One local story last week — the announcement of the closing of Madonna del Castello Catholic Church just outside of Pittsburgh — is a reminder that while church attendance may not be what it once was, faith plays an incredibly important role in our communities.
Madonna del Castello Church is named for a shrine to the Blessed Mother of the same name on a hilltop in the Province of Caserta, in southern Italy, overlooking the towns of Formicola and Treglia, my family’s small village. Both the Italian shrine and the Swissvale Borough church trace their names to a 600-year-old legend about the power of faith.
As the story goes, during the Middle Ages, a woman was gathering firewood in the forest above town when she placed her bundled infant on a large rock to gather some nearby sticks in her arms. When she returned, she saw a wolf making off with her child in its mouth.
The woman, armed with nothing but her faith, prayed for the Blessed Mother to save her child. And after the Blessed Mother appeared on the rock with the infant at her feet, the townspeople built the first chapel there.
Centuries later, Italian immigrants established Madonna del Castello Church here. The loss of that church is a trial for that community, because we still are people of faith.
All the immigrants who came to America had their own religions, but faith is what got them here and kept them here — faith in their God, faith in their communities, faith in each other, faith in the future of their families and faith in the promise of America.
Many Americans live quiet and decent lives guided by faith, but sometimes their voices are drowned out by those who purposefully pervert the meaning of faith to meet their secular ambitions.
A national story last week — James Talarico’s primary election victory for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator from Texas — may be an early sign that faith can once again be center stage in our politics.
Talarico is an uncommon politician for these times. He is a former Presbyterian seminarian and schoolteacher who talks directly and often about faith. A devout Christian, he calls Christian nationalism a “cancer on our religion” and he talks about curing “the disease of Christian nationalism.”
Talarico works across the aisle. “I can’t get anything done without working on a bipartisan basis,” he says. As a Democrat in the Republican-dominated Texas state legislature, he has sponsored 16 bills that have passed with bipartisan support. Eight of those bills “relate to education, childcare or workforce development for young people,” according to the Texas Tribune.
Talarico speaks simply. He told News Nation’s Anna Kutz in 2025 that his experience as a teacher and his family’s faith help him help others to see through the political jargon of our times. According to him, “People actually trying to understand each other is a lot healthier than cable news networks or … social media.”
And he operates on his grandfather’s definition of faith. “So, my granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, and he taught me at a very early age that Christianity is a simple religion, not an easy religion, but a simple religion. Because Jesus gave us two commandments to follow: love God and love neighbor; that that’s what this whole faith boils down to.”
Talarico has said all that. And he won the primary election in Texas. Faith may be back.
