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By Jan is M. Wootten
When the future arrives at 120m.p.h.
When a vicious hurricanc turned a quaint. 80-ycar-old church building on the Mississippi Gulf Coast into a pile of splintered boards and rubble, Episcopalians in Bay St. Louis discovered a new definition for their church.
“It's the people." explained a small group of women gathered on a Wednesday morning to celebrate the Holy Communion in the living room of the rectory of Christ Episcopal Church.
“It’s heartbreaking to see the lot,” said one lady, a member of Christ Church for 55 years, “but we realize we can worship without a church building.”
The beach-front lot where the old building stood is empty, cleared by the Army Corps of Engineers, and listed for sale. The rectory and curate’s house stand a mile away on another water-front lot with the buildings belonging to Christ Episcopal School. All these structures are now clean and repaired, but in August. 1969, their doors and windows were broken and their floors and furnishings covered with silt deposited by four feet of Gulf of Mexico water.
Two classrooms of the school now serve as a sanctuary on Sunday mornings, with seventh grade desks doubling as pews. The rectory housed the weekday Lenten services this year, with an average of eighteen persons attending the 7 a.m. Eucharists. Thursday night Lenten suppers featuring guest speakers averaged about eighty persons, double last year’s attendance.
“I don’t know what’s happened; maybe we feel we need one another,” said Mrs. Richard Shadoin, trying to describe the new spirit among Christ Church members.
For Sale: bcach-front lot where Christ Church stooil for 80 rears.
Tercnce Feeney, Christ Church’s senior warden, thinks the new spirit was born in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Camille “when people's first venture was to find out what happened to people.”
Hurricane Camille took its toll among Christ Church communicants. Of 31 3 members from Bay St. Louis and neighboring Waveland, Mississippi, only 270 remain now' after the storm. Some who left were older persons who could not cope with the mental and emotional shock and extraordinary physical demands of cleaning their homes and clearing their lots.
Other families, discouraged about rebuilding their homes and their town, with the further difficulty of insuring their homes once repaired or rebuilt, simply have moved away. Bay St. Louis is a county scat and a
Hurricane Camille blew away more than a beloved old building in this Mississippi town.
small trading center. The majority of its residents arc retired persons, weekend residents from New Orleans, and persons who commute to a nearby NASA test site soon to be deactivated.
The Rev. Charles R. Johnson, rector of Christ Church and headmaster of the^0\ ear-old Christ Episcopal School, believes many families would not have stayed on the Coast if Christ Episcopal School had not reopened last Fall. Students come to the school from as far away as Biloxi, some thirty miles to the East, and Pearl-ington, some twenty miles West.
“Christ School was about the only stable and on-going thing here for a while, and we hope people who have temporarily left will come back because of the school.”
Christ Episcopal School planned to house high school classes, a library, offices, and eventually a science complex in a large house on a beach-front lot just four miles away in Pass Christian, Mississippi, before Hurricanc Camille destroyed the building, equipment, and supplies.
In order to honor teaching con-
Sri'TrMDER, 1970
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