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November 26, 2025By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press
SHREWSBURY – How do you find peace – in the midst of life’s busyness and tragedies?
Through trust in, and surrender to, God.
That message was proclaimed at the women’s retreat that the Commission for Women of the Diocese of Worcester hosted at St. Anne Parish in Shrewsbury Nov. 15. Pamela Ashmankas, one of the organizers, said 80 people from 36 parishes in four states attended.
The theme was “Peace I Leave With You: Receiving the gift that only Christ can give.”
Speaker Kitty Cleveland, a singer/songwriter and artist from the New Orleans area, shared her music and experiences, including her father’s imprisonment, recounted in her book, “From Prison to Paradise: A Story of Radical Trust in God’s Divine Mercy.”
At the Mass, Father Adam R. Reid, St. Anne’s pastor, said peace is not found in the absence of something, like the holiday rush being over, but in the presence of Someone. Amid challenges, we can experience peace if we’re grounded in Jesus. He suggested praying, “Prince of Peace, flood me with your peace, that I may be the peacemaker you call me to be.”
Peace is important because God is “a God of peace, and we can’t hear him if we’re agitated,” Ms. Cleveland said.
“My dream was to be a singer on Broadway,” she said. That changed when she had a powerful experience of God’s love on a retreat at age 16.
She encountered obstacles to becoming a Catholic singer, and joined her father, Carl Cleveland, as a lawyer. Later, feeling God calling her to work that she would find more life giving, she left to study counseling.
When the FBI asked her father for “dirt” about politicians, her father, who had a client who bribed the politicians, didn’t have information, she said.
Her father was then indicted on RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) violations. Later in her talk she told about his conviction being reversed.
It’s a gift to experience our “poverty,” because then we experience our need for God, she told listeners.
During the six-week trial her father explained complex laws well, and his family assumed he’d be found not guilty, and planned a celebration, Ms. Cleveland said.
As the verdict “guilty” was repeatedly pronounced, she lamented, then “saw” the Divine Mercy image, and prayed, “Jesus, I trust in you.” She didn’t see how her family would get through this but knew Jesus did.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” her father cried, before starting what was supposed to be more than 10 years in prison, in December 1997. He was being separated from his family, and losing his physical freedom, reputation, law practice and ministry as a permanent deacon.
“How does a loving God let these things happen?” Ms. Cleveland wondered. But, she said, ‘He is loving, and he weeps with us.”
The family regularly visited her father, and sang for prison Masses, and one prisoner said their singing moved him to tears of joy, she said.
The family had some laughs too, like when Ms. Cleveland’s grandmother smuggled Thanksgiving dinner into prison in her pantyhose, and two of Deacon Cleveland’s daughters sent their boyfriends to prison to ask his permission to marry them.
After serving one-and-a-half years, her father lost the appeal, Ms. Cleveland said. That was her darkest moment.
Her father’s prayer to return home changed and he surrendered to God and felt God’s embrace in the “hell” of prison, she said.
When the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear her father’s case, “hope returned; we couldn’t believe it,” she said.
He filed a motion to be released on bail pending appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court. The hearing on that motion was set for 3 p.m., the hour of Divine Mercy, three days before the first universal celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday, the day St. Faustina was to be canonized in April 2000. (St. Faustina had visions of Jesus as King of Divine Mercy, from which Divine Mercy devotions sprung.)
At 3:30 p.m., at Deacon Cleveland’s hearing, the judge ordered him released.
“We were like men dreaming,” Ms. Cleveland said, quoting Scripture.
Later, in November 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed her father’s conviction, but didn’t address the charges that did not involve Constitutional law, she said.
“Our justice system needs reform,” she said, adding that her father was prevented from seeking a new trial for those charges or suing for wrongful conviction.
He was diagnosed with cancer in 2003 and died in 2006. She said the archbishop reinstated him as a permanent deacon, so he was buried in vestments. She said her father was “so purified and humbled by what he suffered.”
She sang for retreatants a song she wrote for Pope John Paul II just after he died, imagining what he said upon seeing Jesus. She told listeners she hoped the song would get them excited about seeing Jesus.
Ms. Cleveland, who felt God called her to be a “music missionary” but didn’t know what that meant, now has 10 CDs, and much of her music is free on her website, kittycleveland.com, under the section “Sounds of Peace.”
On weekdays she leads the rosary at 5:45 a.m. CT on Instagram and YouTube.com/KittyCleveland, and volunteers lead it on weekends on Facebook, where the 6,000 participants can communicate with each other, she said.
Some retreatants shared their reactions to the day.
Connie Kelly, of Prince of Peace Parish in Princeton, celebrating her 80th birthday, said it was her first retreat, “but not the last!” Of Ms. Cleveland she said, “She’s a real person – like us.”
“I thought it was very inspiring – the deepness of her faith and her explanation of it,” said Charon Quinn, of Christ the King Parish in Worcester, who said this was her first retreat in decades.