Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
April 17, 2002
Faith at home: sons lead family members to Catholic Church
Boy, 8, leads mother, brothers to Church; priest baptizes mother
By Maura Rossi
EAST HANOVER, N.J. (CNS) — The phrase, "a child shall lead them," certainly applies to the Rossi family.
Luke Rossi's curiosity about what a friend across the street was learning at Catholic school led him to ask his mother, Jennifer Wang Rossi, why he wasn't learning the same thing in his public school.
"How come I'm not learning about God?" Luke, who is now 8 and a second-grader, would repeatedly inquire of her, Jennifer Rossi said.
This and other questions eventually led to Luke's baptism and that of his younger brothers, Brandon and Jason, by Msgr. William McCarthy in St. Rose of Lima Church, East Hanover, last Father's Day. Luke also will receive his first Communion on May 5 at St. Rose's.
Luke's leap of faith led to Jennifer Rossi's own decision to become a part of the parish's Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults process in preparation for her reception into the Church. She was baptized and confirmed at the Easter Vigil at St. Rose's March 30.
It was no surprise, said Jennifer Rossi, that her bright, very articulate and sure-of-himself little boy's interest would be sparked by anything he was not familiar with, especially if one of his friends seemed to know all about it.
"Like all kids, he wanted to be like his friends," she told The Beacon, newspaper of the Paterson Diocese. "He didn't want to be different."
Luke's interest and curiosity intensified as his Catholic school friend was preparing for his first Communion and started to share even more information with Luke.
Attending the friend's first Communion Mass piqued his interest in perhaps becoming a Catholic himself, according to his mother.
"He really got into it," she recalled.
Neither she nor her husband, Dino Marcus Rossi, really understood that reaction since they never went to church or talked about religion at home. Neither had been born, baptized or brought up in the Catholic faith, or indeed any faith at all, although her husband's father and her own Taiwan-born mother were Catholic.
Since the Rossis felt they could not provide Luke with any useful information about the Catholic Church or how to join it, they decided to check things out with Msgr. McCarthy.
"I took Luke to church and he went up to Father McCarthy and asked how you could become a Catholic," Jennifer Rossi said. Msgr. McCarthy talked to him, asked and answered questions and showed him around the church, she said.
During studies at home to help Luke catch up on CCD lessons, Jennifer Rossi found her own interest growing and gradually decided that "if my son was a Catholic, someone in the family should also be a Catholic to support him."
Asked how her husband had taken to her becoming a Catholic and the boys' baptisms, she said he is now "very proud of me and very supportive." He initially worried, though, about her decision, she said.
"He felt that if I were Catholic, as well as the kids, he would be alienated from us, but he went along when he saw this was something I really wanted to do," she said, adding that right now her husband is not ready to make the same choice she did.
Luke, however, is "working on getting" his dad into the Church, the boy said with a grin.
Another son who influenced his mother's decision to become Catholic was Father Michael Butler, pastor of Holy Redeemer Parish in Kitty Hawk, N.C., who baptized his formerly Baptist mother, Claudia Butler, 24 years after his own entrance into the Catholic Church.
Claudia Butler heads a family of six children — including one Catholic priest, one Baptist, one Episcopalian and one member of the Pentecostal Holiness Church — as well as 11 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
"It's kind of a weird feeling, but it's beautiful," Father Butler said of the baptism at St. John the Baptist in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., in the Raleigh Diocese.
"There's the woman who gave you life, and now you're giving her eternal life," he told the NC Catholic, the diocesan newspaper.
Contributing to this story was Dana Wind in Roanoke Rapids.
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