From the cobblestone streets of Europe to the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, Emily Koczela has found home everywhere she goes. She has prayed with strangers whose language she cannot understand. She has been treated as family by people who have never before seen her face.
All because she showed up to Mass.
“Whoever I am and whyever I’m there, they can see that I’m kneeling at the right times,” said Ms. Koczela of her experience of attending Mass around the world. “So, I’m a sister.”
Raised in the Washington, D.C., area, Ms. Koczela was trained as an attorney and is now retired from a successful career that included roles in law, finance and public policy. She makes her permanent home in both southeastern Wisconsin and New Hampshire with her husband, Mark; but the couple are also seasoned travelers who once lived in Brussels for Mark’s job.
That sensation of finding welcome and refuge in Catholic churches all over the world is one she has long wanted to share with others who do not have her travel experience, especially children. That was one reason she began the Very Young Catholics Project, a book series depicting the lives of Catholic children and their families throughout the universal church. So far, 18 books have been released, with a goal of 24 in total—representing Catholic life in every standard time zone spanning 15 degrees of longitude.
Ms. Koczela’s other inspiration, she says, comes from Scripture. In establishing his church, Christ instructed his disciples to “do this in memory of me,” (Lk 22:19) bringing the Eucharist to every time and place. He also commanded them to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19).
In every place she had ever visited, Ms. Koczela saw the Catholic Church doing these two things, often against all odds. Despite the many and manifest imperfections, miscalculations and outright sins of the people who have carried out the Great Commission for two millenia, the name of the God of Abraham is indeed praised around the world, from the rising of the sun to its setting.
“When you look back through history, you do not see, ‘Well, here’s a 150-year period where no one went to Mass.’” said Ms. Koczela. “Through time and through space, through geography, as a group, we’re getting it done. Even though as individuals each of us fails.” She marvels at the “thousands of missionaries whose names we don’t know have set out all over the world,” who worked to spread the faith, but evenmoreso at “the ordinary people of that parish, wherever it was, [who] held on—so that when I showed up, [the church] was still there.”
The depth and breadth of the church is often hard for children to comprehend. So Ms. Koczela wondered if she could help. If children could see this, she thought, what would the future of the church look like?
Ordinary lives, extraordinary faith
The stories in The Very Young Catholics Project are, technically, fiction but are based heavily in fact; to write each book, Ms. Koczela personally visits real families around the world, staying for a minimum of two consecutive Sundays to get a feel for daily and liturgical life in the community. Names are changed, but the real faces of her host family’s children grace the covers and pages of each book.
Within the books, there are some moments that seem extraordinary to an American reader: a father and his four children piling onto a motorcycle to buy vegetables for dinner at the outdoor market, a grandfather and grandson grating coconuts for a feast on the beach. But there are far more that feel delightfully ordinary: going to Mass on Sunday, enjoying church festivals, processing on Palm Sunday.
The books convey a kaleidoscope of global Catholic culture that “helps us see ourselves and others with fresh eyes,” said Justin Weng, a father whose family hosted Ms. Koczela during her travels in Taiwan. Ms. Koczela visited Mr. Weng’s family in the 400-year-old city of Tainan, for Very Young Catholics in Taiwan.
“It is a beautiful form of connection—a meaningful way of sharing the Gospel across cultures,” said Mr. Weng of the series.
“Sometimes we normalize something and think everybody acts the same way, or does the same things,” said Micaela Garat, a young woman in Argentina whose family was the inspiration for Very Young Catholics in Argentina. “So the experience of showing and telling someone else about how we live our faith makes us aware of that and also value that more.”
Ms. Koczela self-published the first book in the series, Very Young Catholics in the United States, in 2019. For inspiration, she asked a family from her local parish in Fox Point, Wis., to participate. Starting “at home” was intentional; Ms. Koczela wanted to show future families who shared their lives and culture with her that they would not be “a sociology project.”
“You’re not under a microscope,” she said of the message she hoped to convey. “You are my brothers and sisters.”
After self-publishing several books, Ms. Koczela signed a contract with Holy Heroes, who now owns the rights to the books. She receives royalties, but still personally funds all costs associated with travel and hiring a photographer for each book.
The photographer Jake Schmiedicke has traveled and collaborated with Ms. Koczela for several of the books, including those depicting life in Togo, Taiwan, Iceland, India and Kazakhstan.
“When she described [the project] to me, it sounded exactly like the stories that I like to tell and the projects that I like to be involved in. It’s something that’s at the ground level, real people doing real things,” said Mr. Schmiedicke. “We try to encourage the families to really just carry on in their normal lives. Don’t try to stage anything.”
“I have to make friends with the children fast; presents and cookies are good ice-breakers,” Ms. Koczela said. “I also have to be sure they aren’t nervous about being perfect children and saintly Catholics in front of me.” In addition to cookies and copies of her previously published books, she brings press-on tattoos and slap bracelets, along with photos of her husband, children and grandchildren. She speaks French and hired an interpreter for her visit to Kazakhstan, but otherwise relies on Google translate and the widespread use of the English language to communicate.
Ms. Koczela said she relies on her training as a lawyer to help her “over-research” for every trip. She said she read 17 books on Kazakhstan before traveling there to get a sense of the country’s history.
