By Lydialyle Gibson
Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest
March 8, 2006
http://www.wednesdayjournalonline.com/main.asp?
SectionID=4&SubSectionID=4&ArticleID=3971&TM=4383.657
Kathleen Falsani should have been home in bed. Instead, she was at her desk long after 9 o'clock on a Tuesday night, tweaking and re-tweaking her lead for the next day's story, proofing copy and checking facts in the sprawling quiet of the Sun-Times' newsroom. Only three or four other staffers lingered among the blank computer screens and buzzing lights. True, Falsani felt much better than she had the night before, when a feverish flu had kept her awake for hours, but she was tired and woozy, and it showed. No matter: news was breaking in the spiraling drama of priest and accused molester Daniel McCormack, and Falsani - who lives in Oak Park - had roused from her sickbed to cover it.
"I think we've got something nobody else has," she said, scanning a revised draft for mistakes while her editor waited across the room for a thumbs-up. Two days later, on Jan. 26, the story (on which Falsani shared a byline with Sun-Times crime reporter Frank Main) would disclose that a nun had warned the Chicago Archdiocese of concerns about McCormack back in 2000, more than five years before church officials said they first learned of allegations against the priest and nearly six years before criminal charges ousted him from St. Agatha's North Lawndale pulpit. The revelation would intensify already rising outrage among parents and worshippers. "Cardinal Francis George isn't going to be happy," she said.
For nearly as long as Falsani's been a reporter, religion has been her beat, and for nearly as long as she's been alive, it has been an urgent, invigorating obsession. "Since I was a little person, I was fascinated by religion and the way different religions worked," she said. "Something I viscerally remember is sitting on the floor when I was five or six, with a book of world religions spread out in front of me." Within weeks of her arrival at the Sun-Times in September 2000, Falsani was writing about gay Catholics, depressed clergymen, and then-candidate George W. Bush's presidential "calling." By mid-summer 2001, she also had her own column, dedicated to spiritual life in Chicago. The timing seemed providential for her: 9/11 proved a fiery baptism, and close on its heels followed the Catholic Church's abuse scandal, Pope John Paul II's death, and the election of Pope Benedict XVI.
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Keeping busy: Covering religion for a major metropolitan newspaper these days is anything but a sleepy beat. Photos by Josh Hawkins |
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The last few years have been lively ones for religion writers, Falsani said, a far cry from a decade ago, when the world of worship still found itself "relegated to the Bingo pages." These days, religion is a 1A story.
Falsani takes it all in stride. While many reporters were surprised by the popularity of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ or the Left Behind book series or Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life'not to mention the electoral potency of "moral values" in the 2004 presidential race.Falsani was not. She'd long been chronicling the ways in which faith permeates civic life, family life, the average workday. "Chicago is a religiously diverse and a very religious city," she said. "Religion is like a sport here. Readers actually care about it."
Falsani herself is pretty religiously diverse. A native New Englander with Italian and Irish roots, she spent her early childhood as a Roman Catholic. "On my mom's side, the Irish side of the family, people were super-Catholic," she said. But in 1980, the year Falsani turned 10, something happened'a family crisis whose details she keeps to herself and her parents left the church to become born-again Christians. "So there we were, Southern Baptists in Fairfield, Conn.," Falsani recalled. "I got used to never quite fitting in." From an evangelical prep school, she went on to Wheaton College, where she found a place among the "liberal-leaning minority-you know, the arts majors, the lit majors, the philosophy majors." After Wheaton, she enrolled in a master's program at Northwestern University that coupled journalism with theology. At the same time Falsani was reporting for the Medill news wire, she was also studying the Old Testament, church history, Islam, Buddhism, and the psychology of religion at Garrett-Evangelical seminary.
"My training was always to look for God in places where you're not supposed to find him," she said, "both as a reporter and in the seminary."
A demanding beat
In the last four years, Falsani, now 35, has found God in the unlikeliest of spots: a bad dye job, a Lean Cuisine lunch, a Lincoln Park spa, MTV, a "morally decent" cup of coffee (made from beans for which the farmer was paid a living wage), and her little brother's departure for Iraq as an Air Force officer. As religion columnists go, Falsani is unusually open and opinionated, upbraiding fellow evangelicals for their indifference to Africa's AIDS crisis, reminding the rest of us that born-again Christians are no more monolithic than Muslims or Jews, declaring Bush's moral compass out of whack, and musing that same-sex marriage has become the Sunday-sermon sin that divorce once was. A U2 fan since adolescence, Falsani spent hours talking religion and politics with Bono when his Heart of America bus tour rolled through the Midwest in 2002, and since then she's devoted some two dozen columns and stories to the rock star's humanitarian campaign.
"It's a very different muscle to write with your own voice about your own opinions," she said. "I have tried very hard to be honest with myself and my readers. Not to be cute, not to shy away from the controversial." Her readership, she said, demands that forthrightness. "Sun-Times readers' B.S. detectors are pretty good. They like stories about real people, and they don't dwell long in the realm of theory. Neither do I."
