Catholic singer's Marian journey through psalms brought award-winning song, joy after infertility

(OSV News) -- The psalms can be an overlooked part of Mass for many Catholics, but there are times in life when the psalms become imbued with new meaning as we walk with the Lord through difficulty and grief, trying to keep sight of hope.

Francesca LaRosa, who recently took home a Catholic Music Award for Best New Singer in Rome for her song "My Soul Proclaims," made her own unique journey through the psalms that brought new life and a song honoring the joyful words of Mary in the "Magnificat." She told OSV News her story of infertility and hope behind the award-winning song.

LaRosa always loved singing as a young girl and started to sing at Mass with her father at age 9. As she became more involved in music ministry, she began setting the responsorial psalms to her own musical settings.

The first time she wrote music for a psalm as a teenager was at the encouragement of her mother. "I was able to hear and find the melodies and I would be looking at the Scripture in a different way. It was like I could see the melody coming off the page," she recalled.

She eventually became music director at her home parish, St. Barnabas Catholic Church in Indianapolis, before leaving the role to pursue her own music career.

Originally thinking she would be in the contemporary Christian music scene, she found in 2020 that "God really led me back to the psalms."

"I was married and experiencing infertility and asking God, 'Why is this happening? Why aren't we able to have children? This is a huge cross to carry by ourselves in the midst of a pandemic,' I was just very heartbroken," she said, "As I had this conversation with God, I accidentally bumped into my night stand on my way out of the room and my Bible fell to the floor. I opened it up just to see what page it was on and it was on the psalms."

She asked God if he wanted her to focus on the psalms in her music, then "felt an overwhelming sense of peace" so she decided to set out on a "psalm journey" recording all the psalms, posting them to her YouTube channel and selling her settings to them on her website.

While she set them to music with the intention of helping other cantors, at the same time, she found the psalms brought her healing in her journey of infertility.

"The day after I finished filming my last psalm, I had surgery with a NaPro doctor and he found that I had a chronic disease called endometriosis, and he was able to remove all of it," she said. "Right after that surgery I was healed, and I was blessed with a child. Two weeks later, we found out we were expecting."

LaRosa's work on the psalms also ended up reaching a wide audience and yielding unexpected connections. Her videos drew the attention of Catholic composer Tom Booth, who connected her with Catholic musician Sarah Hart, who became a mentor and friend.

While she was still struggling with infertility and in the process of recording the psalms, LaRosa collaborated with Hart to set the "Magnificat" to music for their song "My Soul Proclaims."

"We opened Luke 1 and it was such a powerful moment to read Luke 1 as two women and we're reading the story of Mary and Elizabeth -- St. Elizabeth has been a huge person in my own life because of my journey with infertility," LaRosa emphasized. "I was really writing it in terms of being someone who wasn't able to have children."

"To sing my soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, to sing the words of Mary and for her to say, 'Holy, holy is his name,' it brought me a lot of healing in my infertility journey to write that with Sarah in that desert season," she said.

They released the song just after she and her husband, David, found out they were expecting. She talked about the powerful moment of hearing the song the day after they found out. "To have that song fill the walls of my house that had been holding my broken story," she said, "and now here's this song that means something so different to me, now that I'm hearing the words of Mary as I am with child myself. I was just overwhelmed with emotion."

The music video for the song, filmed shortly after she discovered she was pregnant, shows her walking down the center aisle of a local church, offering her "own prayer of praising God." She said she had real tears of gratitude for being "with my child in adoration, walking to Jesus."

LaRosa found out about the Catholic Music Awards from one of her supporters and her husband submitted her music "just to see what might happen."

After receiving an invitation to attend the awards, she and her husband were initially unsure as she knew she would be newly postpartum at that time, but they decided they would be able to attend in Rome when her parents and in-laws volunteered to accompany them and assist with the baby, forming a special family trip to Rome during the Jubilee Year of Hope.

Her daughter, Gabriella, was born just over a month before the awards and was named in honor of the angel Gabriel and the feast of the Annunciation.

The birth and postpartum process went very well and they even got Gabriella's passport and birth certificate in time for travel, "by the grace of God," LaRosa said.

She expressed gratitude for her personal journey in singing "My Soul Proclaims" and then being invited to perform it in Rome.

"I just had my daughter five weeks prior to singing it in Rome," she said, "it came full circle from singing it in the music video being one week pregnant to singing it in Rome five weeks postpartum and my daughter was there with me."

"When they announced me as the best new singer, I just almost fell to the ground," she said, "I feel so unworthy of it all and I'm just so grateful for every moment of this."

Seeing Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, at the Angelus address was also an amazing experience, she said, and little Gabriella received his blessing from afar in St. Peter's Square.