JANUARY 2022


“Sometimes the suffering that we go through, the losses that we experience, can lead us into a new form of ministry.”


ND: As you know, our 2022 convention theme is “Tested by Fire: Renewed & Transformed”. How have you been “tested by fire”?


Laura Kelly Fanucci: Sometimes the suffering that we go through, the losses that we experience, can lead us into a new form of ministry. I experienced that with losses related to parenting. Even before my husband and I had kids, we went through several years of infertility and a miscarriage, in addition to the loss of our twins. Trough those different kinds of losses, I came to see how the Church needs to minister to people through those very silent or invisible sufferings. Tey’re so common and I hear so often, even from devoted Catholics, that the Church doesn’t talk about miscarriage or stillbirth, and people don’t feel they have a place to mourn [those losses]. In our local parish, my husband and I approached our pastor and liturgist and asked if we could have a yearly Mass for God’s children, a memorial Mass for parents who have lost a child. I was blown away. People came who weren’t a part of our normal Mass community, and people who I had no idea had experienced the loss of a child. Tey spoke those children’s names into the room, and we prayed for them together. Sometimes, with these trials that we go through, I think the lie is that we’re alone or that we can’t be vulnerable enough to share [our struggle] with anyone else. But when we do, it’s such a powerful experience of the Holy Spirit and of God’s healing, a real balm in the midst of grief.


Another way I’ve been tested by fire is these past two years of pandemic. It has been horrible to be a parent with all the shock and the stress of the shutdown and virtual learning. It was so disruptive and stressful for the kids, and my husband and I were both trying to work from home with five kids at home and no child care. It was such a difficult time, and every parent I know is still burned out and has had no space to deal with the stress. We still have to reckon with how hard this experience has been, and it’s not even over. We are longing to get back to a sense of normalcy, but we can’t sweep under the rug the real toll that this has taken on so many people’s lives. Everyone went through incredible hardship in one way or another. How do we make meaning out of that, theologically? How do we help people grieve their losses? Not just the staggering number of people who died, but also job loss, financial precarity, all the anxiety around the pandemic. We have to help people pray through that, heal through that, try to grow and change in response to it. Tat’s a way that, collectively, we have been tested by fire. Te question that remains to be answered is, “How are we going to come out of this as a society…as the Church, the Body of Christ…and as individuals?” Tis will be a hinge point for so many people, and it’s a big piece of our work in the Church—to help people see how God is calling them through this and in this. We’re not great at lament as a culture, and we’re not great at sitting with the tension of hard places. Even though we’re all glad to be back at church and at the movies, it’s still taking a toll on our physical, emotional, and spiritual health. If we don’t sit with this, if we’re not honest about it—when you don’t grieve, the grief comes out sideways. I think that much of the anger that’s coming out right now, culturally and politically, is unresolved grief, unnamed grief. People want to control anything they can, because the grief and the losses have been so enormous. Tere used to be ways that we could talk about things before, but now there’s so much grief that it’s coming out sideways at each other, and it’s devastating. We have to name these things if we’re going to figure out how to go forward together.


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