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	A Philadelphia Catholic Confesses By Clark Deleon Philly.com March 21, 2011 http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/118347574.html Hello, my name is Clark. And I'm a self-loathing Catholic. In unison from the crowd of men and women seated in a room smelling of stale coffee: Hi, Clark. I haven't attended a Self-Loathing Catholics Anonymous meeting in years. I'm here tonight because the news about the cover-up of sexual abuse of children in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia has me half-crazy. And I feel myself reaching for the same old crutch. I feel a desperate urge to - A single voice: One day at a time, brother. Thanks, buddy. As I was saying, I feel a desperate urge to hate the church. That's what self-loathing Catholics are supposed to do, right? But I refuse to hate the church of my birth. I refuse to give the church that much power over me. Christ compels me to reject the sins of my fathers. And bishops. And cardinals. But how can I forgive them? And just who am I to forgive the Catholic Church? A shout from the back of the room: You bold, brazen article! Yes, I am. For you younger SLCA members, a "bold, brazen article" is what the nuns used to call any schoolboy who had the temerity to challenge authority. It was a typical nun insult: specific, obscure, and freighted with delicious meaning known only to nuns. I finally figured it out as an adult. "Bold, brazen article" is the equivalent of an ethnic joke about parts of speech. As we know from diagramming sentences, there are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. And the low man on the grammatical totem pole is the article: a, an, or the. So to be a bold, brazen article is to be The An Who Would Be King. I cherish Catholic school memories like that one. It's our secret handshake. It's the difference between a Catholic and a public. And in Philadelphia, when I was growing up, that difference was your identity. Back in the day, to be a Catholic school student in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was, by modern standards, to be abused psychologically and physically. Every high school seemed to have at least one priest who was a former Golden Gloves champion and was willing to demonstrate his technique on a prideful student or three. That was part of the mystique, lore, and reality of being a Catholic school kid. And we celebrated it the way Marines celebrate surviving Parris Island. I think psychiatrists call it the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages come to identify with and support their captors. They also have a name for the psychological condition manifesting itself in varying degrees among many of us in this room tonight: post-traumatic stress syndrome. We child soldiers for Christ have been betrayed by our commanders. Most of us are angry or in denial. Some of us are broken. But what the people who label us "self-loathing Catholics" don't understand is how much we loved the church. They don't understand that this awful feeling wasn't our choice. It was the church that abandoned us. Everybody! The crowd solemnly repeats the SLCA motto: It's not my fault. It's not my fault. Damn it, it's not my fault. What is our fault is that we still care. We bold, brazen articles believe in something we can't describe, perhaps something that never existed. And we refuse to collaborate, even as we refuse to give up on the faith of our mothers. We are Philadelphia Catholics. And it still hurts after all these years.
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