Five Feet Of Water In All Of Our Homes: What Catholic Teaching Says Indiana Is Owed

The White River at Anderson crested Friday morning around 24.9 feet, a foot higher than anyone has measured it there since 1913. That number goes in the record books. The number I keep coming back to is the one Tony Smith gave CBS News from his own street in Anderson: five feet-plus in all the homes there. A river crest is a fact about hydrology. Five feet of water in the living room is a fact about a family, and Catholic social doctrine has a great deal to say about the second one.

The News Story

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun formally requested a Presidential Emergency Declaration on Friday, asking the Federal Emergency Management Agency to send additional federal resources to a state battered since August 11 by tornadoes, a derecho, and what the National Weather Service has called catastrophic flooding. The request followed the statewide disaster emergency Braun declared Thursday, which mobilized the Indiana National Guard and took effect immediately for 30 days.

The White River at Anderson, northeast of Indianapolis, crested Friday morning at roughly 24.5 to 24.9 feet, more than a foot above the record set in 1913 and the highest level measured there in over a century. More than 11 inches of rain fell east of Indianapolis after Tuesday; New Castle recorded over 11 inches in a little more than a day, a rate the National Weather Service characterizes as having roughly a 0.1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. Several other creeks and rivers across central and eastern Indiana reached major flood stage, and forecasters said the White River was expected to remain over its banks into Sunday.

At least three storm-related deaths have been confirmed, two in Ohio and one in Indiana, all occurring Tuesday. Among them was a 4-year-old boy in Geneva Township, Indiana, killed when a tree fell on a house. In Roseville, Ohio, a village of about 1,500 that was surrounded by water on August 11, a person died during a medical emergency after flooded roads prevented first responders from reaching them.

CBS News reported 277 flash-flooding incidents across the Ohio Valley since Monday and seven separate flash flood emergencies declared since Tuesday. Upwards of 36 million people were under flood alerts Thursday across Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky and Tennessee. Power outages peaked at above 300,000 customers in Indiana, and more than 300,000 across the Midwest and Ohio Valley remained without service early Friday.

Rescue operations were extensive. Henry County Sheriff John Sproles said more than 50 people were pulled from a flooded apartment complex Wednesday. In Cambridge City, a town of about 1,700, Town Council President Jim McLane described a seven-to-eight-block area of flooded homes and dozens of boat rescues; he said he had lived in the area 60 years and had never seen comparable flooding. Franklin County officials reported 45 water rescues Thursday. A section of Interstate 70 was partially closed after the roadbed buckled.

In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine declared a state of emergency in Perry and Muskingum counties and activated 40 Ohio Army National Guard members with 20 tactical vehicles for water-rescue support; parts of southeastern Ohio received five to eight inches of rain. Emergency officials in Dearborn County, Indiana, and Hamilton County, Ohio, ordered evacuations along the Whitewater River Thursday night, with officials describing the rise as dangerous and beyond anything on record there.

Braun’s federal request was pending as of Friday evening. Damage assessments in both states remained incomplete, with officials saying it was too early to estimate the number of homes destroyed. ^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]}

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

What A House Is, In Catholic Language

Start with the word the Church actually uses, because it will surprise people who assume Catholic social teaching is chiefly a critique of ownership. The word is property, and the Church defends it.

But look closely at why she defends it. The Compendium opens its treatment of the family and economic life by reminding us where the word economy comes from: oiko-nomia, household management. “The home has been for a long time, and in many regions still is, a place of production and the center of life.”^[11] The house came first. The market grew outward from it in what the Compendium calls concentric circles. So when a Catholic talks about a home, she is talking about the original economic institution, the one every other one is downstream of.

Leo XIII made the argument sharper in 1891. The right to property, he wrote, belongs to a man “in his capacity of head of a family,” and “that right is all the stronger in proportion as the human person receives a wider extension in the family group.”^[12] A father wants his children provided for “amid the uncertainties of this mortal life,” and the ordinary way he accomplishes that is by owning something durable he can hand on. Property, in Leo’s account, is a father’s answer to uncertainty.

The Compendium says the same thing in plainer modern terms, and this is the sentence I would put on the wall of every parish hall in Madison County this week: “The right to property is closely connected with the existence of families, which protect themselves from need thanks also to savings and to the building up of family property.”^[13]

Read that against Charlie Simmons. He is 70. He told CBS News he had been working on his Anderson house for about a year, moved back in a couple of months ago, and by Thursday was wading through it in chest-deep water. “Financial-wise, I’m cooked,” he said. “Start again, 70 years old, start over, what are you going to do.”

