Church rebuilding after storm will take time, Philippine priests told

PHILIPPINES-CHURCHES Feb-25-2014 (850 words) With photos and video. xxxi

Church rebuilding after storm will take time, Philippine priests told

By Dennis Sadowski Catholic News Service

PALO, Philippines (CNS) -- Since November, any time it rains the interior of the Archdiocese of Palo's Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our Lord gets good and wet.

Without a roof, most of the church's interior is open to the skies.

Mass is celebrated at a portable altar set up under a tent in the one wing where the roof remains intact. Only a couple of hundred people can fit in when normally hundreds more fill the church for Sunday Masses.

Construction crews in early February were working as fast as they could to replace the roof, which was destroyed in Typhoon Haiyan. They had managed to rebuild the structure above the main altar, which still must be refurbished. Once the roof is completed, work will begin on the interior.

When the typhoon hit, the cathedral had just undergone a full renovation as part of the archdiocese's yearlong 75th anniversary celebration. Cardinal Luis Tagle of Manila joined Palo Archbishop John Du to close the celebration Nov. 28 with Mass. A downpour occurred during the liturgy, bringing tears to many worshippers huddled under umbrellas and a tarp strung from wall to wall.

The cathedral is one of dozens of churches, missions and chapels in nine dioceses and archdioceses seriously damaged or destroyed by the typhoon when it slammed the Visayas region of the central Philippines with 195-mile-an-hour winds and an unprecedented storm surge Nov. 8.

At historic Santo Nino Church in Tacloban, Mass is celebrated, rain or shine. A 15-minute rainstorm as Mass began one afternoon in early February sent worshippers searching for pews free from dripping water and left large puddles of water throughout the church.

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Church rebuilding after storm will take time, Philippine priests told