Parishioner stories: Finding a path amid struggles

January 31, 2019
 
Editor’s Note: As we enter a new year, we asked Massgoing Catholics what keeps them anchored in their faith despite challenges in the church and in their personal lives. We hope to make a different set of parishioner portraits an occasional feature of the paper in 2019, with reporters Christina Gray and Nicholas Wolfram Smith reaching out to diverse communities in San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties. Gray, who is primarily responsible for San Francisco and Marin coverage, may be reached at grayc@sfarch.org; Smith, primarily responsible for San Mateo, at smithn@sfarch.org.
 
 

Finding home in a small community

Elizabeth Paganini, St. Mary Parish, Nicasio
 
Christina Gray
 
Growing up in South Bend, Indiana, Elizabeth Paganini thought “the whole world was Catholic and loved Notre Dame!
 
When she moved away from the town she said was “90 percent Catholic,” she realized she’d been raised in “a bubble.” In a time and place where there are now “so many choices for what people can do as far as spirituality,” she is grateful for that bubble.
 
Catastrophic new revelations about clergy sex abuse and cover-up by church hierarchy hasn’t made her doubt her place in the faith. “Not for one second,” she told Catholic San Francisco after Sunday Mass at St. Mary’s, her parish, on Jan. 13.
 
She prays for the victims, but is also anguished by how the stain of “bad apples” has bled onto the good men and women in the church who helped form her faith.
 
“I had such wonderful priests and nuns that educated me,” said Paganini. “I think about how hard they worked and how difficult this must be for them.”
 
She conceded that the current problems in the Catholic Church are “a big test” not just for the institutional church, but can be for one’s personal faith. Connecting to Scripture on a daily basis keeps her grounded no matter what the prevailing winds bring.
 
“A friend said to me, if you ever get lost, the best road map is the Bible,” she said.
 
Her husband, Ruel, died unexpectedly when their 11-year-old daughter Alexandria was a toddler. She found love again with Dave Paganini after being introduced to him by a church friend. This past Christmas Eve, pastor Father Cyril O’Sullivan married the pair in a small ceremony at St. Mary’s.
 
At Mass that day in the tiny church, Father O’Sullivan from the pulpit individually thanked members of the community by name for large and small acts of service to the parish. After Mass virtually everyone at Mass gathers on the rural lot dotted with cows.
 
“That is why I am here,” said Paganini, who currently lives with her husband and daughter in Novato but treks to Nicasio each week for Mass. “When I found this small, country community, I wanted to be part of it, whatever small contribution I can make. I wanted my daughter to be part of it.”
 
 

Moving toward Easter

Michael di Stefano, St. Dominic Parish, San Francisco
 
Nicholas Wolfram Smith
 
Last Easter Vigil, Michael DiStefano approached a priest at St. Dominic Parish after Mass and told him he wanted to enter the church.
 
“He said ‘Great! Email me,’” DiStefano told Catholic San Francisco.
 
Entering St. Dominic’s RCIA program was the last step in a conversion that began after a startup he co-founded failed. “It humbled me enough to hear the guiding voice of the Holy Spirit,” he said.
 
DiStefano, who had practiced meditation since high school, found a mantra that invoked a “Heavenly Father.” As he repeated it over time, he found it became a prayer. Through reading, he became more convinced in faith, until the day he looked for Catholic churches on Google Maps and picked St. Dominic.
 
DiStefano said converting has taught him a different way of approaching other people.
 
“Previously, I would look at things I’d instinctively disagree with and close myself off,” he said. “But now because I trust in the magisterium of the church, I read things and rather than disagree, I say ‘I don’t understand it yet and want to understand it more.’ That’s changed my life, seeing what’s the charitable view of this, how am I not seeing what the other person sees here?”
 
DiStefano said he looks forward to participating in the church’s sacramental life after his reception into the church.
 
“Especially – and this might sound odd – confession. I’ve lived 30 years of my life accumulating debt and not confessing,” he said.
 
A few months after DiStefano decided to join the church, it entered another devastating period as scandals broke around Archbishop McCarrick, the Pennsylvania grand jury report and Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s August 2018 letter alleging a hierarchical “conspiracy of silence” at the faithful’s expense.
 
But DiStefano said the scandals have not shaken the faith he found.
 