In Catholic terms, something specific just happened to Charlie Simmons. The instrument by which a household protects itself from need, the accumulated family property that a lifetime of savings and labor was converted into, went underwater in about 36 hours. He did exactly what the Church has told working people to do since Leo XIII. He put his savings into a house. And the house is now full of river.

The Word The Compendium Uses Is “Right”

Housing shows up in Catholic social doctrine in a place most people never look for it: the section on the common good.

The Compendium lists what the common good concretely demands of a society, and among the items it names are “the provision of essential services to all, some of which are at the same time human rights: food, housing, work, education and access to culture, transportation, basic health care.”^[14] Housing sits there as an obligation the common good places on the community, listed alongside food and work as something a society owes its members rather than something it hopes will turn up.

The Catechism is more specific about who owes it. In its treatment of the fourth commandment, it says the political community “has a duty to honor the family, to assist it,” and lists among the things it must ensure “the right to private property, to free enterprise, to obtain work and housing.”^[15] The duty runs to the family, and the duty belongs to the political community.

Put those two texts beside a flooded subdivision and the moral arithmetic gets simple. Roughly the same eleven inches of rain fell on everyone east of Indianapolis. What it destroyed in each house was the specific material condition the Catechism says the political community owes the family. That destruction creates an obligation, and the obligation lands on all of us who share a commonwealth with Cambridge City and Anderson and Yorktown.

Leo XIII Already Answered Governor Braun’s Letter

Here is where it gets uncanny. Braun’s Friday request to Washington, asking a distant and much larger authority for help a state cannot supply on its own, was addressed in Rerum Novarum 135 years ago, in a paragraph most people quote for the opposite purpose.

Leo XIII argues against state intrusion into family life, and he is blunt: the notion that civil government should “intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error.” Then, in the very next breath, he writes this: “True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth.”^[16]

Notice the three conditions Leo attaches. Exceeding distress. Deprived of the counsel of friends. No prospect of extricating itself. A 70-year-old man standing in five feet of water in a house he just finished rebuilding, in a town where every neighbor who might have loaned him a truck is bailing out his own basement, satisfies all three without needing an argument.

And notice the reason Leo gives, which is the part that matters most. Public aid is right in that case, “since each family is a part of the commonwealth.” His warrant is membership. The household is a constituent part of the body politic, and a body does not leave one of its own members to rot. That is a claim in justice, and it sits at a different level entirely from charity dispensed downward by the strong to the weak.

Leo’s limit is real too, and Catholics should hold both halves. Public authority intervenes at the point of extreme necessity, and the intervention aims to restore the family’s own capacity to stand. Then it stops. A FEMA declaration that gets a family back into a dry, safe house is exactly what Leo describes. A permanent administrative relationship in which the family never again owns anything durable would be the error he warns against in the same paragraph. Both readings come out of the same encyclical, and honest use of it requires quoting both.

The New Poor Of Madison County

Now apply the most recent teaching we have. Pope Leo XIV, in Dilexi Te, refuses to let the poor be defined as a fixed population somewhere else. “In wealthy countries too, the growing numbers of the poor are equally a source of concern,” he writes. “In general, we are witnessing an increase in different kinds of poverty, which is no longer a single, uniform reality but now involves multiple forms of economic and social impoverishment, reflecting the spread of inequality even in largely affluent contexts.”^[17]

He goes further, and this is the sentence that decides how a Catholic reads this week in Indiana: “Poverty must always be understood and gauged in the context of the actual opportunities available in each concrete historical period.”^[18]

Charlie Simmons was not poor on Monday. He was a retired man in Anderson, Indiana, with a rebuilt house and, presumably, some plans. By Friday, measured against the actual opportunities available to a 70-year-old in central Indiana in 2026, he is poor. Tony Smith, who told CBS he lost both the house and the business, is poor. So are a great many people in Henry, Delaware, Madison, Wayne, Franklin and Dearborn counties whose names are not in any wire story.

This matters practically. The Church’s preferential love for the poor attaches to whoever is actually poor, right now, in the county you can drive to. Leo XIV recalls John Paul II’s insistence that this love “cannot but embrace the immense multitudes of the hungry, the needy, the homeless, those without medical care and, above all, those without hope of a better future,” and warns that ignoring them makes us the rich man who pretended not to see Lazarus at his gate (cf. Luke 16:19-31).^[19] The gate this week is on State Road 1.

