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	In the Face of Prejudice Boston Globe June 16, 2010 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/05/16/in_the_face_of_prejudice/ The old joke in Hingham is that when outsiders drive by St. Paul's, they assume it's another of the town's myriad Protestant churches: It's white, with a wooden facade, and a towering Gothic steeple, dominating the small, quaint square. When it was built, in 1871, it was one of the first Catholic churches on the South Shore. "In the 19th century, almost everybody in Hingham was Protestant," Sheldon Daly was saying. "Their servants were mostly Irish, and later Italian. The servants were Catholic and they didn't have a church of their own." There was a lot of anti-Catholic bigotry back then. And yet the poor Catholics, encouraged by some tolerant, affluent Protestants, were able to build a beautiful church and named it for the saint who was a Jew before that long walk to Damascus. Sheldon Daly was thinking about that history, the perseverance of a minority in the face of prejudice, the tolerant Protestants who defied the bigoted ones, because now, all of a sudden, his parish, the place where he's been going to Mass these 50 years, is seen by some as a symbol of intolerance. The Rev. James Rafferty, the pastor, decided that an 8-year-old boy who had been accepted for next fall's third-grade class at St. Paul School couldn't enroll after all, because the boys' parents are lesbians. Rafferty decided that conflicted with Catholic teaching, and that is certainly his prerogative. It's a private, faith-based school and everything Rafferty did is perfectly legal. "But what does that say about us?" Daly asked. "What does it say about us as Catholics, as Christians?" The contretemps at St. Paul School has become a national story, packaged as yet another skirmish in the culture wars. But for a guy like Daly, it has provoked a crisis of conscience. And so he was sitting in his house yesterday, wondering if he was going to leave the parish he's called home since Jack Kennedy was president. He doesn't know the lesbian couple. He doesn't know their story. He only knows that their kid being excluded from his parish's school embarrasses him, makes him feel that all this talk about loving thy neighbor is empty words. Like many other Catholics, Daly has navigated a life of faith listening to his conscience more than his bishops. He was a senior at Boston College in 1958 when one of his best friends asked him and his then-girlfriend and future wife Nancy to stand up for him. "At the time, there were about three Jewish guys at BC, and one of them was my friend. He fell in love with an Irish Catholic girl and they wanted to get married. This was very controversial back then, and they couldn't just get married in any church. We ended up finding a small chapel on Beacon Hill and a priest, a Jesuit, married them. Nancy and I stood up for them at the wedding. He's Jewish, but he raised his kids Catholic."
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