Conger

The Bishop of Louisiana has issued a stinging rebuke to President George W. Bush, saying two years on from Hurricane Katrina, the government has failed the people of New Orleans.

The “grief, guilt, anger, and frustration of a nation is gathering” in New Orleans, the Rt. Rev. Charles Jenkins wrote on the first day of the president’s tour of restoration projects in the city, and urged the government to mount a “serious” effort towards rebuilding the devastated city.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams and the US House of Bishops will also meet in New Orleans on Sept 20-21, and on the 22^nd the Bishops will join in rebuilding homes damaged by the storm.

Bishop Jenkins, whose own home was destroyed by the August 2005 Hurricane that ravaged the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coast and flooded the city of New Orleans, called upon the American president “to clearly demonstrate his calculation of our people’s worth and his government’s commitment to our safety? The question is one that Providence has put to this President, and it is one of those tests all human beings dread - the kind that determines who you really are.”

Much hard work had been done by religious and civic groups to restore the city, he said. “The volunteers of this country are still coming in larger numbers than ever to help heal the lives of their fellow Americans,” Bishop Jenkins.

A “huge number of Americans love their neighbor as themselves. Not in words alone but in actions,” he said, and had come to the assistance of the people of New Orleans.

However, government policies have not matched private Christian initiative, Bishop Jenkins argued. Government inefficiency and corporate greed had failed the city. Two years after the storm almost “30% of the children in this city are homeless,” he said, with many of their teachers living “living in shacks without running water.”

“Faith-based organizations” had been “advancing their meager funds to families for the purchase of building materials” while the government’s reconstruction programme “has yet to come through with any funds,” he said.

“We can be reconciled, Mr. President,” Bishop Jenkins wrote. “New Orleanians are a long-suffering and forgiving people. But to be so you must show us that you see and value our humanity before it is too late.”