Alas, the link is no longer live, but here’s an excerpt from one: “When a friend suggested that I read My Cousin The Saint, I hesitated for many reasons….I am not Catholic, I expected the book to be a boring tale of a religion that doesn’t necessarily interest me and I was raised in a secular home. My friend persisted and I am so grateful to her. By page 2, I was hooked…..and my interest continued all the way into the epilogue. Justin Catanoso writes about a quest that could just as easily be mine..in another country with different characters.”

My book, by the way, can be purchased inexpensively at many online retailers, particularly www.amazon.com

Full story here.

If you are visiting my site for the first time, my book gives a full, historical account of the canonization process from my own reporting at the Vatican, as well as Pope John Paul II’s role in changing the canonization process in the early 1980s, and how those church rules applied to my cousin, the saint — whom JPII beatified on May 4, 1997.

Excerpt: John Paul II was himself an enthusiastic promoter of sainthood and beatification. He streamlined the process to make canonization move faster, celebrated canonizations all over the world and named more saints than all the popes in the previous 400 years combined.

“He understood that there’s nothing like a canonization to fire up the faithful,“ said Justin Catanoso, a North Carolina journalist and author of “My Cousin the Saint,“ about his relative Gaetano Catanoso, who was beatified and named a saint by John Paul II. “It’s just a gorgeous ritual.“

One error in the NPR story as reported: beatification is not the first step toward canonization, it is the next to last step (there are at least three or four prior steps).

For information: click here,  or Call Tammy at 336-714-3228 or tmwatkins@charlottediocese.org

It was nice to see Monsignor Sarno, a Brooklyn native, Vatican insider and a key source in my book, interviewed in the ABC News story this evening. He looks older, but otherwise just as dour as he was when I met him in his office in June 2006.

John Paul II, the busiest saint-maker in church history, approved each step in the process for the 2005 canonization of Padre Gaetano Catanoso. Pope Benedict XVI canonized Gaetano several months after JPII’s death. To learn more about saints and the canonization process, there are few sources better than My Cousin the Saint.

“This is a engaging account of life, death, and faith in an Italian-American family — the latter portions on canonization are unavoidably less emotionally engaging than the author’s account of Padre Gaetano, or the illness and death of the author’s brother Alan. Catanoso nevertheless gives an authentic account of how being Catholic has changed for him, and those things that continue to hold him to the church, and those things that make him want to run from it.  Written in a decidedly lay, non-theological voice, the journalist Catanoso covers his story with graceful prose and a sure eye for telling detail.”