OLD TREASURES, NEW CONTEXT Convent opening doors to history 
Submitted by:	September 2004
Source:  	Times Picayune 09-29-2004

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On Tuesday there were four days to go to the ceremonial opening of a new
Catholic Cultural Heritage Center in the French Quarter, but it might have
been four hours, given the pace. 

Workmen and painters bent over a half-dozen jobs on the grounds of the Old
Ursuline Convent. Inside, a rushed volunteer staff gratefully seized the
last-minute FedEx delivery of explanatory cards that will make sense of the
new exhibits: the French ledgers, Spanish letters, old maps, photos, and
antique vestments once used in colonial New Orleans. 

 
Good news: the exhibit cards arrived on time. Bad news: In the last stage
of its installation Monday, a 200-year-old bishop's crozier, the ceremonial
shepherd's staff, toppled out of its stand with a crash that left it
slightly bent. 

"The metal conservator is looking at it; he thinks he can get it back in
time," said Monsignor Crosby Kern, rector of nearby St. Louis Cathedral and
the somewhat harried head of this new enterprise. 

"In time" is Friday at 7 p.m. If all goes according to Kern's plan, music
from a string quartet will waft over an evening garden party on the convent
grounds. In the crowd will be a cardinal from the Vatican; Kern's boss,
Archbishop Alfred Hughes; perhaps both of Hughes' archbishop predecessors;
some clergy; and those patrons sufficiently interested in this new Catholic
museum to pay $150 each to support it and get an early peek. 

At the event Cardinal Francesco Marchisano, in effect the chief custodian
of St. Peter's Basilica and Vatican City, will announce the coming of an
exhibit of Vatican mosaics to New Orleans in 2006, Kern said. 

The heritage center is a new effort by the Archdiocese of New Orleans to
display for natives and tourists alike the intimate braiding of
institutional Catholicism and the civic life of New Orleans, beginning in a
swampy, early 18th century French colonial settlement when there was little
working difference between church and state. 

The heritage center includes nearby St. Louis Cathedral, where a concert
Sunday at 7 p.m. by Olivier Latry, the organist of the Cathedral of Notre
Dame in Paris, will also help mark the opening. And the center includes St.
Mary's Church, built about 1845 as a chapel for bishops but now a regular
neighborhood church attached to the convent. 

But its heart is the Old Ursuline Convent at Chartres and Ursulines
streets, one of the most significant buildings in the city, and the
country. 

Finished about 1752, the year of Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment, the
convent has contained much of New Orleans history. 

Although built to house the first small band of French Ursuline nuns who
ran a local hospital and educated girls, in time it became a building of
substance. In the 1830s it served as a temporary meeting place for both the
state Legislature and the state Supreme Court, Kern said. For much of the
19th century it was the official residence of the city's archbishops, and a
place often frequented by visitors of note. 

At its heart is an open, spiral staircase dating from the early 1730s,
salvaged from a previous convent on the site. Its cypress steps are rounded
and uneven from centuries of use; its handcrafted black iron railing might
be the only remaining example of French colonial ironwork, said
archdiocesan archivist Charles Nolan. 

In a now-demolished building on the same site, Ursuline nuns on Jan. 7,
1815, famously prayed all night for the safety of the city on the eve of
the Battle of New Orleans. At the foot of the staircase stands an enormous
grandfather clock that the earliest Ursulines brought with them in 1727 as
a parting gift from the French sisters they were leaving behind. 

Its massive pendulum still swings. 

"This building is still alive. In fact it's never at any time ceased being
a working building in the Archdiocese of New Orleans," Kern said. 

After the city's archbishops moved out, in the early 20th century the
convent complex housed an elementary school and St. Mary's parish, a center
filled with Italians living in the French Quarter. 

Now the building's second floor houses the archdiocese's archives. 

The new exhibits in the building's ground floor expand and give more polish
to previous displays that were available to tourists. Kern hopes to keep
building on the convent's historic potential -- to bring it more into
commerce on its own merits and not least to squelch the bizarre tales some
tour guides tell their customers about it, he said. 

There is, for example, one tale in the repertoire about the shuttered
third-story dormer windows, said Kern: They are supposedly sealed up with
screws specially blessed by the pope himself, the better to contain the
undead vampires in the attic. 

Two floors below the supposed vampires, the archdiocese has converted the
first floor into a series of exhibits telling various stories about the
intermingled lives of clerical and civil New Orleans. 

It was a cosmopolitan place. The cathedral records of 1820 register the
baptisms, marriages or funerals of citizens from 14 states, 14 European
nations, Latin America, the Caribbean and, in the case of slaves, nine
African nations. 

An exhibit of documents displays a letter from Pere Antoine, the famous
Spanish Capuchin priest with the French name, in which he explains to his
bishop the destruction of the city in the great fire of 1788. 

There is the cathedral's French ledger detailing certain accounts from
1756; an 1895 roster of Italian parishioners; and a daily intake register
from an institution called the "New Orleans Catholic Association for the
Relief of Male Orphans." 

On one October day in 1853, a few weeks past a memorably horrendous yellow
fever epidemic, the orphanage recorded the arrival of 15 boys, including
one James Herrick. Apparently, names were all they came with; for 14 of the
15, the recording clerk noted that nothing was known about their ages,
place of birth, or whether they were "full or half-orphans." 

Other exhibits include one devoted to the career of retired Archbishop
Philip Hannan. It features Hannan's old portable World War II chaplain's
kit for saying Mass on the hood of a Jeep, as well as a mannequin outfitted
in Hannan's Army greens, with its chaplain lapel insignia and shoulder
patch of the 82nd Airborne. 

After this weekend, the center will be open Tuesdays through Sundays,
beginning another chapter in the building's long use, Kern said. 

"The things that happened here in this building," he said, "tell us who we
are and where we come from." 

By Bruce Nolan
Staff writer