In an affluent country, there is a temptation to treat a domestic flood as an insurance matter and a foreign famine as a moral one. Leo XIV closes that gap deliberately. Impoverishment inside a wealthy nation is real impoverishment, and the people it happens to are the poor in the full Gospel sense, with everything the Church says that entails.

We Are Debtors

So what does the Church say I owe, sitting dry in Nebraska, reading about a river in Indiana?

The Compendium answers with a word that stings a little: “The principle of solidarity requires that men and women of our day cultivate a greater awareness that they are debtors of the society of which they have become part. They are debtors because of those conditions that make human existence livable, and because of the indivisible and indispensable legacy constituted by culture, scientific and technical knowledge, material and immaterial goods and by all that the human condition has produced.”^[20]

Debtors. That is the framing, and it dissolves the usual polite distinction between what I choose to give and what I owe. Every dry house in America sits on inherited work: somebody’s levee, somebody’s building code, somebody’s road grade, somebody’s volunteer fire department founded in 1893. None of us paid for the conditions that make our own existence livable. We received them. And the Compendium says that reception creates a debt, payable to the society we received them from, which includes the parts of it currently underwater.

The Compendium is careful, though, to keep solidarity from collapsing into a feeling. It insists solidarity works at two levels at once, as a social principle that “determines the order of institutions” and as a genuine moral virtue.^[21] The institutional half is the part Catholics tend to skip. Sending a check is the virtue half. Asking why the flood maps, the building setbacks, the stormwater capacity, and the insurance structures in eastern Indiana produced this particular result is the institutional half, and the Compendium says both are owed.

Which brings me to the least spiritual paragraph in this post, and one of the most important.

Standard homeowners insurance in the United States does not cover flooding. Flood coverage is a separate product, mostly through the National Flood Insurance Program, and it is generally required only where a federally backed mortgage sits inside a mapped high-risk zone. Inland counties on small rivers, well away from any coast, are exactly where that requirement usually does not reach and where take-up is thin. I would guess a large share of the ruined houses in Henry and Madison counties carried no flood policy at all.

Hold that against Compendium 250, the line about families protecting themselves from need through savings and the building up of family property. A system in which a working family’s entire accumulated property is concentrated in one uninsured structure, on a stream that just ran a foot over its 1913 record, has quietly stopped performing the protective function that justified private property in the first place. The Church defends property because it shelters families from ruin. When an arrangement stops doing that, a serious examination has to reach the arrangement itself. That is an institutional question, and Catholic social doctrine says it is a moral one.

The Volunteer Fire Department Got There First

Before any of this reached Washington, neighbors handled it.

More than 50 people came out of a flooded apartment complex in Henry County on Wednesday. Franklin County ran 45 water rescues on Thursday. A man clung to a light pole in Cambridge City until a boat reached him. The East Madison Fire Territory posted that it had responded to historic flooding “and so many calls to help people out of harm’s way,” then told residents near rising water to make a plan and get out while they still could. The Everton Volunteer Fire Department was pulling people off porches. Volunteer. Meaning men and women who left their own jobs, and in some cases their own flooding houses, to go get somebody else’s family.

The Compendium sees this clearly. Writing about the family as an active participant in social life, it says the solidarity proper to families “can take on the features of service and attention to those who live in poverty and need,” and, in a phrase worth noticing, that it “is able to bring every situation of distress to the attention of institutions so that, according to their specific competence, they can intervene.”^[22]

That is the actual shape of this week in Indiana, described in a document published in 2004. A neighbor pulls a man off a pole. A township fire department runs 45 rescues and reports what it is seeing. A county calls the state. The state mobilizes the National Guard and calls Washington. Every rung of that ladder is doing real moral work, and the ladder only functions because somebody at the bottom got in a boat first.

Catholics arguing about disaster policy tend to pick one rung and defend it against the others. The Church’s answer is the whole ladder, in order, with the higher rungs stepping in exactly where the lower ones have been overwhelmed. Leo XIII in 1891 and the Compendium in 2004 describe the same structure. Governor Braun’s Friday letter is that structure operating as designed.

What Is Actually Owed Now

Five feet of water in all of our homes describes what happened, and it is also a fairly precise statement of the bill. Drywall to the ceiling. Insulation, subfloor, joists, furnace, water heater, wiring below the line. Every photograph in the house. The tools in the garage a man used to make his living.

