Hurricane Isaias, the first hurricane of a strangely quiet Atlantic season, is expected to come ashore between Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle late tonight or early Saturday. Thousands have been told to leave, and the Panhandle has been told to expect long nights without power. Before the forecasters and the linemen take over the story, every street on that coast has a question to answer today: who will check on the people who can’t get ready alone? How are we actively promoting the common good during such an event? The Church’s answer is solidarity, and St. Thomas Aquinas explains why it starts with your next door neighbor.
The News Story
Hurricane Isaias, the first hurricane of the 2026 Atlantic season, was moving toward the northern U.S. Gulf Coast on Thursday night as a Category 2 storm, with landfall expected late Friday or early Saturday between southern Mississippi and the western Florida Panhandle. Governors in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia declared states of emergency, coastal counties ordered evacuations, and offshore energy companies shut in most of the Gulf’s oil production.1
As of the National Hurricane Center’s Thursday night update, Isaias had maximum sustained winds of 105 mph and was about 260 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River, moving northeast at 14 mph, CBS News reported. Forecasters said the storm could reach Category 3 strength on Friday. Fox Weather reported that the hurricane center expects some weakening before landfall. “We are expecting Isaias to be a dangerous hurricane when it makes landfall,” hurricane center director Michael Brennan said, according to the Associated Press.2
A hurricane warning covers the coast from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to the Bay and Gulf county line in Florida. A storm surge warning runs from the mouth of the Mississippi River to Florida’s Big Bend. Forecasts call for 5 to 7 feet of surge in parts of Mobile Bay and the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, 4 to 10 inches of rain with isolated totals near 15 inches, and tornadoes from Friday night into Saturday across coastal Alabama, the Florida Panhandle and southwest Georgia. Fox Weather reported that roughly 30 million people live in the affected region. The National Weather Service told communities from Ocean Springs to Gulf County to prepare for long power outages.3
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey declared an emergency for 40 counties. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared one for 25 Panhandle and Big Bend counties and told residents to “prepare to lose power.” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp also declared an emergency. Walton County, Florida, issued a mandatory evacuation order, and Okaloosa and Escambia counties ordered evacuations in vulnerable areas. Orange Beach, Alabama, ordered tourists out, and Gulf Shores officials warned that bridges could close by midday Friday. Dauphin Island Mayor Jeff Collier told the AP that the island’s western end is “traditionally very vulnerable to storm surge.” More than a dozen Florida and Alabama counties canceled school for the rest of the week, and Pensacola’s airport planned to close to commercial flights Friday morning.4
Offshore, the federal agency that tracks Gulf oil production reported that as of 11 a.m. CDT Thursday, about 63 percent of daily Gulf oil output, roughly 1.28 million barrels, and about 57 percent of natural gas output had been shut down. Crews had left 121 of the Gulf’s 371 manned platforms, according to figures reported by Gray Television. Shell, Chevron and BP pulled workers or halted production at offshore sites. The AP and Gray Television both reported that refinery damage or prolonged outages would matter more for gasoline prices than the precautionary shutdowns.5
Isaias became a hurricane on Wednesday, the latest date for a season’s first Atlantic hurricane since 1905, when the first formed on October 8, according to CBS News and the AP. Fox Weather described it as the latest first hurricane of the satellite era, which began in 1966. Forecasters attribute the quiet season largely to a strong El Niño, which has increased wind shear over the Atlantic while the Pacific has stayed active.6
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
The Advice That Mattered Most
Officials along the Gulf Coast said a great many things on Thursday, nearly all of them about the storm and the potential impact it would have. Ron DeSantis told the Panhandle to “prepare to lose power.” Gulf Shores told its tourists to leave before the bridges close, and they could not get out. Then Pensacola’s mayor, D.C. Reeves, said something that had nothing to do with wind speed. He asked people to check on their older neighbors, and he added, “Obviously no need to panic at this point.”7
That may have been the most Catholic sentence spoken on the coast this week. Isaias will be reported as a weather story, and on Friday night as a story about surge heights and power outages. However, underneath both of those themes runs a much more important question to consider: who in a neighborhood can prepare for such a storm on their own, and who can’t. A family in Gulf Shores told the Associated Press it would ride out the storm at home with its chickens: “It’s going to be noisy.”8 They’ll manage. The widow two doors down, the man on oxygen, the household without a car or the money for three nights at a hotel in Montgomery may not fare as well. The Church has a name for what Mayor Reeves was asking of Pensacola. She calls it solidarity.
