Prince of Peace Parish

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 11, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).

Nearly 3,000 names are engraved in bronze at the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. But 10 of the victims in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are different: They have no names. Instead, each is remembered as an “unborn child.” 

Among those memorialized this way are “Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas and her unborn child.”

On Sept. 11, Jack Grandcolas lost the two people he held most dear: his wife, Lauren, and their unborn child. His pregnant 38-year-old wife died on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers fought back against hijackers redirecting the flight to Washington, D.C. Grandcolas recounts his loss and search for hope in a memoir called “Like a River to the Sea: Heartbreak and Hope in the Wake of United 93.”

The book was published by Rare Bird on Sept. 6, 2022, and opens with a dedication to his lost child.

“Dear Son … or Daughter,” he begins. “I am writing this book at the advice of my therapist. She felt it would be helpful to share a little bit about your mom and dad, and why you will always have your place in history.”

Today, that child would be 22 years old. Her name would be Grace, if a girl — Gavin, if a boy.

Lauren was three months pregnant, Grandcolas recalls, when she flew from their home in California to New Jersey for her grandmother’s funeral. At her insistence, he stayed behind to care for their sick cat.

“We were giddy at the thought of becoming parents, having spent the previous decade trying to get pregnant,” he writes. “There had been plenty of heartbreak along the way, including a miscarriage in 1999, when Lauren was 36. Two years later, we had pretty much resigned ourselves to raising only cats ... and then a miracle happened.”

Lauren and their “miracle” were supposed to return to California on Sept. 11, 2001.

That morning, Grandcolas woke up to the sound of the answering machine. He fell back asleep, only to wake up again and spot what he calls the “shape of an angel.” 

Had someone he knew recently died?

It must be Lauren’s grandmother, he thought. Then he realized it was Lauren.

When he checked the answering machine, he heard a message that would change his life forever. 

“Honey, are you there? Jack? Pick up, sweetie,” he heard Lauren’s voice say. “Okay, well, I just want to tell you I love you. We’re having a little problem on the plane. I’m fine and comfortable and I’m okay for now. I just love you more than anything, just know that. It’s just a little problem, so I, I’ll … Honey, I just love you. Please tell my family I love them, too. Bye, honey.”

“In that moment I knew Lauren and our baby were gone,” he writes of his college sweetheart and their little one. 

His wife’s funeral was held at a Catholic church in Houston. Lauren, he says, was not a religious person. But in the months before her death, she began attending a weekly Bible study.

“One evening she came home and said, ‘I finally get it,’” he remembers. When he prodded her by asking, “Get what?” she responded: “The meaning of it all.”

While raised Catholic, Grandcolas struggled with his faith. 

“What kind of merciful God would take my sweet Lauren and our child?” he asked. He later concluded that it was not God but human ideology.

He encountered God again after a conversation with Bono, the lead vocalist of the famous rock band U2. Bono performed “One Tree Hill” — Lauren’s favorite U2 song — in her memory at a 2005 concert at the Oakland Coliseum. Afterward, Grandcolas opened up to the singer.

“Being brought up Catholic, you’re given all this guilt about things that you didn’t do right,” he told Bono. “I worry that I may have screwed up in this life and mortgaged my opportunity to see Lauren again.”

“You’ll see her again. I know it. We all screw up in life,” he says Bono reassured him. “That’s why God grants us forgiveness. It’s his most powerful gift.”

Bono’s words changed him and his faith, he says. 

“Ever since 9/11, I had questioned God and his plan for me,” he writes. “The night was a tribute to her but in a very important way it set me free, allowing me to be more forgiving of myself and rekindle my belief in God’s mercy.”

Grandcolas introduces readers to Lauren as a woman with a beautiful smile, radiant personality, and even a mischievous streak. They married after meeting in college and stayed together as he progressed with a career in the newspaper industry and she took charge as a marketing manager.

After losing her and their baby, he struggled with depression, PTSI (post-traumatic stress injury), heavy drinking, fear of abandonment, and survivor’s guilt. With the help of EMDR psychotherapy, he said, he discovered that “for all these years I had been mourning Lauren without fully grieving for the baby we lost.”

