Workers dig for archives of Haiti's collapsed cathedral (Feature)

By Andrea Sosa Cabrios (dpa) Jan 30, 2010, 5:30 GMT

Port-au-Prince - A yellow earthmover backed up and gathered steam to climb the pile of rubble that was once the Office of the Vicar General of Port-au-Prince.

In the destruction wrought by the January 12 earthquake, workers are trying to recover historic documents of Haiti's Catholic Church.

'We are looking for the archives of the cathedral in the episcopal office,' said Rev Georgino Rameau, of the Society of St Jacques.

Volunteers carried boxes of documents to a truck, as the backhoe - operated by a woman - sent a cloud of dust flying when it hauled away a load of rock.

The ruins of the cathedral, the episcopal residence and the administrative offices of the diocese lie in the city centre, the zone worst-hit by the quake in the Haitian capital. Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot and Vicar General Charles Benoit both perished there.

For several days, the Church tried to get help from the government or a foreign embassy to recover the archives, until finally on Friday the earthmover arrived, Rameau said.

Two armed guards supervised the work. The excavation coincided with the visit of Papal Nuncio Bernardito Auza and a delegation of Dominican bishops to the site.

When I saw that the cathedral had collapsed, it was a total shock to me,' Auza told the German Press Agency dpa. 'It is a great material loss, but also a historic one. The entire historical patrimony of the diocese was lost.'

But some boxes of papers were recovered intact, and the young volunteers accompanying Rameau loaded them onto a truck.

The beautiful cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, whose first stone was laid in 1884, was totally destroyed.

Nearby, the National Palace, the Ministry of Justice, the revenue office and other governmental buildings also lie in ruins.

The 7.0-magnitude quake killed an estimated 180,000 people, and ground the symbols of terrestrial and celestial authority into dust.

'Our group of bishops from the Dominican Republic have come to Haiti to express our solidarity,' said Archbishop Nicolas de Jesus Lopez Rodriguez as he toured the site with the papal nuncio.

Several priests and seminarians died in the quake. Auza told the Vatican news agency Fides that he had also encountered homeless priests and nuns living in the streets.

'The rector of the seminary survived, as did the dean, but many seminarians were trapped in the rubble. The screams of victims were heard all over,' he said.

Yet in spite of the belief of many Haitians, Auza insisted that the quake 'was not the wrath of God.'

After the initial sorrow, the job at hand is to rescue the memory of the Church through its documents.

The backhoe lifted its giant metal claw and bit into the rubble once more, digging for history.