BY FATHER JOHN A. KILEY
Although I am Irish on both sides of my family (Kiley/O’Brien), I have cousins who are Italian on their father’s side (Mucciarone).
One summer ago, I accompanied them as they fulfilled a life long ambition to return to their father’s ancestral village in Molise in central Italy, halfway between Rome and the Adriatic Sea.
My cousins held their breath and bit their tongue as I drove the twists and turns that led atop a high hill to Grotte Sant’Angelo, brilliant in the sunshine, sturdy within its stone walls. There were no immediate relatives remaining in the community but the name Mucciarone was etched in every war memorial, most votive plaques and many head stones.
Much of the population had emigrated over the years to America, Canada, Australia. Some natives, now English-speaking, had fortunately returned for a summer holiday and were most gracious in introducing us to some old timers who recalled the former neighbors named Mucciarone who had moved to New England.
The hospitality of these hilltop folk, the pride they took in their small community and their willingness to accommodate foreigners from the new world was heartening and memorable.
This brief but delightful encounter came to mind while reading a new book, My Cousin The Saint, by Wake Forest (North Carolina) University professor, Justin Catanoso (William Morrow, 2008). Mr. Catanoso happily blends the century long experience of his own Italo-American family in greater Philadelphia with the lives of his uncles, aunts and cousins who remained in the southern Italian province of Calabria.
Mr. Catanoso’s book is a family saga of faith, ambition, determination, hard work, illness, death and success on both sides of the Atlantic. Crowded Sunday afternoon pasta dinners at the family homestead merge with tense family conferences in hospital waiting rooms.
The family camaraderie Mr. Catanoso experienced as a youth when his family moved to the Jersey shore is revived on successive trips to Calabria to research and reaffirm his Italian roots. These familial experiences, mixed with some Church politics, make absorbing reading. The author’s maturing Catholic faith is integral to the narrative as well.
But, as the title My Cousin The Saint indicates, Mr. Catanoso has an actual canonized saint in his family. Father, now Saint, Gaetano Catanoso was a parish priest, a seminary spiritual director and a founder of a congregation of sisters in Calabria during the first half of the last century.
Father Gaetano experienced first-hand the meager resources of southern Italy that caused so many of his townsfolk to leave for the new world. He met the spiritual and material crises that his people experienced with his own hard work, his miracle inducing faith and his practical establishment of a community of sisters to educate the young and console the elderly. Once the required two miracles and testimony to his heroic sanctity were accepted by the Church, Father Gaetano was among the first five saints canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in October, 2005.
In the midst of this part familial/part ecclesiastical account is a profound insight coming, unsurprisingly, from the lips of Pope John Paul II. The Pope tersely instructed the bishops of Calabria, meeting with him on their ad limina visit, “Send me your saints.”
Pope John Paul has been criticized for canonizing too many saints. But there was a scheme in his zeal. Local saints touch the lives of local people. Local saints re-incarnate Jesus Christ graphically and tangibly on the local level so that once again believers can reach out to touch the tassel of his cloak, learn from his words, enjoy his company, bring him their fears, be consoled by his presence.
Saint Gaetano Catanoso had an immeasurable spiritual effect on his family, on his seminarians, on his religious sisters, on his fellow Calabrese, on his American cousins. St. John the Evangelist writes of Jesus Christ: “…the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
In every saint the Word becomes flesh again. Jesus, so to speak, takes on a new human nature. Christ, as it were, becomes a new light of the world, refracted now through the humble labor of Saint Gaetano Catanoso, as he was once reflected in the wisdom of Augustine, the intelligence of Aquinas, the ardor of Francis Xavier, the determination of Teresa of Avila, the courage of Edith Stein.
Author Catanoso has made Christ flesh once again in the person of his cousin Saint Catanoso whose humble example still guides from heaven his family, his fellow Calabrese, and maybe now a number of American readers.
Father John A. Kiley is pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Warwick.
