In the wake of one major hurricane that rolled through the American Southeast and with a cautious eye on another one approaching, Catholics in an Atlantic coastal community experienced the presence of – as one person put it – Jesus in the storm-tossed fishermen’s boat.
Tybee Island is one of Georgia’s barrier islands on the Atlantic, just outside of historic Savannah. It’s a busy place in summer, but in the off months many vacation homes and rentals are empty, leaving a base population of about 3,000.
When Hurricane Helene cut a deadly path from the Gulf of Mexico up to the Appalachian Mountains, Savannah and Tybee Island escaped its worst effects. So for people from areas without power or water, it was a good place to take refuge.
That turned out to be providential for St. Michael the Archangel, the only Catholic church on Tybee Island.
Fr. Brett Brannen, the pastor, had long hoped to awaken his small flock on Tybee to the need to evangelize. To do so, he enlisted the help of an old friend, Mother Olga of the Sacred Heart, a native of Iraq who helped Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley form a new religious community, the Daughters of Mary of Nazareth.
[The slideshow below shows images of their visit.]
Fr. Brannen invited Mother Olga and her sisters to visit St. Michael’s to lead a parish mission.
“I said, ‘Mother, would you be willing to come and bring all your sisters? I want all of them, because I want to go door to door and knock on every house on Tybee Island and invite people to Jesus,’” Fr. Brannen told Aleteia.
Providential timing
The only time the community could come as a group was at the end of September. No one knew, when they planned the mission, that it would be a week when Tybee Island’s population swelled with people escaping the wrath of Hurricane Helene.
The mission included a nightly Eucharistic Holy Hour in the small wooden church of St. Michael, but Fr. Brannen felt the need also to “get out of the sacristy,” as Pope Francis puts it, and bring the Gospel to the places where people live and work.
Going door to door with “Catholic goody bags” that the sisters and parishioners had prepared – with things like a New Testament, prayer card, and holy water -- the sisters and their helpers discovered people going through personal storms of their own. One man said he’d been away from regular Mass attendance because of alcoholism, another because he had suffered abuse in the Church. They and others agreed to attend a healing service at St. Michael’s, and, according to Mother Olga and Fr. Brannen, the experience provided something of a lifeline.
Working in small groups and driven around by parishioners, the sisters knocked on about 300 doors, Mother Olga said.
Asking people “How can we pray for you?” they collected almost 350 prayer intentions that were typed up and placed on the altar in church.
“With every person that we encountered, we heard stories of their storms and the storms of their loved ones,” said Mother Olga, who gave a witness talk at the National Eucharistic Congress this summer.
As Jesus was in the Apostles’ boat during a storm on the Sea of Galilee, the sisters felt they were able to board that “boat” in a number of different circumstances: people suffering loss, separation, illness, or addiction.
“Some of the stories, like one couple, they said some big trees fell on their home and almost split the house into two pieces,” Mother Olga told Aleteia. “They cannot really fix it. It's just all gone. They lost everything. There was another family, who had 50,000 chickens – a family business. They just lost everything.”
Eucharistic healing
In church, the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in a monstrance on the altar and wrapped with a special cloth. People were invited to come up, kneel before Christ in the Eucharist, and touch the cloth, just as the woman with a hemorrhage had been healed when she touched the garment of the Lord, in Matthew 9:20-22.
Longtime parishioner Betty Jayne Hendrix observed that many people were deeply moved by the experience, placing the cloth on various parts of their body that needed healing and walking away in tears.
“We said to our own parishioners, ‘Please go to people you know who are hurting,’” Fr. Brannen said. “‘Invite them, go pick them up, and bring them to this healing service.’ And the church was packed.”
He and retired priest Fr. John Lyons offered the Anointing of the Sick, and a visiting priest heard confessions. At the end, there was still a line outside the confessional, so Fr. Brannen and Fr. Lyons stepped in. In total, confessions were heard for four hours.
Scenes from a special parish mission
At the end of the week, St. Michael’s held an outdoor Mass on the pier, as it does annually to celebrate the Feast of St. Michael. The congregation included more than a few people who had returned to the practice of the faith.
“I saw at least five people that I haven't seen in a church or at Mass in five years, 10 years, some even longer,” said Hendrix, who helped schedule the sisters’ visits around town.
Fr. Brannen hopes people continue to return, but it might not have happened without the Mission to Tybee Island.
“We just have so many stories of people who just needed that little, tiny nudge to say, ‘Hey, we love you. We care about you,’” he said.
With the island’s population swelled once again, this time with Floridians escaping the effects of Hurricane Milton, the people of St. Michael’s have a new boldness to share their faith with those in need.
