PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release: Monday, October 16, 2006
Contact: Elizabeth Di Leo
2611 Ulysses St. NE,
Minneapolis, MN 55418
612.789.2795
612.382.3582 (cell)
saldileo@aol.com

After seven years, the Chapel at St. Francis Lodge is nearing completion

Lake George, Minnesota, October 16, 2006. In 1998, after being encouraged by legendary pro football coach, Bud Grant, who befriends him, a 45 year-old business man begins an emotional journey back to face ghosts from his broken past.

After 30 years, he returns to the Catholic orphanage outside Chicago that became home to him and his three siblings in 1963. He locates the head nun from his time there, living in a nursing home. During the trip emotions and memories he had long put out of his mind begin to unfold in front of him. Many are very painful as he struggles through and relives his early childhood in the orphanage and his most difficult years as an adolescent in Boys Town, Nebraska.

In his quest for the truth he realizes that what his father told him on the last night he ever saw him had been the force that drove him his entire life to try and conquer mountains and rise above his past. His father told him that he was from the "House of the Lion" in Sicily and that they were from "royal blood". He begins to realize it was that same force that eventually led to his failures in life. Now, he had come face to face with it.

As a young child in the orphanage and as a young adult on the road for money and power he could never get that statement out of his head. But what also haunted him was he could not understand why his father had deserted the family.

To get more answers, he goes to back to the old neighborhood in New York where his father grew up and finds his mother's cousin whom he had never known before. She informs him that there was no "House of the Lion" in Sicily. His father had not only run away, but he was a liar.

Through the pain of his search for the truth he finds redemption. At last he recognizes that although things were at times very difficult, there had always been good people along the way in his life who had helped him through it. He sees that he didn't really make it through alone like he had always thought. He also realizes that he has a loving family of his own and that was all he ever wanted in the first place. He is finally grateful for what so many good people had given him and finally has peace.

Only then can he forgive his father and move on. In the end, he begins the process of passing it on! He starts to search for the people who helped him along the way, who are still alive, to thank them!

Today, he and his wife are building St. Francis Lodge (www.stfrancislodge.org), a free retreat center for nuns in the great north-woods of Minnesota. It has been seven years since he started and now the chapel will be completed soon.

For more information, please contact: Sal & Beth Di Leo, 2611 Ulysses St. NE, Minneapolis MN 55418, 612.382.3582, or saldileo@aol.com

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