NEW ORLEANS _ The fingers of Jesus _ or at least the two stone versions of them shorn off the left hand of the statue in the garden behind St. Louis Cathedral _ will not be restored until New Orleans is, Catholic Archbishop Alfred Hughes has decided. Katrina reduced the serene courtyard in the rear of the church to a maze of shattered timber. An oak and a magnolia, both estimated by church officials to be more than 150 years old, crashed around the statue, which the church lights at night to create a distinctive, giant silhouette on the back wall of the cathedral. Incredibly, the Jesus statue emerged nearly unscathed, losing only the thumb and index finger from the left hand. In the next few days, French Quarter residents marveled at the statue’s brush with obliteration, and some of the faithful began to say Jesus had managed to flick the hurricane just to the east, sparing New Orleans even greater damage than it endured. That story has gone all the way to Rome, said Monsignor Crosby Kern, who rode out the tempest in the St. Louis rectory, which dates to 1830. “Those old buildings can weather anything,” Kern said. In the heat of Katrina, however, the fate of other church assets seemed less certain. “The wind was howling, and the slates were coming off the roof, just getting ripped off and sailing away, when I heard the crack of the branches,” Kern recalled. He watched, astonished, as the trees bent and arced during their collapse, falling all around the statue but failing to hit it. “We have photos from a big storm in 1915 and both of those trees are in it,” he said of the now fallen oak and magnolia. “They weathered that, and they were big trees then. But this was unbelievable, and I saw it and just thought, ‘The Lord is taking care of everything.”’ Paratroopers with the 82nd Airborne cleaned up the ziggurat of debris, found the stone digits and presented them to former Archbishop Philip Hannan, who served as a chaplain to the 82nd during World War II. Like the statue, the famed cathedral suffered relatively minor damage given Katrina’s ferocity, Kern said. The roof bore the worst of it, and some holes punched in the steeple allowed water to course into the organ box. But all of that can be repaired, Kern said. A casualty of another sort was the Rev. Frank Montalbano, a faculty member at Notre Dame Seminary and a well-known figure at the cathedral. After riding out the storm in the rectory with Kern, Montalbano, 83, promptly announced his retirement and moved to San Antonio. “Well,” Kern laughed, “I think he realized, `maybe I don’t have to put up with this anymore.”’ The decision to hold off on restoring the fingers to the statue’s damaged hand until the city itself has mended was announced by the archbishop Oct. 2 during the first Mass at the New Orleans landmark since Katrina. Hughes did not say what benchmarks would be the basis of his decision that New Orleans had healed and that it was time for the fingers to be replaced. MO/JL END RNS (James Varney writes about religion for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.) Editors: To obtain a photo of the Jesus statue, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com.