“Over the years that child grew up in my mind, growing older every year,” he writes. “I knew I would not be able to move on until saying goodbye to the baby I never got to hold.”

Today, the memory of Lauren and their unborn baby lives on at memorials across the country, through the Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas Foundation, and, now, his book.

“[A]s I continue to reflect on the highs and lows of the last two decades, I’ve come to realize that I am very lucky indeed,” he says. “I found true love, twice. I’ve endured a pair of horrific tragedies but still have a resilient spirit and zest for life. I’ll always carry the emotional scars of losing Lauren and our child, just as I’ll always have the physical scars from my burns, but all of my wounds continue to heal.”

“We all suffer loss. We all endure heartbreak. It’s how you respond to these cataclysms that define you,” he concludes. “Sometimes the most beautiful things grow out of our hardest moments.”

This article was first published on Sept. 11, 2022, and has been updated.

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Quito, Ecuador, Sep 10, 2024 / 18:08 pm (CNA).

Bishop Andrew Cozzens of the Diocese of Crookston, Minnesota, who is in Quito, Ecuador, for the International Eucharistic Congress, shared several “surprising” fruits of the recent National Eucharistic Congress, the first the U.S. has held in 83 years.

In an interview with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Cozzens said the blessings flowing from the July event in Indianapolis exceeded all expectations.

“People experience this love of Jesus. And this love that comes when the entire Church is gathered to adore and love Jesus. In those moments, the blessings of God that come to us are great and change us,” said the prelate, who served as chairman of the National Eucharistic Congress.

Cozzens made reference to stories of profound healing and renewal, including couples who after the congress want to pray more every day, “priests who were thinking of leaving their ministry and who changed during this Eucharistic Congress,” or “bishops who normally experience burdensome and difficult things in their lives and who feel the courage that only comes from Jesus.”

Cozzens emphasized that when the “Church gathers and congregates around the Eucharist, Jesus wants to bring us many blessings.”

“It was a moment that changed our Church in the United States, and that is why I am here.”

Secularization: the challenge of our time

Cozzens identified secularization as one of the biggest challenges facing the Church today. He described it as a worldview in which people live as if “the world were all there is and God is not real.”

However, he reminded Catholics that “the sacraments are the strongest way in which God enters the world and wants to enter our lives.”

“But many people do not know that they need this encounter and think there is no benefit in this encounter,” he lamented.

Faced with this challenge, the prelate called on the faithful to be witnesses of the transforming power of Christ: “All of us who know that this encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist is important have the responsibility to witness to this reality in the world today.”

‘Jesus wants to change us and convert us in the Eucharist’

The bishop of Crookston also elaborated on Christ’s desire to transform man’s heart of stone into a heart of flesh through the Eucharist. “Jesus wants to change us and convert us in the Eucharist,” he said with conviction.

He highlighted how this encounter with Christ not only changes people individually but also has a social impact: “When we experience this love of Jesus for each one of us, it changes me. And when I change, I can experience the fraternity [that exists] in the world.”

“The heart is the part of us that makes the blood circulate, and that is what love is like,” Cozzens commented, noting that the main message of the Quito congress is that Christians must be “the heart of the world.”

“It’s not only human fraternity that is going to [be the agent of] love; it is the love of Christ that can heal the world,” he added.

Three keys to a deeper encounter with the Eucharist

Finally, Cozzens gave three recommendations to Catholics to deepen their relationship with the Eucharist and more fully experience its fruits. 

“First, go to confession,” he advised, explaining that confession purifies the heart and prepares it to receive the grace of the Eucharist.

Secondly, he invited the faithful to attend Mass not only on Sundays but also during the week. “The more you experience, the more your love will grow,” he said.

And third, he urged Catholics to spend time in Eucharistic adoration. “We need that time in silence with Jesus to speak heart to heart,” he said, noting that adoration is an opportunity for an intimate dialogue with the Lord.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 10, 2024 / 17:38 pm (CNA).

