Discovering a long-lost cousin - who has become a saint

Growing up in North Wildwood or visiting his grandparents' old South Philadelphia neighborhood, Justin Catanoso thought he knew what it meant to be Italian American.

His mother baked rigatoni with tomato gravy. His father and uncles were in the landscape business. He had dark hair and brown eyes, and a vowel at the end of his name, and was Catholic - at least in name.

So why did his immigrant grandparents never talk about the southern Italy they fled a century ago? Had they left some family secret in the impoverished mountain region of Calabria - a home to the Mafia?

They had, but never knew it.

And it was no dark secret at all, but luminous.

The clan they left behind in 1903 had spawned a holy man, the Rev. Gaetano Catanoso, whom the Roman Catholic Church would proclaim a saint in 2005.

And in the course of discovering his long-lost cousin - a parish priest born in 1879 who grew into what he calls an "ethereal, holy being, so virtuous that he is hailed as a miracle worker" - Justin Catanoso would discover his larger family, his Italian roots, and the faith he hardly knew.

"It was an experience that pulled me into the heart of the family," Catanoso, now a 48-year-old North Carolina journalist, said during a recent visit to Philadelphia. He recounts his journey of discovery in a new book, My Cousin the Saint: A Search for Faith, Family and Miracles.

The chasm between his own American upbringing and St. Gaetano's life of sacrifice was "impossible to understand at first," Catanoso recalled in an interview. "He was truly a servant: a true parish priest who never wanted to be more than that."

Based in the Calabrian village of Pentidatillo, refusing even a donkey, Gaetano Catanoso would walk as a young priest from town to town, preaching, feeding the hungry, and teaching young people to pray.

He established schools and orphanages across the Archdiocese of Reggio di Calabria, rebuilt churches destroyed in a 1908 earthquake, and began a religious order of women, the Veronican Sisters of the Holy Face, devoted to the poor.

In time, other priests, including a future archbishop of Reggio, would turn to the man who jokingly called himself "the little donkey of Christ" as their confessor and spiritual adviser.

Yet when he died on April 4, 1963, none of his American relations had ever heard of him.

It was not until 2001, after some Philadelphia relatives passed along a 1997 newspaper clipping about Pope John Paul II's proclamation of Gaetano Catanoso as "blessed," that Justin Catanoso learned of his grandfather's cousin. Credited with a miracle, he was on the path to sainthood.

"I was blown away," Catanoso recalled last week.

"I said, 'How is it the Catanoso family in America could come of age with no idea that a beatification happened in 1997? I've got to find the story.' "

He soon landed a book contract, but St. Gaetano's story would prove just one of several in My Cousin the Saint.

Aunts and uncles started telling him their life stories. He toured the peasant town of Chorio, where his paternal grandfather, Carmelo, and the future St. Gaetano were born.

He "fell in love" with his many "fun-loving, sweet and generous" cousins in and around the city of Reggio di Calabria, and heard firsthand their tales of spontaneous and inexplicable medical cures that seemed to follow prayers to St. Gaetano.

But would St. Gaetano work a miracle when Catanoso's older brother, Alan, was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2004?

His anxious prayers to his late cousin would bring him a few steps closer to the Catholic Church, toward which he had long felt "stone cold," and even to joining a parish in Greensboro, where he edits the local business journal.

Still, when Pope Benedict XVI stood before St. Peter's Square on Oct. 23, 2005, and proclaimed Gaetano a santo, Catanoso was still struggling at ground level with the church whose uppermost heights his cousin had attained.

"There's a lot I'll never believe or accept," he said. "And I don't need anybody telling me how to live or vote. But I like the community and spirituality. I'm much more comfortable there than I ever would have imagined."