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2 months ago | 
catholicoutlook.org | Helene Stapinski
I left the Church soon after my children were born. They were both baptized, but because of the sex-abuse scandal, as well as the usual culture-war issues, I left in anger and never looked back. Yet once a year I would take them to my family’s parish, Our Lady of Czestochowa, in New Jersey, for a memorial mass for my father, whom they had never met.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Helene Stapinski |Santiago Ramos |Vanessa R. Corcoran |Jonathan Malesic
I left the Church soon after my children were born. They were both baptized, but because of the sex-abuse scandal, as well as the usual culture-war issues, I left in anger and never looked back. Yet once a year I would take them to my family’s parish, Our Lady of Czestochowa, in New Jersey, for a memorial mass for my father, whom they had never met.
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Dec 26, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Helene Stapinski
The seeds of Maria Laurino’s most recent book, The Price of Children: Stolen Lives in a Land Without Choice, were planted in 2017 with a random phone call. Her Ohio cousin, John, was looking for travel advice, but wound up telling Laurino about an online group he had joined, made up of hundreds of grown adoptees like himself searching for their birth parents in Italy. Laurino’s curiosity was piqued. Her cousin put her in touch with the creator of the group, John Campitelli.
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
cjr.org | Helene Stapinski
Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. The news still came as a shock, even if expected, like hearing that an elderly family member has died. The end had been coming for a long time. Skinny and sickly, the Jersey Journal was finally being taken off life support. The paper will fold in February. Seventeen employees, including nine full-timers, are being laid off.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Helene Stapinski
On a beautiful day in Harlem a few months before the release of his debut album, Luther S. Allison stood chatting a few yards away from Duke Ellington's white baby grand. Allison, a wiry 6'4" with huge hands and a contagious enthusiasm, was surrounded by history at the National Jazz Museum - Eddie Lockjaw Davis's tenor saxophone, the famous Great Day in Harlem photo of 57 musicians taken on a stoop on 126th Street.
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Mar 15, 2024 | 
washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com | Helene Stapinski |Bonnie Siegler
In 1954, Jules films Marilyn Monroe being filmed by fellow refugee Billy Wilder; in fact, Jules captures in color the iconic “Seven Year Itch” footage of Monroe standing above a subway grate, with her billowing dress taking on a life of its own. The sponsor who enables Jules to escape to the U.S. is none other than Harry Donenfeld, the publisher of Superman, who cheats Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel out of their fair share of the profits for creating an iconic American superhero.
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Nov 7, 2023 | 
catholicoutlook.org | Helene Stapinski
A young Italian priest makes his way in New York City. Fr. Luigi Portarulo steps through the tall red doors of La Scuola D’Italia into a maelstrom of activity. Children are hugging each other goodbye, meeting parents for pickup, or dashing to classrooms for extracurricular activities. All are loudly speaking Italian. A group of students dressed in blue uniforms with Scuola crests on their chests clowns around inside a small classroom.
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Nov 2, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Helene Stapinski |Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly
Fr. Luigi Portarulo has found his way from a rural Italian village to the Vatican, to another, very different village—Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Now, at Our Lady of Pompeii church, he has helped revive a thriving Italian-American Catholic community. Helene Stapinski wrote a profile of Fr. Luigi for our November issue, and here she reads it aloud for listeners.
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Nov 1, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Helene Stapinski |Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly
Listen to Helene Stapisnki read this article aloud: Fr. Luigi Portarulo steps through the tall red doors of La Scuola D’Italia into a maelstrom of activity. Children are hugging each other goodbye, meeting parents for pickup, or dashing to classrooms for extracurricular activities. All are loudly speaking Italian. A group of students dressed in blue uniforms with Scuola crests on their chests clowns around inside a small classroom.
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Jun 22, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Helene Stapinski |Richard Brown |John Rodden |Jennifer Banks
To show that St. Joseph’s was not an isolated case, Kenneally cuts between similar Catholic orphanage stories in Canada, Great Britain, and her native Australia, some involving the same order of nuns. But her main subject is St. Joseph’s, whose sheer number of survivors and abuses are sometimes hard to keep track of. A cast of characters at the front of the book would have helped. But as we find in the author’s notes at the back, these stories are just a few of the many Kenneally discovered.