A Firm and Persevering Determination
The word gets used loosely, so it’s worth being exact in our usage. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church calls solidarity both a social principle and a moral virtue, and it sets aside, by name, the false definition that most often passes for it: “a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far.” Quoting St. John Paul II, The Compendium defines solidarity as “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good. That is to say, to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.”9
Hurricane coverage tempts all of us toward the feeling. You watch the radar loop, you see the cone swing toward Mobile Bay, and you feel compassion and concern for the people impacted by what you see on the radar. That feeling is good, but it’s where most of us stop. Solidarity starts where the feeling would like to end: with a phone call, a ride, a spare room, a case of water carried next door. The Compendium says it “translates into the willingness to give oneself for the good of one’s neighbour, beyond any individual or particular interest.”10 A storm with a landfall time printed on it is about as plain a test of that willingness as ordinary life provides.
Charity Starts Nearest
St. Thomas Aquinas asked whether we owe more to the people closest to us, and his answer reads like a hurricane plan. “Grace and virtue imitate the order of nature,” he wrote, and in nature “every natural agent pours forth its activity first and most of all on the things which are nearest to it: thus fire heats most what is next to it.” So “we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us.”11
Thomas lets that order bend. In the same article he adds that it varies with circumstance, “because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one’s own father, if he is not in such urgent need.”12 Need can outrank nearness. But on an ordinary Thursday before a storm, nearness is where charity has the most reach. The relief convoys will come next week. Your neighbor’s shutters need closing today, and you are the one standing in his driveway. A city cannot knock on every door before the bridges close. However, the neighbors who live on that street can do just that.
The Strong and the Weak Both Owe Something
St. John Paul II gave solidarity a shape that fits an evacuation order almost exactly. “Those who are more influential, because they have a greater share of goods and common services, should feel responsible for the weaker and be ready to share with them all they possess.” Then he turns to the other side: “Those who are weaker, for their part, in the same spirit of solidarity, should not adopt a purely passive attitude or one that is destructive of the social fabric, but, while claiming their legitimate rights, should do what they can for the good of all.”13
Read that and then reflect upon what is happening along the Gulf Coast this week. The household with a full tank of gas, a second car that is available, and an aunt in Birmingham is the “more influential” one, whatever its bank balance happens to be. It owes something to the household with none of those. And the household that needs the ride owes something too: to accept it, to leave when the county says leave, and to keep a rescue crew from having to come for them through 6 feet of water on Saturday morning risking their own lives because you failed to act with prudence. Dauphin Island Mayor Jeff Collier said his worry was that residents and visitors would not heed the warnings in time.14 Heeding them is its own act of solidarity. Every family that leaves early is one fewer call on a first responder in the dark, and this coast knows what is at stake: the Associated Press recalled this week that Hurricane Camille killed more than 250 people near Waveland, Mississippi, in 1969, and Katrina nearly 1,400 in 2005.15
Two Kinds of Love, Both Required
None of this lets the institutions off. The Compendium insists that charity works at two levels at once. It is “the work of mercy by which one responds here and now to a real and impelling need of one’s neighbour,” and “it is an equally indispensable act of love to strive to organize and structure society” so that the neighbor is protected.16 Elsewhere it asks for “the ability to respond quickly when such disasters strike peoples and territories.”17
Thursday showed both kinds of love working. On the structural side: emergency declarations in Florida, Alabama and Georgia, evacuation orders issued early, a hurricane warning posted more than a day before landfall, a Miami-based urban search and rescue team dispatched north, and Hurricane Hunters flying into the storm to sharpen the forecast.18 Offshore, crews left 121 manned platforms before the weather turned.19 Those decisions are love in the form of a policy, and the people who made those policies deserve thanks.
On the personal side, the Church has older language she can draw upon. The Catechism lists the corporal works of mercy as “feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and burying the dead,” and it quotes St. James on the neighbor who says, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without lifting a finger.20 A hurricane reshuffles who needs which work. By Saturday, a comfortable family may find themselves homeless for a week.
The Compendium has a special word for the elderly, and it aligns well with the mayor’s request. When the elderly are in “situations where they experience suffering and dependence,” they need health care and practical help, it says, and above all, “they need to be treated with love.”21 An evacuation is exactly that kind of situation. An 85-year-old who is frightened, confused, and alone needs a shelter and bed. She also needs someone who knows her name, and that is a role that a familiar neighbor can play well.
