The woman wailed outside the ruins of Cathedrale de Notre-Dame de Port-au-Prince, the Roman Catholic cathedral that symbolized Haiti's religious fervor.
"This is what God did!" she cried Friday morning. "See what God can do!" Tuesday's earthquake brought down the roof of the enormous pink-and-cream cathedral, filling the apse and nave with tons of rubble. The quake punched out its vivid stained-glass windows, twisted its wrought-iron fencing and sliced brick walls like cake. The western steeple, which had soared more than 100 feet in the sky, toppled onto parishioners praying at an outdoor shrine to St. Emmanuel. Flies buzzed around the pile of copper, plaster and felled columns.
The senior Catholic figure in the country, Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot was killed in the magnitude 7.0 earthquake. As many as 100 priests were still missing, said sacristan Jean Claude Augustin.
By the cathedral's ruins, a small blue copy of the New Testament lay to one side. Sheet music from Christian hymns was scattered through the street.
Haiti is, officially, predominantly Catholic, with some Protestant faiths. But across the board is an underlying belief in, or respect for, voodoo and other indigenous traditions, which are often mixed in with formal religious practices.
Former Haitian president Bertrand Aristide was at one time wildly popular, in part for his blend of superstitious spirituality, social activism and Catholic faith.
Many have turned to God for an explanation of this catastrophe. Tens of thousands of earthquake survivors have been spending the nights in the streets, singing hymns and calling out the Gospel.
Dudu Orelian, whose brother and nephew were killed, stood outside the cathedral.
"God is angry at the world," Orelian said.
Jack Fisner, a Haitian seminarian who lives in the Dominican Republic, came to Port-au-Prince to begin coordinating aid and prepare a report for the pope.
"This has been a terrible blow to the church and the people," Fisner said. "You have to question your faith, but hopefully not lose it."
Augustin clambered like a billy goat into the interior ruins of the cathedral, scaling the mounds of rubble and downed chandeliers. He found a young man attempting to raid the collection box of its money and persuaded him to stop. Instead, the two men worked together to salvage the tithes, gathering up the coins and bills in a sheet.
The statue of Notre Dame, familiar to anyone who ever worshiped in the cathedral, was gone, either destroyed or stolen.
Behind the cathedral, the church's pastoral center, which gave religion classes, and the residences of most of the church leadership and its priests were also destroyed.
Hope remained that the church's general vicar, an active, popular Haitian priest in his 80s, might still be alive.
Father Charles Benoit, buried under a collapsed four-story building that contained his residence, managed to get a cellular telephone call out to Francois Voleile, a lifetime parishioner, two days ago. He said he was unharmed and had water and juice, but no way out.
Voleile had been keeping vigil at the site ever since, while a couple of other survivors armed with a tiny mallet and pocket flashlight, tried to work their way into a small opening on the side of the mountain of rubble. On Friday, they were getting nowhere.
At mid-morning, a group of search-and-rescue workers arrived from Mexico, the so-called "topos" (moles) who go around the world to extract disaster survivors caught in terrible circumstances.
The Mexican team sent the rescue effort at the cathedral into full gear, using ropes to pull off sheets of laminated roofing and expose more rubble below. With local residents helping, they used pick axes and shovels to tear into the top of the mound and create three possible entry ways.
"It is overwhelming, such destruction in a place already destroyed," said Sister Berta Lopez Chavez, who said the day before the team had worked at a Catholic school, pulling out three live children and the bodies of about 30 others. "Haiti lives two realities: this catastrophe, and their catastrophe of every day, of poverty and ignorance and daily hunger. It's like, what else can happen to them? The little they had is gone." About three hours after the team from Mexico launched its efforts, a team from Lincolnshire County, England, arrived with their black Labrador, Holly. Everyone was ordered off the hill, and the dog ran back and forth to inspect the scene.
"We are not discouraged," parishioner Voleile said. "We are still alive and we can go on."