Seminarians launch weekend recovery work

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

As a collective response to Hurricane Ida, seminarians studying at Notre Dame Seminary will team up every Saturday through Thanksgiving to offer their physical labor and spiritual encouragement to those in the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux who were most impacted by the storm.

“From now until Thanksgiving, every Saturday we’re going to be somewhere throughout the diocese,” said Father James Wehner, rector-president of Notre Dame Seminary. “We’ll be breaking the seminarians into groups, and that will be our pastoral formation for the semester.”

Normally, seminarians engage in pastoral “apostolates” during the week – outside of their theological studies – as part of their priestly formation, Father Wehner said.

But because Ida’s damage was so widespread, Father Wehner felt it was appropriate to suspend their participation in those outside apostolates so that the seminarians could focus on helping people recover.

Group effort

On the weekend of Sept. 4-5, seminarians fanned out into the River Parishes, and they helped clear out storm damage from two family homes of seminarians, one in Destrehan and the other in LaPlace.

“We’re going to concentrate all of our efforts on relief here as well as in Houma-Thibodaux or wherever we're needed,” Father Wehner said. “It will either be physical relief – helping people – or spiritual, which would mean just getting into the neighborhoods and sharing with people and giving them a little bit of encouragement and hope.”

There are five seminarians from the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux at Notre Dame Seminary.

Father Wehner said dozens of seminarians evacuated before the storm to their home dioceses fearing the potential of power outages. The entire student body returned to the seminary on Sept. 11 and resumed classes on Sept. 13.

At a brief conference with the seminarians on Sept. 11, Father Wehner advised them that walking with people in challenging times is what the life of a priest is all about.

“Pope Francis speaks strongly about this,” he said. “Priests and seminarians need to be formed to not retreat but to move forward into these situations. Otherwise, there is something defective in formation if it doesn’t propel us into people’s lives in these situations.”