After celebrating 11 o’clock Mass in the lower church Sunday, Fr. Ledoux went upstairs to check the building.
“The chandeliers in the upper church were swinging, and the door was banging in the choir loft,” Fr. Ledoux observed.
When he approached the choir loft and could feel a breeze, he knew immediately that one of the wooden panels, about 120 feet up in the steeple, had been breached.
When he checked outside, he saw the board lying on the front steps of the church.
Fortunately, in times of inclement weather, when Masses are celebrated in the lower church, the front stairs are roped off, so no one was in the area at the time the board fell to the ground.
“It could have been a lot worse,” he said.
At Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha Catholic Community in Exeter, Sister Antoinette Jacques reported Sunday night that 15-20 tree limbs were down on the property from the storm.
She said that the situation was tense there Saturday night, when high winds began impacting the rural area.
“That was more worrisome,” said Sr. Antoinette, the church’s pastoral assistant.
Despite calls for an evacuation on Saturday in some parts of the seaside community of Narragansett—which did not include St. Mary Star of the Sea Parish, located three blocks inland from Scarborough Beach—the pastor, Father Francis Kayatta, went ahead with the planned wedding of a couple from Chicago. The groom’s family has ties to St. Mary Star of the Sea Parish.
The bride, he said, took the whole thing in stride, even as a reporter from The Weather Channel prepared for a standup report nearby.
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“We never lost electricity at the parish,” said Father Kayatta. “We prepared for the worst, but hoped for the best.”
The pastor rode out the storm in the church’s rectory, a Cape Cod-style house.
The arrival of Irene brought mixed feelings from those enjoying one of the last traditional summer weekends of the year on Block Island.
“For the visitors, we are calm, cool and collected. For the visitors, the vacationers, it’s like pandemonium,” said Father Joseph Protano, pastor of St. Andrew Parish, of the disparity in the tenor Friday night between those who routinely cope with rough weather blowing in off the Atlantic as a way of life, and those who don’t.
The pastor of the only Catholic church on the resort island which sits about 13 miles off Rhode Island’s southern coast, reported Sunday that there was no damage to the church property and very little damage overall on the island due to the storm.
“I think we’re very fortunate to have escaped a very bad storm,” Fr. Protano said.