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About eight years ago, Greensboro-based journalist Justin Catanoso discovered he had a saint in the family.
Not saint as in “nice person.” Saint as in about-to-be canonized at the Vatican. By the pope.
At first, Catanoso, a native of New Jersey who had walked away from the Catholic Church years before, was skeptical.
“I figured if there was a Catanoso being named a saint, they must have lowered the bar or the guy snuck in the back door,” Catanoso, now 48, told me this week. “There was no way that the Catanosos I knew in America and in New Jersey would qualify for canonization.”
But being a journalist, he took his Protestant wife and kids to Italy to get the scoop on the Rev. Gaetano Catanoso (1879-1963). The Catholic priest, it turned out, was second cousin to journalist Catanoso's immigrant grandfather.
What he found and how it changed him is told in Catanoso's new book, “My Cousin the Saint: A Search for Faith, Family and Miracles” (William Morrow, $25.95).
To help sell the book, Catanoso has been making the rounds at Catholic churches and at Italian-American events. Next week, he'll be in Charlotte. (Details below).
In Greensboro, Catanoso's day job is editor and columnist at The Business Journal.
He'd gone to Catholic high school way back when, but he was always more serious about journalism than about his faith. When it came to Catholicism, he had too many questions.
If somebody had told him he'd write a spiritual memoir . . . well, he'd have laughed it off.
“But when you learn that you have a saint that's in your family tree and he's not that far out on the branches . . . it's a pretty cool thing,” Catanoso said.
He found that Padre Catanoso was a modern-day St. Francis : A devout country priest who stood up to the Mafia, started an order of nuns, and walked from village to village to serve his peasant flock.
There's much more to the story: His brother, Alan Catanoso, died of brain cancer, despite a year of prayers for a miracle to the family's saint; Catanoso and his big American family were there in Rome when their relative was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on Oct. 23, 2005; and Catanoso now attends St. Pius X Catholic Church.
From St. Gaetano Cotanoso, he learned “to be the best person you can be . . . I really kind of feel his presence when I'm at a crossroads. I think, ‘What would he advise?'”
Want to go?
Catanoso will speak Friday at 7 p.m., at St. Matthew Catholic Church, 8015 Ballantyne Commons Parkway, Charlotte. Next Saturday, he'll be at the Ciao, Italia! Festival uptown.
