Father Andy Costello, C.Ss.R., the son of Irish immigrants and youngest of four children, grew up in Brooklyn, New York. There he attended Catholic grammar school, altar served, and dreamed of becoming a priest. “Like a little kid who wants to be an astronaut or a fireman or policeman. I wanted to become a priest.” You could say living a holy life is a part of his family. His older sister became a nun, and he had three aunts who were nuns as well.

Father Andy has a bigger-than-life personality that shines through despite some recent health issues. He suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, but he zooms around with his walker with little trouble. At lunch, he was telling jokes and wise cracking with his fellow Redemptorists. “Did you hear about the one armed fisherman?” he asked the table, “They said he caught one that was this big!” Lifting up a single arm in a failed effort to show the length of the fish. He had plenty more where that came from!

Writing has always been something that Father Andy has loved. In grammar school he began his writing career by putting his stream of consciousness to paper. An exercise he continues to this day. He was inspired by watching his father read and eventually by some of his favorite writers, James Fenimore Cooper and Charles Dickens.

This passion for writing has made Father Andy a prolific scribe for decades. He has published many books and was a regular contributor to US Catholic Magazine. Father Andy just recently published his newest book, I Am a Catholic in Case of an Accident. The title is a reference to holy cards or medals that many Catholics used to carry with them in their wallets or pocketbooks. Father Andy believes that the title is a good hook.

How do we as Catholics, clergy and lay people, begin to reach and reconnect with those who feel like they do not belong in the Catholic church anymore? How do we reintroduce Catholicism to people who no longer want to be a part of it?

One of Father Andy’s ideas for reconnecting people to the Catholic church is by just simply talking to people. “20, 30, 40 years ago, I came with the idea, try to talk to one person every day that you don’t know,” Father Andy explained. “I want to meet people and find out who the hell they are!” He likes to do this anonymously by approaching people not as a priest, or a Catholic, but as a fellow human being. He explained that this has helped him approach the world without preconceived notions. “That’s just one of my goals in life, to talk to everybody.”

Father Andy has been writing his entire life and he has no interest in stopping. He mentioned to The Beacon that he has plenty of ideas down the pipeline that he is hoping to publish in the future. With a chuckle and his mischievous toothless smile, he joked, “I got my teeth pulled out. Some freaking guy pulled all my freaking teeth out! I gotta write about that! ” †