On any given day, Father Tom Charters, associate pastor of St. Michael the Archangel mission in Erwin, Tennessee, might be serving a basic needs request for food, utility, or rent assistance. A phone call from a parishioner on Sept. 27, 2024, however, took the need to respond in a totally different direction.
“A woman was asking for prayers for her son who was stranded on the nearby Unicoi County Hospital roof. That’s when I found out a flood was hitting about two-and a half miles from the parish, along the Nolichucky River,” said Father Tom.
While all 50 people on the hospital roof were rescued, six people working in the Impact Plastics plant, four of whom were Hispanic, were unaccounted for. The Unicoi County High School, the main distribution center for food and clothing, offered its auditorium to the Hispanic community for prayer. “At five o’clock every evening we would pray the rosary in the auditorium that the missing would be found alive and for the dead,” Father Tom stated. Sadly, all six perished. Three of them were Father Tom’s parishioners.
As news of the flood became public, and then became national news, donations from Catholic Charities and others quickly began pouring in. “We turned our religious education building into a supply distribution center. The ladies and men of the parish organized the donations, I helped unload supplies and we became one of the county centers. We set up a separate fund for flood relief,” Father Tom explained. Glenmary donors generously contributed more than $200,000, money that went directly to the parish fund for flood relief.
Father Tom notes that St. Michael the Archangel Parish has always been involved in the county ministerial association, especially the Ecumenical Center of Care and Share. He continues, “We worked closely with the high school rescue groups during the time. I was at the high school every day for two weeks, just being present to people there.”
The Glenmary parish, with its key staff of Glenmary Brother Corey Soignier and lay pastoral leader Lorena Reynoso, was a key coordinating point as help poured in from near and far. St. Mary’s Mobile Clinic from Knoxville set up in the parking lot to attend to medical needs. The Atlanta-based Mexican consulate, through Catholic Charities Immigration Services, were set up tables inside the narthex to helped individuals reapply for legal documents. The flood had swept everything away.
A parishioner who operated a food truck, with Mexican food, provided meals for several weeks, funded by World Kitchen. A Catholic Charities counseling service from Florida working through the parish, gave a retreat for survivors and anyone who wished to participate, along with individual counseling. And Brother Corey and Lorena helped direct reporters from all over: The parish became one of the sites from which the national news media told the story worldwide.
Though cleaning and rebuilding will go for months to come, things have slowly settled down in “There was a lot of activity,” says Father Tom. “It was exhausting physically and mentally, but our parishioners jumped in to help. We were following the Gospel message of Matthew 25:40 [“‘Whatever you did for the least brothers of mine, you did for me’”]. That’s how we ended up responding.”
—Mary Ellen Pellegrini
