You shouldnever simply catch an exception and do nothing. All this is doing is hiding whatever exception you are getting that is preventing the code from running.
Bear is right. You probably got an SQLException, but because you ignore it you don't know.
There are two easy fixes:
1) 2) Both will cause the exception to show up on the page (with the first one having a 500 HTML error code (internal server error)). Use this information to find the cause of the error.