She doesn't have time to. During 2004 before she took a few months off to write her first book, The God Factor, due out this month-Falsani filed nearly 150 stories and columns for the Sun-Times. Back in Oak Park, she shares her home with husband Maurice Possley, a Tribune reporter whose investigations into the Illinois criminal justice system helped hasten the state's moratorium on the death penalty.
"We share a similar faith," Falsani said. "He likes to say he covers the murder and mayhem and leaves the grace and redemption to me." She and Possley work all hours-which makes them feel guilty about the cats left at home'but the two spend enough time in what Falsani affectionately calls the "People's Republic of Oak Park" to know their neighbors, their grocer and their dry cleaner. Whenever she hears Giuseppe the knife-grinder pushing his three-wheel cart through their neighborhood, Falsani ransacks the kitchen, looking for dull blades.
"There's a sense of community that I haven't felt anywhere else," she says. "The deal with my husband is that if we live in the Midwest, we have to live in Oak Park."
But they spend plenty of time on the road as well. Possley follows Death Row stories across the country, and Falsani's work can call her to the Vatican with as little as 36 hours' warning. Lately, that's been happening a lot. Besides the abuse scandal, which (last month's headlines notwithstanding) has brushed Chicago relatively slightly, last year saw the passing of one pope and the anointing of another. "I've never witnessed anything like that, and I expect I never will again," Falsani said.
After John Paul II's death last April, she flew to Rome carrying just the clothes on her back and camped out on the teeming streets with a group of Loyola University students. In her first seven days there, Falsani filed 17 dispatches; by the time she returned home three weeks later, sleeplessness and the "dead pope diet" had left her haggard, exhausted and two dress sizes smaller. "There were three or four million people in an area about the size of the neighborhood around Wrigley Field," she said. "It was dumbfounding because of sheer mass, and it was dumbfounding because it was so peaceful. There were so many young people, and it was extraordinary to see the way people were drawn to honor this man. Half of them didn't even believe in his religion, but they wanted to honor him-and they did, in the way they behaved. This was truly the face of the universal church."
Mourning and introspective, Cardinal Francis George became a mainstay of Falsani's reports from Rome. Over dinners or long walks'or from a hilltop vista overlooking St. Peter's'he pondered the Vatican's future with her: John Paul's legacy, the call for sainthood, the pilgrims' devotion, the gravity of choosing a new pope. As he often does, George gave her extraordinary access to his thoughts and impressions.
"He's not the easiest person to know and get along with," said Falsani, who supposes her theological training appeals to his rigorous mind. "We can talk about Tillich, or the preferential option for the poor, and I know what he's talking about. He's very cerebral, very precise. You have to ask him what he thinks, not how he feels. That said, he's very warm and funny."
Falsani traces their remarkable rapport to April 2002, when Pope John Paul summoned the American cardinals to Rome for a knuckle-rapping over the widening abuse scandal. Falsani showed George how to use his new cellphone; he gave her a ride to her hotel in the rain. Promptly upon her arrival in Rome, Falsani's wallet was stolen, and by the time the news reached George, "I had been mugged and all my money taken," she recalled. Concerned, he shouted to her across a crowded press conference: "Cathleen! I heard you were robbed. Do you need any money?"
Still, the two have had their squabbles. More than once, Falsani said, her reporting has earned a wroth response from the cardinal. "We've had some very public skirmishes. He's been snotty to me, and I've gotten him in trouble," she said. "But I get him, I understand him."
The God Factor
This month, Falsani's book hits stores, a collection of religious profiles and interviews called The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People. The project grew out of an occasional installment of her column. Among her assemblage of celebrities are Barack Obama, Studs Terkel, Elie Wiesel, Dusty Baker, Tom Robbins, Barry Scheck and, of course, Bono. "I picked people for their openness, their introspection, or people whose work I admired," she said. Interview subjects range from the orthodox to the unbelieving, and in between fall the spiritual-but-not-religious types. Her favorite is Oak Parker and actor John Mahoney, a Catholic who prays daily and argues for the kindness of compassionate lies in lieu of telling a hurtful truth. Declining a face-to-face interview, Seamus Heaney sent a recent poem, and Harold Ramis described his evolution from Jewish to "Buddh-ish." DJ provocateur Mancow Muller confessed to being saved. But the biggest surprise' Director David Lynch isn't so dark and weird after all-in fact, the man who made Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks practices transcendental meditation.
When it comes to her own faith, Falsani is pretty candid. "I don't like labels," she said, "but if you said I'm a left-leaning, self-described, born-again evangelical, you wouldn't be wrong." There are two things, however, that she won't divulge: whether she goes to church, and where. "That's something I won't talk about," she said, adding that when she writes about Buddhism or Judaism or Islam, many readers don't realize she's Christian. "There's a running bet among Chicago religious leaders about what exactly I am," she said. "I guess my name is just ambiguous enough that I could be Jewish or something."
But she's not. And reporting on other people's religions, she said, "doesn't change what I believe, or where my faith lies." As much as in anything else, her faith lies in something she learned in a philosophy class years ago: "That all truth is God's truth," she said. "I try to remember that."
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