Saint Roch Chapel

This guide to Saint Roch Chapel in New Orleans returns to the summer of 1867, when yellow fever was killing thousands and doctors blamed bad air, swamp filth, even the phase of the moon, decades before the disease's real cause would be proven. It follows a young German priest, Peter Leonard Thevis, who arrived at Holy Trinity Church just as the fever took his own pastor, and who led his congregation in prayer to Saint Roch, the medieval plague saint, promising a chapel if they were spared. You'll hear how that chapel opened on consecrated cemetery ground nine years later, in 1876. Step through the gate beside the altar to see what the era's other clinic left behind.