St. Rita Parish (New Orleans)

This year's IGIVECATHOLIC funds will be used to finish the update of the organ and sound system.

St Rita Parish is over 100 years old!  The current church was built in the early 1950s.  We recently painted the sanctuary and added gold leafing behind the Crucifix on the altar.  The more muted color on the altar along with the gold leafing, really draws your attention to the crucifix.  Gold leaf was also added at the side altars behind the Mary Statue and the St. Joseph statue.  In addition to these design elements, we continue to address other needs in the church.  The sound system was replaced.  The quality of sound has greatly improved with the addition of new permanent speakers and improved microphones all around the church.  

Because of your generous contributions to our building & maintenance fund, we were also able to begin the process of improving the church's organ.  There is still more work to be done to continue those improvements.  We were working with an organ installed in the church in the 1960s and much has changed since then! We recently installed a Phoenix Organ which was fabricated in Ontario, Canada.  The Phoenix will operate as a hybrid organ with our existing organ pipes.  These organ upgrades will give the organist the ability to play three different styles of organ music.  The new organ is WiFi enabled and can play and record music as well.  The benefit to this is if the organist does not know a piece of music to be played for a service, we can record that piece elsewhere and plug it into the new Phoenix and it will be played!  As part of this project, we need to replace some of the organ pipes. We are hopeful we will be finished all of these projects by Christmas.  Thank you for your generosity and hope you enjoy all the upgrades to our Church.