Devastated Redemptorist parish in Haiti still helping

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (CNS) -- Not much remains of St. Gerard Church, located on a steep hill in Port-au-Prince, but Redemptorist Father Abellard Thomas (pictured left) says it's his parish, and he wants to keep it functioning as much as possible.

The church is little more than a pile of bricks and metal, one of thousands of buildings in the Haitian capital that collapsed during the 45-second earthquake Jan. 12. The parish's school crumpled as well: It still entombs the bodies of dozens of students and teachers.

Father Thomas said 200 people died in the school, which bears scorch marks from fires that recovery workers set to mask the smell of the decaying bodies. Each day, family and friends of those who died stop by to visit the collapsed school, paying their respects and praying for those who lost their lives.

Their anguish is his anguish, Father Thomas said.

The priest is also mourning the loss of two of the six sisters who lived in the parish convent. The two members of the Companions of Jesus died while teaching at St. Rose School in Leogane, about 15 miles west of the capital and closer to the quake's epicenter. The other four sisters are fine, but their residence is unusable.

Despite the sadness he feels, Father Thomas has turned the parish grounds into a registration site for people seeking assistance from the World Food Program. Aid workers from the Paris-based Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development work out of the parish compound, giving food-entitlement cards to as many as 1,700 people a day.