I have never been to Las Vegas before, but I heard a lot about it. 

From June 28 through July 5th, I experienced  Las Vegas for myself. It was different.

The purpose of my visit was to give a Cross Mission at the parish of St. Christopher.

When I got off the plane, lines of slot machines and avid gamblers assaulted my passage all the way as I walked through the terminal to the baggage claim. The message is clear. Las Vegas is the gambling and Casino Capital of the world. Wherever you go in Vegas, you are accosted by Casinos, full of glittering and noisy slot machines.

I got Lyft to the rectory of St. Christopher Church. Estella, the parish Secretary, was waiting for me, and showed me to my room.

After resting from the flight for over an hour, I got Lyft to drop me off at the Bellagio. I had some free time to browse about until Saturday. It was late, Friday afternoon, and my Mission didn’t start until tomorrow evening.

The Bellagio water show is spectacular, and it was encircled by hordes of anxious spectators, taking photos. Called “The Fountains of Bellagio,” it’s one of the most popular attractions in Las Vegas. Said to be the most ambitious, choreographically-complex water feature ever conceived and built, it amazingly interweaves, water, light, and music. Each performance is unique.

These free fountain shows at the Bellagio are choreographed to more than 30 different songs. The 1,100-foot-long lake is 375,000 square feet, or 8.5 acres, equivalent to three city blocks or eight football fields. The water could fill 2,000 swimming pools and would take more than a year to fill with an ordinary garden hose.

The fountain “shooters” consist of 1,214 programmable devices, each of which can shoot a jet of water 460 feet into the air, higher than a 24-story building. At any one time during a performance, 17,000 gallons of water is squirting through the air. The complexity of the shows are such that there is a staff of 30 working seven days a week, 365 days a year to clean, maintain and make emergency repairs on the fountains between shows.

This attraction was created by the water design firm of WET Design, which is also responsible for the Mirage Volcano and the water features at the MGM Aria Resort and Casino.

I attended a Cirque du Soleil Show in the Bellagio. The show was superb and it felt like you were watching a fantasy. So much going on with acrobats coming out of nowhere, doing incredible feats in the air, and diving into pools of water, sixty feet below, that suddenly appeared on stage, out of nowhere. I felt it was all too much for one set of eyes to take in. But, it was exciting, and entertaining.

I began the weekend Cross Mission on Saturday with confessions and vigil mass at St. Christopher’s. The congregation was very warm and attentive at all the masses.

St. Christopher parish offered another view of Las Vegas. You wouldn’t know you were in Vegas when you were in the parish. It had an entirely different feel with people doing the normal things in life: going to Church, looking after children and the elderly, going to work, taking care of one another, and talking about anything and everything in their lives, but not a word about the famous Strip in the distance. In fact, you couldn’t even see the Strip from the parish. It was another world as distant and remote to the people of St. Christopher as a foreign country.  The Strip was a world for tourists.

I met a young man on the plane on Friday when flying into Las Vegas. He grew up there, and I asked, “What was it like growing up in Vegas?”

He said, “It was boring. It was only for adults and kids had no part of it.”

“But, you’re coming back. It must have some appeal for you.”

“The only appeal it has for me is my family,” he replied. “I’m going there for them.”

This young man’s perspective struck me as no different to that of the parishioners I met at the parish of St. Christopher. Home is where the heart is. Las Vegas is for excitement.

Sunday was a very busy day with four masses in a row. Everybody wanted to talk to you after mass and shake hands. One man waited for the crowd to leave before approaching me: “I’m sixty seven years old. I’ve been holding the devil by the tail, but this mass has changed my life.”

He was crying as he told me this. I thanked him for his heartfelt words which moved me deeply. I gave him a blessing and got ready to say the next mass. You never know how much your ministry means to someone until you hear something like this.

I was treated to dinner, after the Sunday masses, at the famous Caesar’s Palace that evening by a young parishioner. John was very involved in the parish, and was directing the liturgy for the last mass on Sunday afternoon.

“Have you eaten?” he inquired, as he drove me to the rectory after a very busy day.