The Church’s answer to a flooded house is a rebuilt house, which takes labor, money, and a long calendar. Catholic Charities agencies run long-term disaster recovery precisely because the money and the volunteer crews are scarcest six months out, when the story is dead, and the mold is not. St. Vincent de Paul conferences work the same ground parish by parish, one household at a time, which is the scale at which this particular disaster actually exists.

So give, and give again in February when nobody is asking. And if you live in a county with a small river running through it, go find out this month whether your parish, your school, your neighbors, and you yourself carry flood coverage, because Compendium 250 is an argument for making sure family property can actually survive the thing that is most likely to destroy it.

Charlie Simmons asked a real question from the middle of his ruined house. Start again, 70 years old: what are you going to do? The Church’s answer is that the commonwealth he has belonged to for 70 years will help him do it, because he is a member of it and members are not left in the water.

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Footnotes

1. Ian Lee, “Indiana’s White River Breaks 1913 Flooding Record as Governor Declares State of Emergency,” CBS News, August 14, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/indiana-white-river-flooding-record-emergency/. ↩
2. Michelle Simmons and Bill Hutchinson, “Indiana Governor Declares Statewide Disaster Emergency as Midwest Floodwaters Rise,” ABC News, August 13, 2026, https://abcnews.com/US/indiana-governor-declares-statewide-disaster-emergency-midwest-floodwaters/story?id=135609692. ↩
3. Emily Mae Czachor and Meg Oliver, “Floodwaters Submerge Midwest Neighborhoods Still Bracing for More Severe Storms,” CBS News, August 13, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/floodwaters-submerge-midwest-neighborhoods-bracing-more-severe-storms/. ↩
4. “Midwest Braces for Even More Rounds of Flooding Rain into the Weekend,” CNN, August 14, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/14/weather/midwest-storms-flooding-indiana-ohio-hnk. ↩
5. “Rivers Rising in Indiana’s Catastrophic Flood Zone as New Storms Threaten Midwest,” CNN, August 14, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/weather/flooding-rain-severe-storms-derecho-midwest-appalachians-climate. ↩
6. “Indiana Governor Asks for Presidential Emergency Declaration after Severe Storms, Flooding,” FOX59, August 14, 2026, https://fox59.com/indiana-news/indiana-governor-asks-for-presidential-emergency-declaration-after-severe-storms-flooding/. ↩
7. “Indiana Gov. Mike Braun Requests Presidential Emergency Declaration Following Severe Weather,” WTHR, August 14, 2026, https://www.wthr.com/article/news/politics/indiana-gov-mike-braun-requests-presidential-emergency-declaration-severe-weather/531-491ff5e3-4239-4c46-a7fd-e92f004f0ddf. ↩
8. “Governor Mike Braun Declares Statewide Disaster Emergency Following Severe Storms and Flooding Across Indiana,” WBIW, August 13, 2026, https://www.wbiw.com/2026/08/13/governor-mike-braun-declares-statewide-disaster-emergency-following-severe-storms-and-flooding-across-indiana/. ↩
9. “Ohio National Guard Water Rescue Unit Activated as DeWine Declares Emergencies in 2 Counties,” 10TV, August 12, 2026, https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/ohio-severe-storms-dewine-state-of-emergency-national-guard/530-f76b2798-c6dc-47f9-bfc0-ab603aae236e. ↩
10. “Rain-Soaked Indiana Sees Record River Levels and Washed-Out Roads,” Scripps News, August 14, 2026, https://www.scrippsnews.com/science-and-tech/natural-disasters/rain-soaked-indiana-sees-record-river-levels-and-washed-out-roads. ↩
11. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 248. ↩
12. Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1891), no. 13, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html. ↩
13. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 250. ↩
14. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 166. ↩
15. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2211. ↩
16. Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1891), no. 14, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html. ↩
17. Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te: On Love for the Poor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2025), no. 12, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20251004-dilexi-te.html. ↩
18. Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te: On Love for the Poor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2025), no. 13, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20251004-dilexi-te.html. ↩
19. Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te: On Love for the Poor (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2025), no. 87, quoting Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), no. 42, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20251004-dilexi-te.html. ↩
20. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 195. ↩
21. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 193. ↩
22. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 246. ↩

Books Cited

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• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Doubleday / Image, 2003