By Jessica Easthope

Frank DeVita wore this jacket with pride, nearly every day for the last 10 years of his life.

His medals and patches tell a story of bravery, but DeVita had a different recollection of June 6th, 1944.

“Everybody in that generation was called heroes, and he would say, ‘I’m not a hero,’ not to be humble or anything, but he would say, ‘I’m not a hero. The people who are heroes are the people that are buried there still.’ He continually vocalized that.”

DeVita passed away in 2022 at age 96. This treasure trove of history, albums, documents, and even Frank’s uniforms will soon be displayed in the National Coast Guard Museum in Connecticut. But for now, it lives at home with his youngest son, Richard, in Hoboken.

D-Day – the largest sea invasion in history. DeVita, a 19-year-old from Bensonhurst, was a Coast Guard gunner on the U.S.S. Samuel Chase. He was in charge of dropping the ramp on a Higgins boat carrying soldiers from the Army’s 1st Infantry Division during the first attack wave on Omaha Beach, exposing them to German machine gun bullets.

In a 2020 interview with the American Veterans Center, DeVita was still haunted by his memories of the sea, dyed red with blood.

“And the guy that was two feet away from me, the machine gun took his helmet off and part of his brain, and he was crying, ‘Help me, help me, help me!’ I had no morphine. I couldn’t help. The only thing I had was the Lord’s Prayer. And he died. He was just a little boy.”

Plagued with survivor’s guilt for decades, DeVita went on to live a happy life. He married his childhood friend Dottie Guardino at St. Finbar Church in Bath Beach, raised three children, and provided for his family as a pattern maker in New York’s fashion industry before becoming a Knight of Columbus.

“I said to myself, ‘What the hell just happened? And how come I’m still alive? How come I’m still alive?'”

But no amount of happy memories could replace what took up room in his subconscious.

“You wouldn’t notice it day to day. I noticed it more when he was sleeping. He talked in his sleep, he tossed and turned, and he moaned a lot in his sleep. I think that’s how his PTSD or subconscious tried to deal with it.”

Pilgrims have been walking for almost three weeks now on their way to Indianapolis for the first National Eucharistic Congress in 83 years.

Among those pilgrims is Zoe Dongas.

She works in the Office of Young Adult Outreach in the Archdiocese of New York and is walking the entire way.

We checked in with her today along the route at the National Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton in Maryland.

The pilgrimage is making its way through Maryland, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and will eventually end up in Indianapolis for the National Congress.

There are four routes bringing pilgrims from four corners of the country to the Congress.

In all, they are traveling 6,500 miles, and passing through 65 dioceses in the 60 days leading to the Indianapolis event, which runs for five days beginning on July 17th.

Stay with Currents News for updates about the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage and Congress.

If you want to read more about the event, just go to EUCHARISTICREVIVAL.ORG.

The 80th anniversary of D-Day is upon us, and while heads of state are gathering in France, the focus isn’t on them. It’s on the few veterans who are still alive.

The commemoration festivities are being hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife. President Biden and British royals are also participating in the festivities.

For more remembrances of D-Day, go to The Tablet.

You can read about the horror of that day in Normandy from a survivor, Frank DeVita, who was a parishioner at Saint Finbar in Bath Beach.

Discover the story of a Brooklyn chaplain who made the ultimate sacrifice ministering to a fallen soldier.

President Joe Biden issued an executive order barring asylum when daily migrant apprehensions at the U.S. southern border hit a seven-day average of 2,500. This move could result in the deportation of some migrants in a matter of days, even hours.

“If they choose to come without permission and against the law, they’ll be restricted from receiving asylum and staying in the United States,” President Biden said.

Some members of Congress, like Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), showed their support.

“This is going to help us secure the border,” Rep. Gonzalez said.

Biden appeared to take a page from former President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration playbook. Trump tried implementing a similar policy in 2018. The ACLU led the challenge that caused courts to strike it down and said it plans to sue the Biden administration too.

Administration officials defended the executive order, saying it includes humanitarian exceptions for unaccompanied migrant children, for some medical emergencies, and for victims of severe human trafficking.

The timing of the announcement is raising eyebrows among advocates like Sister Norma Pimentel because migrant apprehensions at the southern border have plummeted.

“I would think it’s because of the fact that we’re having an election very soon,” said Sister Norma Pimentel, Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley. “And if he doesn’t show a different optic picture, then they’re losing.”

The apparent White House strategy now is to point fingers at Republicans who failed to support the Senate’s bipartisan border bill.

But some Republicans fired right back, saying it’s too little too late.

The national correspondent for The Tablet and Crux, John Lavenburg, joins Currents News to discuss more about the Catholic reaction to President Biden’s new border policy.

By Jessica Easthope

History is repeating itself at Maryhouse.

The items in the room where Dorothy Day lived and died have been frozen in time.

But up on the roof of the Lower East Side building, the Catholic Worker Movement is growing.

“There was a group of us that came together with just more of an interest in cultivating,” said Liam Myers, a member of the Catholic Worker Movement. “Like our connection to the earth, to plants, to what we grow, to what we eat.”

A new urban garden provides fresh produce for lunch Tuesday through Friday, served to more than 100 women and children. Many are newly arrived migrants. Myers harvests it and cooks with it.

“As we’re trying to feed people, as we’re trying to care for the poor, we’re just trying to be more attuned, knowing that better listening to the Earth is a way to better listen to each other,” Myers said.

The idea for the urban garden, home to herbs, leafy greens, and soon some vegetables, was started this spring. Pope Francis’ encyclicals planted the seed.

“We draw a lot of inspiration from Pope Francis. So the group also read Laudate Deum, which was kind of his update to Laudato Si,” Myers said. “And we think a lot about this connection between the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

“I think that as we recover a sensitivity to our place in the earth, which Pope Francis calls us to do in Laudato Si, in no doubt today, we recover our humanity,” said Jim Robinson, a religious studies professor at Iona University.

Robinson volunteers at Maryhouse a few days a week. He says that connection to the earth is part of the lifecycle of the Catholic Worker Movement.

“It’s all an integral ecology, as Pope Francis puts it,” Robinson said. “So to be able to offer fresh kale or lettuce, that’s just like a beautiful and very tangible expression of our desire to reclaim, to remember our humanity.”

The garden is an old-school approach to a new way of thinking.

“Having the space to think about what ingredients are going in and to be able to grow some of that, we’re grounded in Catholic social teaching and we’re grounded in our faith too,” Robinson said.

In a place where radical inclusion flows freely, where Dorothy Day lived out her grassroots mission, faith still lives in this house and above it.

“Perhaps she would, like us, envision us to kind of carry on that work in that movement,” Myers said.

Many of the women and children Maryhouse feeds are newly arrived migrants who rely on the Catholic Worker community for food, clothes, and other resources.

More than 180,000 migrants have settled in New York City in the last two years.