»Has god destroyed New Orleans?«

As emergency teams fight to reach survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, a conservative group in the US has claimed that the hurricane was an “act of God” in judgement on the city.

Repent America, an organisation that claims to “go out into the streets and communities of America declaring the word of God and proclaiming the Good News”, has said that an upcoming event in the city caused God to act.

The annual event was ‘Southern Decadence’, which brings together thousands of homosexuals, enabling them to celebrate their sexuality.

This year, the Louisiana governor ordered the evacuation of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina headed towards the city, resulting in the event having to be cancelled.

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Repent America’s director, Michael Marcavage, suggested that “this act of God destroyed a wicked city. New Orleans was a city that opened its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. May it never be the same.”

He continued, “We must not forget that the citizens of New Orleans tolerated and welcomed the wickedness in their city for so long.”

There are few cities with so many good as New Orleans and also few cities where there is such a stark coexistence with the bad. It is this city, the Big Easy, that is home to kind and generous and Christian people (nowhere is more Catholic) and yet also this city that has allowed evil to flourish in a way that has become truly dangerous.

I have to be blunt: New Orleans, you are in peril. You are a fine people but you have let fester an evil that is unmatched outside of Hollywood and Berkeley and Times Square. The devil is invoked in your city (there is even a swamp named for him just to the north in Baton Rouge) and there is nothing more hazardous. Voodoo priests are openly at work. There are occult temples. There are tours to "haunted" cemeteries. There is the proud tomb of voodoo queen Marie Leveau. "This mystical religion is as big a part of New Orleans as jazz, Cajun food and Mardi Gras," notes one writer. "Before you start thinking that voodoo is something of the past, the reader should be aware that the religion is as alive today as it was in the days of Marie Laveau. On a recent trip to New Orleans, I visited no less than 4 voodoo shops and a voodoo museum, plus visited with three different voodoo priestesses!"

It's that kind of stuff -- not God -- that brings disaster. When you invoke dark spirits, you get a storm. The very word hurricane comes from the Indian hurukan for evil spirit and when we look at the Bible we note that black magic -- the very definition of voodoo -- was quickest to bring the Lord's judgment.

Then there's the Mardi Gras. While this started as "Fat Tuesday" before the fasting of Lent, there is no longer fasting -- just the extravaganza with huge bizarre faces on floats surrounded by the pomp of barely-clad dancers. With their costume feathers and sexual flourish they would have been at home in the gardens of a Roman emperor or on a barge in the Nile or in a Venusian temple -- if not Babylon itself. This is serious business. Throughout the Bible God destroyed cities for exactly this kind of innuendo. And He has not changed. He is still in a time of mercy but it would do well for us to recall that in 1900 on the other side of the bay Galveston was destroyed by a category-four hurricane that came after a Mardi Gras which had as its costume theme "Beelzebub and the Devils."

God allows this to purge us when we don't purge ourselves. It doesn't have to happen but unless evil is expelled -- especially hardcore occultism like voodoo, which is the darkest form of evil -- it's inevitable. When I visited the National Hurricane Center, they told me there was no place that gave them the meteorological willies like your city. Miami is likelier to be hit by the mega-storm, but all it would take is a category-three or four to put the entire city under water.

There are parts of New Orleans that are 12 feet below sea level -- which means that a hurricane with a 17-foot surge, not all that much in a good storm -- would put parts of the city under twenty or even thirty feet of water. The area is like a bowl surrounded by levees that would trap water from the gulf and overflow from Lake Pontchartrain.

On Bourbon Street -- which has turned into a stretch of porn shops, strip joints, and hooter bars -- there would be water to the second story.

Officials told me that in the best of circumstances 100,000 would be stranded.

Hundreds of thousands coming from the lower parishes would likewise find themselves trapped.

And the cycles may be coming due. The return rate for a category-three is 31 years, a category-four 65 years, and a category-five 170 years. Recall please that in 1969 Hurricane Camille missed by thirty miles and you also squeaked by Andrew. If a category-five made landfall between your city and Baton Rouge, according to an emergency manager named Walter Maestri, it would be "the most catastrophic hurricane in the history of the United States."

This doesn't have to happen. God can intervene. I believe He will. He has in your past. He miraculously stopped a battle from destroying you in 1815 and fire from ravaging the entire city in 1812. You know this; you're Christians. You are among the finest, so easy to love; you outnumber the bad. But like Christians in every part of this country you have grown indifferent and devil-may-care and that's all it takes for the devil to triumph.

Michael Brown, creator of the immensely popular SpiritDaily.com website - popularly known as the Catholic DrudgeReport, has said that Katrina was "definitely" a purification for New Orleans. Brown points out that the name Katrina itself means "pure". And that, Brown told LifeSiteNews.com, is not a coincidence. "I don't believe in coincidences," said Brown, adding that God has everything in His control and "I think that everything is interwoven."

However, beyond these speculations is a more general acknowledgement that New Orleans, the epicentre of the disaster, was a "sin city" which harboured few rivals. The New Orleans "southern decadence" festival which was to take place Labour Day weekend, is described by a French Quarter tourism site as "sort of like a gayer version of Mardi Gras" which is "most famous (or infamous) for the displays of naked flesh which characterize the event," with "public displays of sexuality . . . pretty much everywhere you look."

The city is also renowned for occult practices, particularly voodoo. Voodoo is also common in violence and crime saturated Haiti.

The American Spectator reports that "New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the country. By mid-August of this year, 192 murders had been committed in New Orleans, 'nearly 10 times the national average,' ...New Orleans was ripe for collapse. Its dangerous geography, combined with a dangerous culture, made it susceptible to an unfolding catastrophe. Currents of chaos and lawlessness were running through the city long before this week, and they were bound to come to the surface under the pressure of natural disaster and explode in a scene of looting and mayhem".

The Sept. 4 New York Daily News reported "Louisiana and New Orleans have a long, well-known reputation for corruption... Adjusted for population size, the state ranks third in the number of elected officials convicted of crimes (Mississippi is No. 1). Recent scandals include the conviction of 14 state judges and an FBI raid on the business and personal files of a Louisiana congressman." One former governor from the 1990's recently completed a prison term for tax fraud and the one that followed him, reports the Daily New, "is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for taking bribes from casino owners".

The Daily News goes on to note that in the 1990s the New Orleans Police Department "had the dubious distinction of being the nation's most corrupt police force and the least effective: the city had the highest murder rate in America. More than 50 officers were eventually convicted of crimes including murder, rape and robbery; two are currently on Death Row."

Two Christian leaders in New Orleans are testifying to God's mercy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One suggests that the death toll could have been much higher had it not been for God's mercy -- and the other that God may have used the hurricane to purge wickedness from the city.
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"Imagine what would have happened if [New Orleans] had taken a direct hit," he tells BP. "The levee did not break until after the storm was clear and the winds had died down and the rescue workers were able to get out." Had the levee given way during the hurricane, he says, "untold thousands of people" would have been killed.

"It's a terrible tragedy," Kelley says of the devastation in and around New Orleans, "and we still don't know the scope of it -- but the evidences of God's mercy are there. We rejoice in the fact that He has got the whole world in His hands, including the city of New Orleans and [the seminary]."