By Anna Farrow, Catholic Register Special
December 8, 2022
As a woman of faith, Canadian journalist Laura Ieraci has a pastoral heart — one that can lead her to distant pastures.
Ieraci spent two weeks this past summer filming on location in Hungary for a forthcoming documentary focused on the faith of a gypsy community and the life of a heroic priest. But the gestation of the project started seven years ago as she and her husband, Rev. Andrew Summerson, had a couple of weeks to kill between the end of their studies in Rome and the next stage of their lives in North America.
When her husband asked her how she wanted to fill the time, Ieraci answered, “I want to go and learn about Mother Church.” Two years earlier, this cradle Roman Catholic from Montreal had married into the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church. She wanted, she said, “to see the geography, to eat the food and to hear its chant.”
By the end of their 2015 trip to eastern Hungary and western Ukraine, Ieraci was already making plans. She told her husband, a Byzantine Catholic priest of the Eparchy of Parma, “One day it would be great if we could organize a pilgrimage for the people in North America.”
In 2018, with the help of her husband and their bishop, she did just that. She wanted to provide an opportunity for Greek Catholics in North America to learn about the history of their Church and to connect with the physical touchstones, the icons and buildings, of the faith.
As a journalist, she has an instinct for capturing a story. Then editor for Horizons, the newspaper of the Eparchy of Parma, Ieraci organized things so the pilgrimage could have a small film crew attached. She and her team produced a documentary, From Mariapoch to Mariapoch: A Journey of Discovery, that aired on EWTN.
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