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A beloved
priest’s spiritual legacy
Fr.
Capuano
By
Susan Brinkmann
CS&T
Correspondent
A 32-year-old English teacher prays to him
everyday to keep her safe on the road as she commutes to work at
Holicong
Middle School
.
A Conshohocken couple prayed to him to help with infertility problems.
The father of a 9-year-old girl implored his intercession when his daughter was
diagnosed with a strange eye disease.
If you’re wondering, who this saint is, who helps so many people, you won’t
find his name on a list of the canonized.
In fact, the name Father Michael “Cap” Capuano probably won’t ring any
bells for you at all — which suited him just fine in life.
Father Cap was a simple, humble man. He drove a beat-up orange Nova, and never
passed anyone he knew on the street without offering a ride. His home was so old
the dining room floor sloped, and it took a visiting bishop to convince him it
was time to build a new rectory. A handyman at heart, he was the first one on
the roof to fix a leak. When he wanted the tabernacle door gilded, he melted
down his own jewelry to come up with the gold.
“Everybody loved him,” said Michael Pascarella, a federal probation officer
who grew up in St. Lucy Parish, the parish where Father Cap spent his last years
as pastor.
“The day before he died was a Sunday, and I was the lector,” Pascarella
said. A probation officer for the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, he had
applied for a federal position in the
U.S. Court
system and was still waiting for word.
“Father came up to me and asked, ‘How’s it going with that federal job?’
I said it wasn’t going well and he said, ‘You’re going to get it,’”
Pascarella said. “That was our last conversation.”
Father Capuano died the next day, on the old feast of the Epiphany, Jan. 6,
1988, of a massive heart attack. The day after he was buried in
Holy
Savior
Cemetery
, in his hometown of
Bethlehem
,
Pa.
, Pascarella found out he had the job.
A busy probation officer who is often in harm’s way, Pascarella has never
stopped praying to this beloved priest. When he and his wife, Susan, were
struggling with infertility in the early 90s, they turned to Father Cap.
“It was late January 1993, and we had just been told by a doctor that I would
never father a child,” Pascarella said. “We were devastated. We came home
that night, and my wife was crying. I was sitting on the sofa, and Father’s
picture was up on the mantle. I said, ‘Father, I know you’re in heaven. We
can use some prayers right now.’”
The next day, the deputy chief came to his office and showed him an ad in the
paper about a new infertility study being conducted at a nearby hospital. The
tip eventually led them to the physician who would correctly diagnose and treat
the couple’s problem. By October of the same year, Susan was pregnant with
twins. She delivered two boys on May 18, 1995. They named one son Matthew, and
the other Michael Anthony, in honor of Father Cap.
The Pascarellas are not the only people whose lives have been profoundly touched
by Father Cap.
Father Michael S. Olivere, the president of Saints John Neumann-Maria Goretti
High School first met Father Cap when he became pastor of St. Lucy’s.
“I was still in high school,” Father Olivere said. “He was so welcoming,
such a friendly man. From the very beginning, we all loved him. Very quickly we
found out he was also a very good priest.”
Father Cap was instrumental in Father Olivere’s decision to become a priest:
“He was a confidante of mine when it came to my vocation. We had great
conversations about it. He was always affirming and encouraging. He kept saying,
‘Your vocation is there. Just allow God to lead you. Don’t be afraid to take
the plunge.’ He understood. He was right there with me through every step of
that journey.”
Even though Father Cap died the year before he entered the seminary, “I very
much felt his presence throughout my seminary years,” Father Olivere said.
“When he died, everyone was in shock. I can remember walking into the church
after his body was transferred from the rectory, and looking at all the people,
and thinking, ‘These people are devastated over the death of their
pastor.’” Father Olivere recalled. “It was sad, but it was a beautiful
tribute to him.
“Later on, when I was content with my own vocation, I remember thinking,
‘That’s the way I want to die. I want to die as a parish priest, loved by
his people.’”
Father Cap was one of those men whom everyone knew was destined for the
priesthood even as a child. The fourth of five sons of the Italian immigrants
George Damiano Capuano and Mariantonia Ruggiero, he was born Jan. 3, 1930.
His mother was a devout Catholic who attended daily
Mass.
From an early age, he was always around the family’s parish church, Our Lady
of Pompei in
Bethlehem
.
“Our pastor … was almost like a father to him,” said his brother, Leonard
Capuano. “My dad worked on a railroad, and couldn’t show us too much, but
Father would show us things like how to do electrical work — work around the
roof. Mike liked that stuff.”
Father Capuano spent so much time around the church that “we all knew
something was going to break,” Leonard said.
And it did, in 1946, when Michael was accepted at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary.
He was the second-youngest member of his class, next to another seminarian who
went on to become Archbishop of Baltimore, Cardinal William Keeler.
Father Cap remained close to his
family, even while serving in six different parishes from
Reading
to
Philadelphia
.
“I have eight children, and every one of them misses him,” Leonard Capuano
said. “They all loved Uncle Mike. He would always take them someplace when he
came up — to McDonalds, ball games,
Dorney
Park
. …”
Death has not separated Father Cap from those who loved him: the Capuano family
still looks to Uncle Mike for help.
Last year, Leonard Capuano’s granddaughter was diagnosed with a strange eye
illness that doctors were struggling to cure. The girl’s father, Leonard
Capuano Jr., prayed to his Uncle Mike for help.
Then, “just like magic, without explanation, no medicine, it all went away,”
Leonard Jr. said in an e-mail: “I chalk this up to Uncle Mike, because
there’s no way I could explain her getting better like this without any
medication.”
Good priests never die — at least not in the hearts of the faithful they
served.
The last person to see Father Cap alive was Frank Bianco, the sexton at St.
Lucy’s.
“He called me at about three o’clock in the morning and said, ‘Frank I’m
having a heart attack. Come on down.’”
Bianco drove him out to
Sacred
Heart
Hospital
in
Norristown
. He wanted to call Father Cap’s family, but the priest kept saying,
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be all right.”
Bianco wasn’t convinced. “I just felt something was really wrong, but he
kept saying, ‘Don’t worry about me — worry about yourself.’”
Father Capuano died later that evening.
Years later, the twin son born to the Pascarellas who bears Father Cap’s name
wondered why his dad was telling this story to a newspaper reporter.
“Because maybe they’ll canonize Father Cap one day,” his father told him.
“You mean I might be named after a saint?” the boy asked.
And his father answered, “Son, you already are.”
Contact Susan Brinkmann
at fiat723@aol.com or (215) 965-4615
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