NEW ORLEANS — While a recently elevated Catholic bishop in Austria told his flock in 2005 that God sent Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, the Catholic archbishop of 380,000 local Catholics here does not subscribe to a similar view.

Archdiocesan spokeswoman Sarah Comiskey said Archbishop Alfred Hughes did not want to address Bishop Gerhard Maria Wagner’s theology now, lest it appear he was singling out a colleague for criticism.

But she highlighted Hughes’ remarks about the storm from two settings in 2006, a first-year Katrina anniversary service and a newspaper column.

In each, he declared that the “why” question is bottomless.

“Some may turn to prophetic messages relating destruction to sin,” he wrote in the Clarion Herald of Aug. 26, 2006, nearly a year after Katrina roared ashore. “But as the Lord Jesus has revealed to us, God’s ways are far more mysterious than ours.”

And in a first anniversary service at St. Louis Cathedral, he reasserted that the “Father’s ways are mysterious to us,” then turned to a famous passage in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans “that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.”

In all the remarks, Hughes urges people to focus less on the meaning behind the disaster, in favor of exploring the meaning of good that comes from it.

There has been no retraction of Wagner’s 2005 remarks, and there have been no reports of the Vatican addressing the matter.

While Hughes’ interpretation seems to predominate, Wagner’s views are shared by some conservative followers of several faiths, including Christianity and Judaism.

In early 2006, 200 conservative Protestant pastors and church members met at City Hall to pray for a “spiritual rebirth” of the city. Many said at the time that God sent the hurricane to punish New Orleans for racism, Mardi Gras hedonism, abortion and other practices they regard as sinful.

At various times after the storm, there were similar Katrina-as-punishment interpretations from figures as diverse as an ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbi, who cited American policy in the Middle East; the Rev. John Hagee, a prominent Texas evangelical pastor, who blamed New Orleans’ sinfulness; and even Mayor Ray Nagin, who provoked a local firestorm in 2006 when he claimed that God was mad at America for its invasion of Iraq. Nagin apologized the next day.

But Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” said in a special New Orleans appearance in 2006 that “God was not in the hurricane.” Instead, he said, God was to be found in the outpouring of generosity that followed the killer storm.

“God does not give an explanation or an apology, but an agenda, a list of things to do,” he told an audience at a local synagogue.

Other pastors see more tangible, immediate lessons underlying Katrina.

The Rev. Shawn Anglim, pastor of First Grace Methodist Church, said he sees Katrina as a natural — even a foreseeable — event.

Anglim, who is also a board member of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, sees in regional building patterns and the mismanagement of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands a long-building, manmade invitation to natural disaster. “It’s like a garden, and there’s a way to live in the garden,” he said.

“I don’t think God in his heaven sent this hurricane our way,” he said. “Hurricanes happen in south Louisiana. They happen all the time — some big, some small, some disastrous.

“Can you live life in a way that minimizes the danger? Yes, you can.”