 35 miles north of Atlanta – where the only Catholic church, Prince of Peace, was at the end of small road. It was simple, tiny and hidden in comparison to the sprawling Protestant churches of Buford’s Bible Belt.

For Santa Claus, it was only a couple of flesh wounds. In a city where collateral damage and shooting statistics roll forward like the numbers on the national debt clock in New York City’s Times Square, what happened on Easter weekend in New Orleans should force anyone with a conscience to stop ducking and sit up and take notice.

The name screams self-esteem and self-awareness. Christopher Confident, who just turned 17, has both qualities, and the St. Augustine High School junior used each to make the decision several months ago to go all-in with the Catholic Church. Confident. “I have to live up to it, you know,” Confident said.

Patrick “Concrete” Pierre, 35, earned his nickname in Brooklyn, where he grew up playing handball, steadily ascending in the Golden Gloves amateur boxing ranks and driving a cement truck for Stillwell Ready Mix into some of the toughest, cash-on-the-barrel construction sites on the planet – or at least in the Five Boroughs of New York.

Whenever Jesuit Father James Carter, the former president of Loyola University New Orleans, would have a conversation with New Orleans Saints and Pelicans owner Tom Benson, it had nothing to do with Benson’s far-flung, professional sports empire.

The agony of infertility comes in waves for Tamara Labat. She is no stranger to pain. As a child, when she was sexually abused and shuttled among five schools in Missouri and Oklahoma, Labat, now 23 and married, carved out her safe house. Every school had a library. The stacks of books were true friends that helped her escape the horrors of a childhood violated. She learned to cherish the silence; she could control the message and no one could tell her that what she had experienced had never happened.

Grant Aasen’s playbook as a 145-pound sophomore running back at Starr’s Mill High School in Fayetteville, Georgia, did not include an “X” and “O” line drawing like this. Anyone who’s ever watched NFL Films can recall Vince Lombardi standing with a piece of white chalk at a green chalkboard, drawing two skinny, parallel lines on the perimeter of the offensive line to describe to his players the blocking intricacies that made the vaunted Green Bay Packers’ sweep virtually unstoppable.