Amid suffering in Puerto Rico, a church stands

Utuado, Puerto Rico — Our Lady of Monte Carmelo Catholic Church tried to hold Mass right after Hurricane Maria passed, but a landslide had knocked out the east wall and filled the tiny sanctuary with thick mud.

The lakeside village of Caonillas had been savaged. The hillsides appeared as if bleeding, scarred by the streaks of dislodged earth and frond-less palm trees. Maria’s winds spirited away zinc and tin roofs. Her deluge sent blood-orange topsoil into homes, onto cars and across roads.

“It was hellish,” said Midge Battistini, a teacher who lost her home near the banks of Lake Caonillas. She said the winds changed direction, creating a funnel effect that sucked up every green thing around.

Tucked into the sparsely populated central mountainsides, the village had been cut off from the rest of the world. No services. No contact. The people of Caonillas had weathered storms before. Hurricane Hugo had been through here. So had Georges. But Maria showed no mercy. There was nothing holy about her.

Carmen Ortiz and her family live nearest to Our Lady of Monte Carmelo, and they worked for a week to dig it out from the mud and clean the pews. On the first Mass after the Sept. 20 storm, the church opened and the Ortiz family — the four of them — were the only ones who could make it. Ortiz sought solace in Father Rafael Rodriguez, sharing her worries, her fears and what her family experienced trapped inside their home as Maria lashed outside.

The church “is the only light I’ve seen in the midst of all this darkness,” she said.

At that first Mass, they prayed that more people would come.

More than two weeks after Hurricane Maria tore a devastating path through Puerto Rico, communities such as this one are still isolated and struggling to meet basic human needs. They are frustrated at what they see as the lack of local and federal attention to their plight. In Caonillas, the effort to re-energize the church has given people a special kind of faith — a special kind of mission — while the world around them remains unsettled and unnerving.

Local officials estimate that nearly every state road in Coanillas and greater Utuado were impassable or collapsed after the hurricane. No homes were left completely untouched in this region of the Central mountain range once ruled by the indigenous caciques, or Taino chiefs.