St. John Vianney’s priest and parishioners put others first.

St. John Vianney’s priest and parishioners put others first

Father Troy Gately remembers the feeling of carrying his mother’s wooden secretary desk out of his family home to toss it on the curb after Hurricane Ike devastated his native Galveston. He and his brother each took an end of the long wooden desk, and it felt just like they were carrying her coffin again.

He placed it on the curb with the rest of his family’s possessions and tried to push away the notion that he was burying his mother all over again.

He thought back to that moment last August as he walked the neighborhood around his parish at St. John Vianney’s Catholic Church, which sits in the pathway of floodwaters that careened out of the Addicks and Barker dams. He watched his neighbors and parishioners carry their own prized possessions onto the curb one after another as he waded through everrising waters in shorts and a T-shirt — his flip-flops left inside the mostly dry rectory where he lives.

The disaster plan his church created was ruined when most of the people on the disaster committee became flood victims themselves. So Gately rounded up every volunteer he could find and went the grassroots path.

He instructed the church’s social services office to open and stock a supply store in one of the campus’s ancillary buildings, where anyone — regardless of faith — could come for free gloves, trash bags, bleach and other supplies. When the power substation on the bayou side of the church property went under water, Gately called CenterPoint and offered up a portion of the church’s newly refinished parking lot to become home to a new temporary station.

He set up a launchpad for the Cajun Navy, which sent boat after boat out into the surrounding neighborhood to rescue people from their submerged homes.

And he didn’t do it alone. Nor does he want to be thought of as a hero: That’s a designation he’d save for the hundreds of parishioners who chipped in to help their neighbors.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, St. John Vianney’s membership has fallen considerably: from about 5,000 to roughly 4,000, Gately says. But he still sees the storm as his parish’s finest hour.

“When someone is carting out their possessions, like that secretary desk, it’s so easy for that person to feel so alone and so hurt,” he says. But he takes pride in the way his parish put others first and lent helping hands.

“Jesus says it again and again, but it’s in St. Matthew’s Gospel: ‘I’m with you always, even until the end of the Earth,’” he says. “And that’s the key.”