Wildwood native Justin Catanoso has just published a book about his family and how they deal with having a bone fide saint in their lineage.

Justin Catanoso admits that he has no answers for us.
But he is still looking.
As are many of us.

His search, however, has an aide—Saint Gaetano Catanoso, his grandfather’s cousin, who was a poor parish priest that never left his native Italy.
Gaetano was elevated to sainthood by Pope Benedict XVI on October 23, 2005, after the church had thoroughly investigated his life, including reported miracles associated with the priest.
Having a canonized saint in the family could be seen as a help, but with Justin, it could have easily been a hindrance, had he let it.

“I’m a story teller,” he said in a recent phone interview from his home in North Carolina, where he is the executive editor at The Business Journal. “As a journalist, I have to be skeptical about miracles, and that’s a healthy thing.”
Justin’s search is also part of the subtitle of his book, “My Cousin The Saint, A Search for Faith, Family, and Miracles” (William Morrow, 337 pages, $25.95). He will be appearing at Woodland Village, Rt. 9, Clermont, at 1 p.m. Sunday, May 25 to promote the recently released book.

The Catanoso Family is well known in Cape May County. Justin’s grandfather, Carmelo, immigrated to America, living in South Philadelphia’s heavily Italian district.
In 1927, he moved his family to North Wildwood, and opened an Italian-American grocery store near 18th and New York. Today the third generation of the Catanoso Family operates the Avalon Campground and Garden Greenhouse Nursery.

“Working in the family business as a kid, I knew I didn’t want to do that for a living,” said Justin, a North Wildwood native, who was raised in a traditional Catholic family, and graduated from Wildwood Catholic High School.
Following in his father, Leonard’s footsteps, he attended Penn State University, and sought a career in journalism. No flowerbeds, campsites and landscaping for him. His first post-college job was as a reporter for a small paper near the university.

Although he had left his family’s campground to attend college, he had (unofficially) left his faith years before, telling his mother that he just didn’t get anything out of it.
But upon canonization of St. Gaetano, he began, albeit reluctantly, to reexamine whatever lapsed commitment he had to his Christian roots, and what better place to begin than in Italy—native home of his grandparents, and of his grandfather’s cousin, who, unlike the Americanized Carmelo, never traveled outside his Mediterranean origins.

“This (canonization) started me on two paths,” he explained. “First, to reconnect with my family in Italy, and second, with Gaetano, and ultimately, my faith.”
Justin’s search allowed him to meet a family he had never known: a Catanoso bloodline in the Calabrian towns of Italy whose faith had apparently never wavered.
“I love the faith Gaetano has engendered in the people in Italy,” he said. “They believe these things, and I have great respect for that.”

Unsure of his own feelings, his Italian search leads him to family, friends—both supportive and skeptical, medical experts, and eventually to the Vatican itself. His interview with Monsignor Robert Sarno, a member of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, was a particularly telling episode of the book.
He boldly asks the less-then-friendly Sarno, “Help me understand the importance of saints. Why do we need saints?”
The monsignor, not known for a gregarious personality, left him unsatisfied.

“I was a little insecure at that time,” Justin admitted. “I left Sarno’s office thinking, ‘Is Gaetano worth (sainthood)?’”
But an interview with yet another “saint-maker,” Father Kurt Gumpel, put Justin back on track.
“Father Gumpel talked with me; not at me,” he asserted. “He took away my doubt.”

The biggest obstacle Justin had to overcome, as his cousin went through the process of beatification (the last step before canonization) to sainthood, was the death of his brother, Alan, who succumbed to cancer the year before Gaetano’s elevation to saint.
“Alan’s death was traumatic,” Justin said tersely. “Everyone was praying to Gaetano for him.”
He poignantly explains this sorrowful part of his search in a chapter titled, “Unanswered Prayers.”

“My Cousin The Saint” is a book for history lovers (Gaetano’s tribulations with the mafia are historical fact), for students of theology, for those who question their faith, or for anyone stumbling down life’s highway.
For this is a story of a journey, as yet unfinished. Justin starts his journey somewhat doubtful, as many who have “lapsed” would be. He is cynical even, if his language is any indicator. In the book’s prologue he intones, “…Padre Gaetano Catanoso, who is, if you believe, close to God. Right there in heaven, a wing’s length from our maker…”
Yet by book’s end, he admits that his cousin’s life, “…has come to mean so much to me…enough to make me rethink my own faith and begin to see life in a larger dimension.”

“What I am most proud of,” he stated, “is that the book is as honest as I can make it. I still have questions. After all, I am a journalist.
“The truth is,” he continued, “Catholicism is a long road, and I’m only a short way up that road. This (book) gave me the opportunity to wrestle with these questions. It also brought to life a grandfather I never knew, and led me to relatives I didn’t know I had. Those relatives in Italy were a gift.”

Maybe sometime miracles are not so noticeable—always there, but barely submerged, needing only a bit more buoyancy to break the surface.