Facing the fear: Katrina versus coronavirus

The virtually new church where he and his wife Debbie and their seven children worshiped – the Taffaros could take up an entire pew at the Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Violet even before they added children eight and nine to complete the family baseball team a few years later – was swallowed up by water and mud seven years to the day after it was dedicated on Aug. 29, 1998.
    

As a parishioner and also a St. Bernard Parish councilman at the time, Taffaro and U.S. Marine Col. David Dysart, wearing rubber waders, slopped through the muck toward the sanctuary.
    

Rushing water had toppled the tabernacle from its stand near the altar, and the force of nature had ushered in another quiet Katrina burial.
    

“I remember vividly pulling it out of the mud,” Deacon Taffaro recalls. “It was heavy and pretty stuck.”
    

In addition to his impressive skill set – before serving in public office, Deacon Taffaro was a teacher at Archbishop Hannan High School in Meraux – he was a licensed professional counselor and psychotherapist, something that would make him eminently qualified to help the people in St. Bernard Parish who had lost all of their material possessions and most of their hope.
    

As natural disasters go – as Katrina proved and as we are learning through the fog of the unknown in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic – Deacon Taffaro is certain about one thing: In a time of uncertainty, accurate information is one of the most critical commodities in holding on to the sure and certain hope that we are not living in the end times.
    

“One of the biggest needs after Katrina was the need people had for information so that they could make informed decisions about what the immediate and intermediate future was going to look like,” Deacon Taffaro said. “That is critical, both from a standpoint of managing people as well as from an individual, psychological standpoint. 
    

“Certainty is always better than uncertainty, even if that certainty is news or information that people would not like to deal with. Certainty frames the experience – rather than people having to guess and surmise and oftentimes conjure up all kinds of different options rather than the reality.”
    

Deacon Taffaro’s oldest child was just starting her senior year at St. Mary’s Dominican High School when Katrina hit, and his governmental responsibilities as a councilman for St. Bernard Parish District D meant he had to juggle finding schools for his children and helping residents, like the tabernacle, rise from the mud.
    

“The family was separated, for all intents and purposes, for about a year,” he said. “There was this initial wave of the surreal experience – like, is this really happening?”
    

He saw what disaster did to the human heart.
    

“The best and the worst came out in people, and so we saw some great attributes that were displayed and we saw in those times of real distress some of the worst attributes displayed,” Deacon Taffaro said. “In hindsight, the further I moved away from the intensity of the situation and was more able to see clearly, I believe my role was very much divinely touched. Not that I did everything right, but I did everything to the extent that I should have. There’s no way I could have gone through that process and maintain that level of capacity over that length of time and intensity without it being very much divinely intervened.”
    

What makes the coronavirus pandemic different from Katrina is its nature as “the invisible enemy.”
    

“We can tune in and look at a radar screen that tells us the storm is here and see how it’s getting bigger and the winds are at this speed and the barometric pressure is this, but you don’t get to see those tangents with this,” he said.

 

“What we are dealing with is largely a kind of fear-based understanding.”
    

Fear can affect a person psychologically, spiritually and emotionally, Deacon Taffaro says, so the best initial step people can take is to heed the advice of authorized sources.
    

“Just like we depend on the professionals at the National Weather Service to guide us, we need to depend on the professionals at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the WHO (World Health Organization), take what they say, digest it and understand what it means as a practical matter.
  

 “While the numbers in this pandemic are great, in the overall scheme of things, most people will fare very well through this. That’s not eliminating the need to take precautions.”
    

Catholics also have their faith to lean on in the darkest days, he says.
    

“I’ve had a number of people ask me, ‘Do you think this is something that indicates the end times?’” Deacon Taffaro said. “Since I’m not God and God hasn’t chosen me to know his mind, I’m staying out of that answer. But, the fact is, whatever the purpose is, God is allowing it, and our role is, how do we find him in the midst of all this?
    

“That’s where hope comes in. We need to be reminded that our experience here on earth is not the end of the story. Regardless of the inevitable impact, there is something else that comes. We know that and believe that with all our heart.”
    The tabernacle Deacon Taffaro pulled from the mud stands today, restored, at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Violet. The Taffaro children, five boys and four girls, now ranging in age from 31 to 7, are themselves a symbol of hope, that “this, too, shall pass.”
    

“We’ve been known to fill a pew and sometimes spill over,” Deacon Taffaro said. “A lot of times, people stop and count. We’ve learned to take that as a confirmation that our children are impacting the world just by being here.”
    

Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].