New Orleans bishop, still shaken by Katrina, leaves his post

NEW ORLEANS (RNS) Crozier in hand, Bishop Charles Jenkins entered his cathedral on Wednesday (Jan. 6) for the last time as the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, bringing to a close, at least temporarily, a 12-year career as bishop that was both ruined and transformed by Hurricane Katrina. Jenkins’ retirement is coming earlier than it should. […]

(RNS) New Orleans Episcopal Bishop Charles Jenkins has retired after Hurricane Katrina afflicted him with post-traumatic stress disorder. Religion News Service file photo by G. Andrew Boyd/The Times-Picayune.

(RNS) New Orleans Episcopal Bishop Charles Jenkins has retired after Hurricane Katrina afflicted him with post-traumatic stress disorder. Religion News Service file photo by G. Andrew Boyd/The Times-Picayune.

NEW ORLEANS (RNS) Crozier in hand, Bishop Charles Jenkins entered his cathedral on Wednesday (Jan. 6) for the last time as the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, bringing to a close, at least temporarily, a 12-year career as bishop that was both ruined and transformed by Hurricane Katrina.

Jenkins’ retirement is coming earlier than it should. At 58, he has stepped down on orders of doctors who diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the storm.


Locally and nationally, Jenkins has described how the post-Katrina suffering of poor New Orleanians transformed his ministry and awakened him to the broad social and economic inequalities of life in New Orleans. But he has said the aftermath also left him medicated, prone to depression and frequently unable to focus on administration.

In the short term, Jenkins said retirement will mean rest and diversion as he builds a new life with his wife, Louise, in rural St. Francisville, 100 miles north of New Orleans. Jenkins has a new truck, a new tractor is on order and he hopes to plant some trees and a garden.

And having rebuilt the diocese after Katrina to reflect his own radical conversion to social justice and racial reconciliation, Jenkins said he said he hopes to stay involved in the social-justice arm of the diocese “as much as is appropriate.”

Having said that, he also expressed a temporary desire to “recede into the mist; deep into the mist.”

If that sounds contradictory, so be it, Jenkins said. If Episcopalians traditionally value the “middle way,” Jenkins has raised it to an art. “I’m good at living in tension,” he said.

Although he opposes gay marriage and the ordination of partnered gay clergy, since 2003 Jenkins has been among a small cadre of Episcopal leaders who urged the national church to hold together despite its deep and apparently irreconcilable differences over those questions. He has argued that living together with confusion is preferable to living apart in schism.


When the national church held elections for a new presiding bishop in 2006, Jenkins was one of five candidates nominated. In 2007, when Episcopal bishops from around the country met in New Orleans for a high-stakes summit with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Jenkins worked behind the scenes with liberal Bishops John Chane of Washington and Jon Bruno of Los Angeles to fashion a temporary compromise.

“Charles Jenkins was a key, key player in that meeting, aside from being its host,” said Jim Naughton, a liberal Episcopal writer from the Diocese of Washington. “He was this reconciling figure, and he as much as anyone made that happen.”

But more than anything else, for the Episcopal church nationally, Jenkins is the personification of wounded New Orleans.

“There is that line in Galatians, ‘I bear on my body the marks of Jesus,’ and for Charles Jenkins that’s really true,” said the Rev. Kendall Harmon, a conservative theologian and writer in South Carolina.

“After Katrina, he was and never will be the same again. But he’s tried to live that out as compassionately as possible.”

Not long after the storm, Jenkins said he was no longer much interested in administration and instead focused the diocese on ways to address social justice concerns and pursue racial reconciliation.


Privately, he unsuccessfully shopped around an idea of addressing New Orleans’ racial scars with something like South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Within his diocese, he founded a new social justice office and launched a housing ministry that so far, alone or with partners, has built 29 homes in central New Orleans.

How to continue that work will be the job of his successor, Bishop-elect Morris Thompson of Lexington, Ky., who was elected in December. He is expected to be installed in May.

Jenkins acknowledged there is more familiar — and difficult — church work to be done in the Episcopal diocese, where some congregations remain perilously weakened by the storm. “There’s quite a lot of consolidation work to be done,” he said. “I hope it can be done well.”

Jenkins said the diocese closed only two parishes after the storm. He frankly acknowledged that given his own post-Katrina conversion experience, he was little interested in assessing the vitality of 55 congregations and helping them rethink their future.

“Instead, I was pretty drawn to doing prophetic work and the work of justice,” he said. “I was much more interested in that than whether St. Swithin’s somewhere should stay open.”


In the end, “I think the diocese is a better place than it was 12 years ago,” he said. “We’ve recognized the gifts, talents and experiences of folks who were pretty marginalized in the Episcopal Church when I became bishop.”

(Bruce Nolan writes for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.)

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