Archbishop Sprinkles Holy Water Over New Orleans

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:

Seventy-year-old New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond climbed into the open-air cockpit of a World War II-era biplane on Good Friday morning and roared off on a 25-minute mission.

As a pilot steered a course from the Lakefront Airport to Kenner to Gretna, to the French Quarter and back, Aymond blessed the population, which has been afflicted and isolated by the coronavirus, from a safe distance — 1,000 feet up.

As he flew, Aymond prayed for protection and healing for the people below, sprinkling holy water that came from the Jordan River as he went. As it turns out, sprinkling holy water in the slipstream of an airplane can be a challenge. “When I first did it, the water came back on me,” Aymond said, “but then I got situated.”

Last month I reported that a priest in western New York did the same thing, but to no apparent effect as Monroe County currently has the state’s second-highest number of confirmed COVID cases outside the NYC metro area.