“I came into this because I believe Christ is the son of God, rose from the dead and will come again,” he said.
 
DiStefano said another unanticipated source of joy is the liturgical year’s rhythm.
 
“We don’t have seasons really here, but the liturgical year has this beautiful seasonality to it. I can’t wait for Lent.”
 
 

Relying on Christ to rise above scandal

Louis Kolenda, St. Cecilia Parish, San Francisco
 
Christina Gray
 
Louis Kolenda’s Catholic roots are deep; he was raised by a devout Mexican mother and a Polish father, and raised his own children in the faith.
 
He told Catholic San Francisco Jan. 23 after morning Mass at his parish, St. Cecilia, that daily Mass and the Eucharist is the singular source of his hope for the church after the “disastrous” revelations of 2018.
 
Today’s scandals are “heinous on many levels,” he said, and need to be dealt with openly. Kolenda, 59, is “greatly disturbed” that clergy – priest and episcopate – who are supposed to be the “antithesis of all this,” committed crimes of this nature and/or participated in covering them up.
 
“However, we need supernatural grace to combat the profound evil that these crimes represent in order to move forward with our lives in a joyful manner,” he said.
 
“Christ giving himself to us in the Eucharist is beyond profound, it is mystical,” said Kolenda, who lives in West Portal with his wife Linda. He noted the fact that the Eucharist was itself born out of epic betrayal.
 
“It is interesting to note that the very night Christ gave us the Eucharist, one of his 12 hand-picked apostles chose to betray him,” he said.
 
After a long career as a consultant, Kolenda is now executive director of Youth SF, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to engaging underserved K-12 students in the study of science and technology, engineering, math and maker arts. He starts most days with morning Mass at St. Cecilia Church, his parish.
 
“The Eucharist sustains me through the trials and tribulations we all inevitably face on earth,” he said, as does praying the rosary and helping others. Reading about the lives of the saints has also been instructive.
 
“Learning about the saints’ heroic lives on earth helps me maintain a historical and spiritual perspective on today’s scandals.”
 
Kolenda said that Christ was specific about what commandments were most important: “To love God with all your heart and soul and to love your neighbor as yourself.
 
“Following these two commandments in that order, I believe, will help lead away from further scandal,” he said.
 
 

Praying, not ‘saying,’ the rosary

Chris Miloslavich, St. Sebastian Parish, Greenbrae
 
Christina Gray
 
San Francisco native Chris Miloslavich “fell away” from the Catholic Church during the 1990s, he said, largely because of the local church’s response to allegations that a high-ranking priest in the archdiocese had abused young boys and teenagers for nearly 20 years.
 
“I asked myself how I can be a part of something like this?” he told Catholic San Francisco. He stopped going to Mass, though he admitted that at the time he was also “a rock ‘n roll guy” who was doing “all the wrong things with my life” and hanging out with people who didn’t value church.
 
Sitting in the empty pews of St. Sebastian Church in Greenbrae after Mass on Jan. 13, Miloslavich, 57, reflected on what brought him back to the church after a two-year, self-imposed exile and what keeps him rooted here decades later despite new clergy sex abuse and cover-up headlines that seemed to reach a high-water mark in 2018.
 
“For me, this is the hope, it really is,” he said, holding up a hand-beaded rosary with a cross inlaid with slivers of olive wood from the Garden of Gethsemane. Miloslavich began praying the rosary daily – as opposed to “saying the rosary” – during a period of personal hardship and has never stopped.
 
He said he had failed to appreciate the rosary, believing it was just rote, “repetitive prayer.” Now, it’s a sustaining nightly ritual.
 
The married father of two said that despite three years of Catholic school and several more of CCD classes, he realized he had not been “properly formed in my faith” when he decided to distance himself from the church years ago.
 
“In the 1990s when I fell away, I thought the things that happened was the church itself,” he said. His ongoing formation – and his own mother – convinced him that wasn’t true.
 
“She reminded me that I shouldn’t deny myself my faith due to the sins of men,” Miloslavich said.
 
His peace about his continued place in the church does not mean he isn’t angry and disillusioned with the human beings who did “not stop the bleeding” when they had the power to.
 
“But the sins of men do not define the Catholic Church. Jesus does.”