The “spiritual darkness” that Mother Teresa describes in her writings can be difficult to comprehend, but this feeling of emptiness was not caused by either depression or a loss of faith, according to a lecturer at an academic conference organized by the Mother Teresa Institute.

St. Teresa of Calcutta’s “dark night of the soul” was a distinct charism that helped her build her faith and serve others rather than a mere chemical imbalance that induces depression or an abandonment of the Catholic faith, said Loyola University Maryland philosophy professor Derek McAllister at a Sept. 6 symposium held at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., one day after the saint’s feast day. 

“If it’s a mental emotional problem, they do not of themselves promote virtue or increase depth of relationship with God,” McAllister said. “Whereas we know with the dark night, the nights do of themselves greatly increase love, humility, patience, and the like. And they decidedly prepare one for deeper prayer.”

The lecture focused on some of Mother Teresa’s letters, which describe an emptiness and a spiritual darkness — essentially an inability to feel the presence of God. St. Teresa, who founded the Missionaries of Charity, was an Albanian sister who spent most of her life serving the poor in Calcutta, India. She was canonized in 2016.

“The darkness is so dark, and I am alone,” St. Teresa wrote. “Unwanted, forsaken. The loneliness of the heart that wants love is unbearable. Where is my faith? Even deep down, there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. My God, how painful is this unknown pain? It pains without ceasing.”

St. Teresa wrote that “the place of God in my soul is blank, there is no God in me” and “I just long and long for God and then it is that I feel he does not want me — he is not there.”

McAllister noted that other saints have had such feelings and referenced St. John of the Cross’ 16th-century poem “Dark Night of the Soul” and his subsequent commentaries on that poem. It describes the Spanish mystic’s crisis of faith and an inability to feel the presence of God even though God was truly present and guiding the experience.

“In darkness and secure, by the secret ladder, disguised — oh, happy chance! — in darkness and in concealment, my house being now at rest,” St. John’s poem reads.

McAllister cited St. John’s descriptions of his experience, noting that “he identifies, by name, melancholy and says that’s not what I’m talking about.” McAllister argued that an “affective condition that overwhelms people” does not accurately describe those experiences, but rather that the experience actively pushed St. John to grow closer to God.

“While you may experience desolation of God’s felt presence of the senses, you’re being purgated and drawn closer to God, but you don’t feel that you are while you’re experiencing that,” McAllister explained.

In the case of Mother Teresa, McAllister compared and contrasted the symptoms described in her writing with the criteria used to diagnose major depressive disorder.

According to McAllister, depression often includes an unhealthy introspection and a lack of realism, which he said “advice does little to remedy.” Further, someone who has clinical depression, he noted, will often experience chronic fatigue, insomnia, and a depressive affect. He also argued that depression does not promote virtue in and of itself: “That’s why it’s called a disorder.”

He cited her writing to show that she was seeking answers to her spiritual darkness, as when she said to her confessor: “Each time your yes or no [to a question] has satisfied me as the will of God.” He also said that she did not experience the other symptoms that commonly accompany depression or depressive affect in everyday activities. The fruits of her experience, he noted, also do not point to a disorder such as depression. 

“What’s this [spiritual darkness] for in and of itself?” McAllister asked rhetorically. “Does it bring about humility, charity, kindness, and growth in Christ? And just look at what happened. Yes, absolutely [it did].”

The conference was attended by numerous sisters in the Missionaries of Charity along with lay members of the order, some priests, and a few professors and graduate students.

It was held a short walk from the St. John Paul II National Shrine, which is displaying a Mother Teresa exhibit until Nov. 11. The exhibit contains a first-class relic of St. Teresa and many of her personal items. 

Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the president of the Mother Teresa Institute, told CNA that the organization functions as “the academic arm of the Mother Teresa Center” that focuses on her writings and her words. He said there is “a lot more depth to Mother Teresa’s holiness” than many realize. 

“I think she has a message for the Church,” Kolodiejchuk said. “She was one of the great figures of the last century.”

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