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You probably recognize Justin Catanoso.

He's the executive editor of The Business Journal, the face from TV, the voice from the radio who talks every week about the cha-ching of local commerce.

He comes across as a no-nonsense guy. He'll look you in the eye, give you his take on, well, anything, and end with a declarative question, delivered short-order quick: "You know what I mean?''

He seems to have all the answers.

Not quite. Read his first book, "My Cousin The Saint.''

It came out a few weeks back. It's part family history, part memoir, part personal journey. It delves detectivelike into how Justin's cousin, an Italian priest named Gaetano Catanoso, became a saint.

One interesting thing is this: Until spring 2001, Justin — 48, a former staff writer with the News & Record and a second-generation Italian-American from New Jersey — didn't even know his cousin existed.

So, Justin filled a dozen notebooks, read three dozen books and interviewed nearly five dozen people on two continents, in two different languages, to get a better handle on Gaetano, the man; and Catanoso, the family.

Gaetano, a stoop-shouldered priest, founded an order of nuns, the Veronican Sisters of the Holy Face. He trained priests, stood up to the Mafia and rode from town to town, in the boot of southern Italy, on a donkey as he helped the poorest of the poor.

"The little donkey of Christ,'' Gaetano called himself.

Justin digs into the two miracles that made Gaetano a saint three years ago. Both miracles happened after Gaetano's death in 1963: A nun became asthma-free; a dying woman, after a nine-day coma caused by meningitis, awoke with no side effects.

On Oct. 23, 2005, Gaetano was declared a saint in St. Peter's Square, the emotional and spiritual base of Catholicism, during a banner-waving celebration that Justin, his family and his relatives attended.

But what's profound in Justin's book is his own personal struggle with his own faith as a lapsed Catholic.

His journey started out a 500-word commentary for National Public Radio. It became a 120,000-word book when Randi Murray, an agent in California, happened to hear Justin's essay and urged him to write a book.

That's how it began. Two and a half years of work. Two trips to Italy. Ten weeks of workmanlike writing in a studio apartment above his garage, where Justin asked himself every morning, "Where am I today?''

Justin landed a book deal with heavy-hitter Harper Collins. But he also crafted an incredibly personal story in which he asked his family — and himself — about faith and doubt, life and death.

And those are thorny issues we all face.

"I thought I could hide behind the guise of a journalist and report and tell,'' Justin says. "But Randi told me, 'Your personal struggle has got to be a part of the book; you have to wrestle with this.'''

He did.

He wrote about sitting in a local Catholic church, pulling out a small notebook and scribbling, "What am I doing here?''

He wrote about grasping the nuances of family, the need to connect.

He wrote about wrestling with the deaths of two people he loved: Alan, his older brother who died of cancer; and Piero, the patriarch of his Italian Catanoso family who died of a heart attack.

As an Italian relative told Justin after Piero's death: "You have seen a lot. You have seen how we live and how we die.''

A few months back, Justin joined St. Pius X Catholic Church. Meanwhile, he keeps in his dresser drawer small relics of his saintly cousin: a swatch of a priest collar, a portion of a handkerchief, a piece of a varnished wood casket.

They were given to him by his relatives, his newly discovered relatives in Italy.

He also remembers what one of his mentors, a history professor he met in college, told him decades ago: "Believe what you can.''

And today, Justin does.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com