A few months ago, I was at a taping of the NBC game show “I Can Do That!”, which included dancer/choreographer Cheryl Burke (“Dancing With the Stars”) as a contestant. I was sitting in the green room with Burke’s then-beau, restaurateur J.T. Torregiani, and one of Burke’s friends, former “King of Queens” star Leah Remini.
With an NBC publicist joining in, there was general Catholic inside-baseball chat going on — “Where do you go to Mass? Who has the best music?” — and Remini was joining in from time to time. I knew that Remini, also a baptized Catholic, had left the “Church” of Scientology in 2013, and I’d heard she was returning to the Faith. It sure seemed to be the case that evening.
Remini now appears Wednesdays (9 p.m. ET/PT) on TLC in the second season of her own reality show, “It’s All Relative,” on which she recently discussed abandoning the secretive, controlling cult (subject of an HBO expose called “Going Clear”).
Here’s the whole episode:
As quoted in Entertainment Weekly, Remini said in the episode:
Remini says that she decided to leave the church following the birth of her daughter, Sofia, in 2004.
“I decided I didn’t want to raise my daughter in the church because from what I’ve experienced and what I saw, the church becomes your everything. It becomes your mother, your father, your everything. You are dependent on the church,” she explains.
“I just didn’t want her to be raised that way, because let’s say in 10 years if I don’t want to be connected to the church anymore, my own daughter would be taught to disconnect from me.”
On Friday, Remini, 45, and her family took another step back into the bosom of the Church, as she and husband Angelo Pagan shared photos of the Catholic baptism of their daughter Sofia.
Pagan shared this photo on Instagram:
And Remini shared this:
A photo posted by Leah Remini (@leahremini) on
It’s wonderful to see Remini back in the fold, where she joins her “King of Queens” husband, comic actor Kevin James, who’s a very public and devout Catholic.
Welcome home, Leah and family!
Deo Gratias!
Images: Courtesy TLC; Instagram
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