A Storm on the Water
St. Paul once spent two weeks on a ship in a storm that would not quit. On the fourteenth day, with everyone aboard the ship still, without food, he urged them to eat, “since not a hair is to perish from the head of any of you.” Then “he took bread, and giving thanks to God in the presence of all he broke it and began to eat. Then they all were encouraged and ate some food themselves” (Acts 27:34-36).
Paul did what he was able to do in that moment: he steadied the people beside him and fed them. That’s most of what solidarity looks like in a hurricane. “Bear one another’s burdens,” he wrote to the Galatians, “and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). On the northern Gulf Coast this weekend, the burdens will be physical ones: plywood, generators, a wheelchair carried up a ramp, a cooler of food shared after the power goes out. Most of all, it will be showing one another that we are not in this alone and that we are there to help each other shoulder this hardship.
Before Friday Night
If you live in the warning area, make the calls today. Know who on your street lives alone, who doesn’t drive, and who depends on electricity for oxygen or medicine. Make sure each of them has a plan and a ride. If you are leaving and have an empty seat, offer it. If a neighbor offers you one, take it. After the storm passes, knock on your neighbor’s door again before you start working on your own roof. If you live far away, your part comes next week. Consider how you can help through your parish and the Catholic Charities agencies in the storm’s path.
Finally, pray. Pray for the people of Mobile, Pensacola, Gulf Shores, Dauphin Island, and every town between Ocean Springs and Panama City. Pray for the forecasters, the linemen, the Coast Guard crews, and the search and rescue teams heading toward the storm while everyone else heads away. Pray for those who cannot leave, and for the neighbors who will stay to help them. And pray that by Sunday every family on that coast has learned, again, how many neighbors it has.
This story turns on solidarity: the firm and persevering determination to commit ourselves to the good of all and of each, beginning with the neighbor nearest at hand.
One principle from the Church’s social teaching, applied to the week’s news, in your inbox each Saturday.
Notes
- ↑ R.J. Rico, Dave Collins and Gerald Herbert, “Hurricane Isaias barrels toward the US Gulf Coast,” Associated Press via Mississippi Today, October 8, 2026, mississippitoday.org; “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2, threatens northern Gulf Coast,” CBS News, updated October 8, 2026, cbsnews.com; “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2 storm, evacuations expand across Gulf ahead of dangerous landfall,” FOX Weather, October 7, 2026, updated October 8, 2026, foxweather.com.
- ↑ CBS News, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2”; FOX Weather, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2 storm”; Rico, Collins and Herbert, “Hurricane Isaias barrels toward the US Gulf Coast.”
- ↑ FOX Weather, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2 storm”; CBS News, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2”; Rico, Collins and Herbert, “Hurricane Isaias barrels toward the US Gulf Coast.”
- ↑ Rico, Collins and Herbert, “Hurricane Isaias barrels toward the US Gulf Coast”; CBS News, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2”; FOX Weather, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2 storm.”
- ↑ Brian Doogs, “Hurricane Isaias shuts down nearly two-thirds of Gulf oil production; could affect gas prices,” WMTV (Gray Television), October 8, 2026, wmtv15news.com; Rico, Collins and Herbert, “Hurricane Isaias barrels toward the US Gulf Coast”; FOX Weather, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2 storm.”
- ↑ CBS News, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2”; Rico, Collins and Herbert, “Hurricane Isaias barrels toward the US Gulf Coast”; FOX Weather, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2 storm.”
- ↑ Rico, Collins and Herbert, “Hurricane Isaias barrels toward the US Gulf Coast”; FOX Weather, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2 storm.”
- ↑ Rico, Collins and Herbert, “Hurricane Isaias barrels toward the US Gulf Coast.”
- ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 193, vatican.va.
- ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 194.
- ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 31, a. 3, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
- ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 31, a. 3.
- ↑ Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis: On Social Concern (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, December 30, 1987), no. 39, vatican.va.
- ↑ CBS News, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2.”
- ↑ Rico, Collins and Herbert, “Hurricane Isaias barrels toward the US Gulf Coast.”
- ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 208.
- ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 486.
- ↑ Rico, Collins and Herbert, “Hurricane Isaias barrels toward the US Gulf Coast”; FOX Weather, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2 storm”; CBS News, “Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 2.”
- ↑ Doogs, “Hurricane Isaias shuts down nearly two-thirds of Gulf oil production.”
- ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2447, vatican.va.
- ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 222.
Books Cited
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- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, complete set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
Who on your street would need help getting ready for a storm, and do you know them by name?