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	A Nice Catholic Girl Tests Her Limits By Gina Boubion Philadelphia Daily News April 23, 2008 http://www.philly.com/dailynews/opinion/20080423_A_NICE_CATHOLIC_GIRL_TESTS_HER_LIMITS.html AN ESTEEMED graduate of Columbia Journalism School, where I work, came to visit his alma mater recently. It was Philadelphia's own Cardinal John Foley, class of '66, and he was in town to accompany his boss, Pope Benedict XVI, on his first American tour. The visit was called hastily (as a Vatican spokesman, Foley had a tight schedule), but the school was able to set up his talk last-minute and get the word out. As a lifelong Catholic who would be at work anyway, I surely could have found the time to drop in and hear what Foley had to say. After all, several of his former classmates, including ex-Daily News reporter Ron Goldwyn, had been quoted in a recent story describing how they'd been won over by Foley's humor and smarts, which he still has in spades. I had to pass. I was busy in another classroom. But I probably would have skipped Foley's talk anyway, in protest. I didn't object in the least to his speaking at Columbia. But God gave us free will, and I was exercising mine. Isn't that close-minded of me, you say? After all, if you're not interested in what a man has to say at a journalism school, what kind of journalist are you? That would be valid criticism of a news reporter, or of someone curious about priests and the Vatican, but not me, a product of Catholic schools and a marriage that would never have come to pass had my father not left the seminary at 19. ("I was a basket case" is how he describes his transition back into society.) Plus, I'm a churchgoer. How I manage to get my children to church on Sunday, and why I bother is a puzzle, since my ambivalence toward the church runs deep. I guess I go for the food (spiritually speaking). Because if I dwelled on the bad, I'd have no choice but to walk out. The church doesn't make it easy. Some of its story is very seedy - which I picked up through independent study, because the Catholic-school curriculum of my youth glossed over the Inquisition,; the popes who had mistresses, children and more money than Fort Knox; Pope Pius XII's refusal to throw the church's full weight against Hitler, and other inconvenient truths. More recently, we have the pedophile-priest scandal. Here Cardinal Foley has spoken out forcefully: "The best defense against the crisis is virtue," he has been quoted as saying, "and in the absence of virtue, candor." But there's the rub. For the first years of the scandal, the Vatican described it as a modern, peculiarly American Catholic problem, even as victims, most under age 45, began to speak out from Ireland and Ecuador, Australia and Spain. Priests have been so reluctant to confess that cases take years to resolve. And when the dioceses of Boston, L.A., Bridgeport, Conn., and others found themselves mired in lawsuits, cardinals used legalese to limit the blame. That's candor? These days, the Vatican has shown more willingness to hang pedophile priests out to dry. The pope surprised American Catholics during his visit by bringing up the scandal repeatedly and apologizing profusely - from the pulpit, in public comments to the press and to victims themselves. It has been a week of roller- coaster emotions for Catholics, to be sure. 'WE WILL absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry," he told the Associated Press on the first day of his trip, setting a tone that few Catholics had envisioned. "It is more important to have good priests than many priests." Tragically, his apologies came much too late. And the other shoe hasn't even dropped. There's a whole generation of older Catholics who haven't piped up yet with their own accusations. That generation, which includes my parents, grew up revering priests, and not talking about sex of any kind. For them, the scandal has been shattering. Not long ago, to have a priest in your family was a status symbol, and I, like everybody I grew up with, called the parish priest "Father" with utter affection and respect. But the culture of putting priests on pedestals has gone the way of the Walkman, and it's their own fault. I remember my shock at learning in the early '90s that there was a church-run sexual-abuse-treatment center for priests in New Mexico. I clipped the story and sent it to my parents. The news threw them into a tailspin. "I don't believe it," my mother said. My usually loquacious father was silent. * Gina Boubion is a former Daily News reporter. She can be reached at gb2219@columbia.edu.
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