On Fratelli Tutti and Hurricanes
09/13/2024
Back in 2020, I co-led a Fratelli Tutti reading group with a Jesuit friend of mine. The encyclical had come out just weeks before New Orleans, my city, received a direct hit from Hurricane Zeta—so named because the number of storms that year had exhausted the Latin alphabet and now had to borrow the Greek.
This was the lens through which I re-read and discussed Fratelli Tutti later that year. Its Laudato-Si-like braid of calls for greater human cooperation to combat wealth disparities and climate change, among many other issues, spoke presciently to me of the local crises we in New Orleans confront, in particular, during hurricane season. But it also spoke to me of the extravagant displays of community support I’d seen in the wake of hurricanes here—after Zeta in 2020, the much more powerful Ida in 2021, which brought a tree crashing through part of our roof and crushed our A/C unit, displacing us for two weeks and, this week, Hurricane Francine.
Every hurricane season, I think of Zeta, my first real hurricane, and how it was an example to me of exactly what Pope Francis was talking about in Fratelli Tutti when he described communities that work together for the sake of something greater than their individual selves.
Like Francine this week, Zeta was easy. (These are relative terms, of course.) But unlike Francine, Zeta was bizarrely magical: the eye of the hurricane passed directly over our neighborhood. Zeta was a relatively weak Category 3—the same as Katrina, but everybody knows the real damage from Katrina came from the flood afterward, not the wind—where we sat in the dark after the power went out and I learned for the first time what “howling wind” sounded like, and transformers exploded with green flashes. But we were alright, and we made tacos by candlelight because the gas stove still worked.
The eyewall was the scariest bit: Darker and louder than even the leading “dirty side” of the storm, as they call it down here, had been. Although I am sure I was afraid, I have a hard time conjuring the memory of that fear now because it was so eclipsed by the sudden and unbelievable relief of the eye. Over the course of maybe five minutes, the rain stopped, the sky grew light and peaceful and the clouds cleared enough to show us a gorgeous pink sunset. All at once, the neighbors emerged, all of us standing on our front porches, all of us holding beers (which made me laugh—the universality of storm-drinking, because what else was there to do?), all of us in disbelief that we were standing in the eye of a hurricane.
Everyone trickled out into the street, surveying the damage. A fence had fallen on our car but not done any damage—a couple of neighbors helped me pull it off and then somebody moved their car to make room for mine elsewhere. When I came back, my husband was in the front room with the door wide open playing a Cajun tune on the accordion, the music drifting out into the gloriously peaceful street where we all drifted around in the pink light, chatting, drinking, knowing what was to come—what was, in fact, all around us—and in no hurry to get back to cowering in the dark.
It was a microcosm of the community that would unfold the next day—and in the case of Ida, over many days. Neighbors pooled their groceries and invited one another to meals; those with generators offered others a cool place to charge their phones; those with chainsaws offered to chop up the fallen trees. It was a glimpse of the world we could have in the absence of individualist consumerism, toxic media consumption and our desire to mind our own business and hide our vulnerabilities. As Pope Francis wrote in Fratelli Tutti, “Unless we recover the shared passion to create a community of belonging and solidarity worthy of our time, our energy and our resources, the global illusion that misled us will collapse and leave many in the grip of anguish and emptiness.”
Sometimes it takes a crisis to bring people together. But it’s up to us to continue to nurture those bonds after the storm has passed. As Francis said more simply in his extraordinary Urbi et Orbi address during the Coronavirus lockdown, “We are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat … are all of us. Just like those disciples, who spoke anxiously with one voice, saying ‘We are perishing,’ so we too have realized that we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.”
Colleen Dulle is a writer and producer at America Media, where she hosts the weekly news podcast “Inside the Vatican.” Her forthcoming book on grappling with faith while covering the Vatican will be published by Penguin Random House in spring 2025.
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