“I haven’t eaten anything since morning, but I’m falling down as you can see, and I need to sleep first. Give me two hours to rest up, and we’ll go out to eat.”

Promptly, John picked me up at the rectory two hours later and we drove to Caesar’s Palace. The meal was the best part because I was hungry. I’ve seen the Roman forum in Rome. Caesar’s in Vegas is elegant, but it is no substitute for the original. The same could be said of the Las Vegas re-creations of Eiffel Tower and New York. The same, however, could not be said of the Grand Canyon.

Sidetrip: The Grand Canyon

After the weekend masses, I had some spare time to explore. So, I signed up for a precious helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon. I had rested up on Monday in preparation  for this tour, and on Tuesday morning I took Lyft to the helicopter pad. There were five other people taking this tour in addition to the pilot. That made seven of us.

The pilot gave us a mini- seminar before we departed, explaining in detail how to buckle up, what to do inside the helicopter, how to enter and exit, and what to do in case of an emergency. He made sure that we would change places during the journey, after we landed in the Canyon, in order to have the maximum experience. We’re going to land in the Canyon, I thought. What an opportunity! We all made friends quickly, and this made our flight more enjoyable.

We flew over the mighty Hoover Dam. It looked like a large thread with little hanging chads between two mountains from our altitude of vision. To the west of the Dam was lake Mead which provides fresh water to Las Vegas. This lake, the pilot told us, was over five feet too low, causing the city and county to consider desalination as an alternative source of water.

The Canyon was a breathtaking marvel. The multi- colored rock formations, and the huge gorges carved out through centuries of eruptions, earthquakes, and evolution took my breath away. The pilot had a good knowledge of geology, and he was able to render a fascinating account of how the Canyon was formed and reformed over millions of years. When the pilot slowed to hover inside the Canyon, I lost all sense of time, getting lost in its beauty and presence. When he hurried the pace of the helicopter again, I was startled back to reality.

Not only did we fly over the Grand Canyon. We flew into it, and landed alongside the Colorado River which runs through it. Here, the pilot prepared a champagne lunch for us. It was a complete surprise. The lunch, I mean. But, what could be more appropriate than to celebrate, with lunch, our collective experience inside one of God’s most impressive creations.  We left, feeling blessed and grateful, to have seen the Canyon from above, but especially from the inside.

Our tour of the Canyon took two and a half hours. We flew over the flat lands, saw wild horses grazing, solitary cabins where mountain men lived away from civilization, and landed a second time to refuel from a big tank in the desert.

On the way back to our destination, the pilot flew us over the Vegas Strip. One of the Casinos, called Rio, was undergoing a $1 billion renovation, he told us. Impressive as a man-made thing, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the Grand Canyon.

Before flying back to Florida, I went to see the David Copperfield Show at the MGM hotel on the Strip. The show was spectacular. This great illusionist is an incredible communicator as well as a performer. He communicated with the entire audience by being present everywhere in the building, and by drawing a variety of individuals into his show on stage or near where they were seated. The excitement of the entire audience was infectious.

I was seated at a table with three Chinese visitors: a student and his parents from Beijing. “David Copperfield,” I was told, “is very popular in China.” The performer, at one point, threw frisbees into the audience, inviting the recipients on stage with him, and one landed on my lap. I gave it to the Chinese student who screamed with joy, and ran up on stage with the others.

I was amazed at how this performer could make someone levitate before your very eyes; make a car appear on stage, a spacecraft hover over your head, and transform a tissue into a blood red, dancing rose. And, it was all an illusion.

The day I left Las Vegas was the biggest surprise of all. My bed began to move under me when I woke up and the furniture wobbled. It was no illusion like the David Copperfield Show. This was real life. I recalled a similar experience I had in Mexico City in 1986. I knew it was a earthquake.
I packed my things, took Lyft to the Airport, and flew back to Florida. En route, I watched the news about the earthquake in Southern California, and the after shocks as far away as Las Vegas.

—Fr. Hugh Duffy