By Jay Sorgi • Posted July 11, 2025

“The day was more beautiful than we could have ever imagined,” Ciara McCartney Noah said about a June 8 Pentecost liturgy that her family will never forget.

Ciara, her husband Thomas Noah and their four children received an avalanche of sacramental blessings in one hour at St. John Chrysostom Parish in Wallingford in a moving expression of their family’s renewed faith.

The couple, who live in Media, had their civil marriage convalidated in the Church and each received their first holy Communion and the sacrament of confirmation.

Their four young children – Emiliano, 4; Augustine, 3; and 1-year-old twins Francesca and Isadora — all were baptized into the Catholic faith.

“There are so many beautiful moments just in that hour of doing the sacraments that really brought a peace to my life and to my faith, renewing faith that I had as a child,” Ciara said.

“I’m in my 42nd year as a priest, and that was the biggest,” said Father Ed Hallinan, St. John Chrysostom’s pastor. “I’ve had baptisms and convalidations at the same time, but I never had confirmation added on, Eucharist added on.”

The family’s desire for such a one-day sacramental tidal wave stems from a nearly lifelong, roundabout journey back to Catholicism.

“My grandparents were Catholic,” Thomas said. “My mother was a Catholic school girl. I was baptized, but my childhood became chaotic through various kinds of moving around as an Army brat, as my mother later married someone not in the faith tradition, so it sort of fell out.”

“My mom and dad were baptized and went through all of their rites,” said Ciara, “and have had an ebb and flow with their relationship with the Church. My mom exposed us to different kinds of religion. We had a few different things that also had an ebb and flow to it.

“I always had a strong interest in understanding the religion more, and understanding my relationship with God better. But life got really busy and the desire to do that came and went.”

The couple said that after they met, they wanted to grow in their faith, but it took years after a civilly recognized marriage and the birth of their four children before they moved forward in faith.

An often-painful search for a school for Augustine, their neurodiverse son, led them to Mother of Providence Regional Catholic School and Masses celebrated by Father Hallinan at the church.

“We wanted much more than just the education,” Ciara said. “Father Ed was giving the homily, and we just felt really connected. That started our journey specifically with this parish. Then we both met with Father Ed and Deacon John (Bowie), and we knew we wanted to have our confirmations and we wanted to have our marriage blessed in the Church as well as baptize the kids.”

“Their faith was on fire,” said Father Hallinan. “This moment was a kairos (‘God’s time,’ in Greek) moment. You have a family coming in and saying, ‘We want as a family to be sacramental. We want to participate in the sacramental life of the Church.’”

Father Hallinan and Deacon Bowie said trying to take care of each sacrament one at a time would be “brutal” because of the challenge of managing the lives of four young kids.

“We had to look at this from a real pastoral view and think, ‘What’s best for this family?’” Father Hallinan said. “The thing that we came up with would be to prepare a liturgy for them and to do it all at one time. They were very, very grateful for that opportunity.”

Deacon Bowie and the family held numerous late-night sacramental preparation classes over the Zoom video platform so the couple could grow in faith while their kids slept.

It all led up to one hour on Pentecost Sunday that nearly 100 family members from across the country experienced in person — an unforgettable witness of the Holy Spirit coming into and through the six of them.

“I was initially nervous about having too many sacraments at once (with) a bunch of kids in our family, and (having) all these people sit through a long ceremony, but people loved it, and they could feel the love and (presence of) God, the presence of warmth and joy in the room,” said Ciara.

Thomas said he “knew that it was going to be meaningful and significant, but didn’t quite grasp how much of a transformational experience it was going to be.”

He marveled at seeing “all of our children baptized in the faith, having their grandparents and our siblings act as godparents and Christian witnesses, being confirmed ourselves, and to see Ciara’s aunt, who was her godmother at her child baptism, be able to come full circle and do that,” said Thomas.

“It’s connecting with community and family, past and present, and then just being able to project this out for our children, and hopefully their children going forward in the future.”

As Ciara added, “I have a new lens of grace that I can see everywhere I go.”