Pope Appoints New Haiti Archbishop One Year After Quake

By Francis X. Rocca
Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Benedict XVI marked the first anniversary of the Haiti earthquake on Wednesday (Jan. 12) by naming a new archbishop for the country's capital city.

Archbishop-elect Guire Poulard will lead the Catholic Church in Port-au-Prince, succeeding Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, who was killed in last year's quake.

Recalling the disaster, which killed more than 230,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless, the pope on Wednesday offered Haitians a word of "hope in the current particularly difficult circumstances."

"The time has come to rebuild, not only material structures but, and above all, civil, social and religious coexistence," Benedict said, in a statement read at a Mass in Haiti by the Vatican's Cardinal Robert Sarah. The quake destroyed Port-au-Prince's Catholic cathedral along with dozens of other churches.

The pope's message also noted "international aid which has already demonstrated great generosity with economic support and volunteers coming from all parts of the world" to rebuild the country.

Comments

[angrymanspokane]

01:10 PM on 01/13/2011

Seems to me if the pope was such a great Christian and all, he would have gone to Haiti to help out...

[Uproar]

10:16 AM on 01/13/2011

It took an entire year to appoint someone? And what, a few preachy sermons is going to get them out of this mess?

[yetiwatcher]

03:59 AM on 01/13/2011

if this was really so important to Benedict, then why did it take him a year to make the appointment?

heard on the radio today that only 5% of the rubble has been removed, hope the bishop is a transformer who morphs into a front end loader

[pinkibus]

02:22 AM on 01/13/2011

The big problem with Haiti is an RC church sucking money out of the people and caring nothing about corruption and violence as long as everybody keeps on giving and they keep on having lots and lots of children to keep on giving and having more children.