She said her research helps her to know ahead of time if there is a unique angle she wants to explore, in terms of cultural or liturgical life. For instance, she has purposefully included depictions of the seven sacraments throughout the books (holy orders and the anointing of the sick will appear in the books on life in Kazakhstan and the Philippines, which are written but not published yet). Still, she says, “I almost always find something I wasn’t expecting.”
Ms. Koczela does not use a recording device during her visits, preferring to be emotionally present to whatever the family is doing. She does note her observations and memories in a diary at the end of each day. Back in the front room that serves as a home office in her cozy, tree-shaded ranch in Milwaukee’s northern suburbs, she crafts the stories from her memories.
Ms. Koczela describes striking a delicate balance between fact and fiction in her writing style: Real events and cultural details are depicted, but dialogue is fictionalized, often to communicate the catechetical importance of situations relayed in the book. For instance, after witnessing 30 weddings in one service in Dubai, Ms. Koczela portrayed the mother and daughter characters in the resulting book having a conversation about what it means to have a sacramental marriage.
While visiting the family of Pacifico and Anjing Sietas in the Philippines, Ms. Koczela accompanied the family to Mass during Holy Week, on visits to extended family and to the beach, and on a sight-seeing trip along the Puerto Princesa Underground River.
Pacifico Sietas said that Ms. Koczela seemed to be “a wide thinker…so simple and deep,” and impressed the family with her stamina in the midst of the country’s high temperatures. In Taiwan, Mr. Weng took Ms. Koczela and Mr. Shmiedicke to see Tainan’s ancient temples. “They were deeply respectful,” said Mr. Weng, who adhered to Taiwanese folk religion before his conversion to Catholicism. “I still remember Emily saying, the people she encountered there were ‘so generous and offer the very best to the god they believe in.’”
Representing the Faith
But evangelization doesn’t happen in a bubble. Alongside true believers and missionaries throughout history—and sometimes behind them, footing the bill—are popes, kings, queens, opportunists, mercenaries and plain old bigots who see Christianity as a means of establishing political and economic dominance over vulnerable populations.
“I’ve thought about it a lot,” Ms. Koczela said, especially when it comes to Central and South America, whose introduction to Christianity came from the Spanish crown and Hernán Cortés—figures whose legacies give the Catholic Church plenty to repent for.
“It was hard for me in Brazil,” she acknowledged. “The city that I was in had exquisite churches hosed down in gold. But I know who quarried that gold, and I don’t think they were getting minimum wage.”
Brazil was colonized by the Portuguese in the 16th century. At the time, the Jesuit order had a strong relationship with the Portuguese crown and became the dominant Catholic influence in Brazil’s early colonial period. Jesuits relied on indigenous labor in their aldeias, or villages, and their early accommodations of the African slave trade in the region have been evaluated in a variety of ways by scholars throughout history—did they tolerate it? Promote it? Profit from it? Actively speak against it? All of the above?
In all her research and all her traveling, Ms. Koczela hasn’t found one neat and tidy answer—she has found an invitation to reflect on herself.
“I’m sure that God has had more than a word with Cortés,” she said. “Whenever you’re sitting on judgment for somebody else, you’re supposed to turn around and look and see if you’re doing the same thing. I’m not colonializing anybody, but I do look at our culture… and I think,“What are we doing now that the people 400 years from now are going to be going, ‘Aha’?”
Ultimately, she made the choice not to feature those grand, gold-plated churches in Very Young Catholics in Brazil. Instead, her story focuses on Holy Week in the subject family’s hilltop parish, whose walls are adorned by murals depicting the life of Christ—a dark-skinned Christ, one whose human form closely resembles the multiracial residents of the local village.
In that vein, the families who figure in Ms. Koczela’s books feel that the Very Young Catholics Project gives them an opportunity to become evangelists themselves.
“I felt excited, because I think that many children are going to see our book, and we will be representing our country, to inspire other children,” said Timothy Sietas, the son of Anjing and Pacifico Sietas.
“My heart really melts when [I think that] of all the people in the Philippines, we are the one who God gives us the opportunity to share our simple living while having our faith in our daily lives,” agreed his mother. “We are so very, very thankful to God that we are chosen to share that faith to others.”
The universality of the faith is what compelled Ms. Garat’s parents in Argentina to agree to the project in the first place, Ms. Garat said—showing “how faith is the same everywhere.”
“The world knows a lot about American traditions and culture; this project helps American kids to discover the traditions and culture of (other countries around) the world,” she said.
“Her mission in her heart, what she wants to say to the world, is that in 24 [degrees of] longitude in the world, Catholics are here,” said Mr. Sietas. “And that living as Catholic children is very ordinary—but it is an extraordinary faith they have.”
“Taiwan is a society where Catholics are a very small minority, and our faith is often lived quietly within the rhythms of family life rather than through a large parish culture,” said Mr. Weng. “Emily captured this beautifully—the way faith is woven into ordinary moments rather than expressed loudly.”
People often tell Ms. Koczela that when she finishes the Very Young Catholics Project, she should write a book for adults. It used to be an idea she dismissed with a smile.
But lately, as the project nears completion, she said she has come to realize something: This story is not just for children.
“The story for the children is: Here are your brothers and sisters around the world,” she said. “The story for the adults is: What have we [as Catholics] been doing for the past 2,000 years? Let me tell you what we’ve been doing.”
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