SHOUT OUT FROM MY HOMIES: THE WEDNESDAY JOURNAL PROFILES GOD GIRL

Wednesday, March 8, 2006
The Wednesday Journal (Oak Park, Illinois)

The God factor: Sun-Times religion reporter Cathleen Falsani finds God in unlikely places

By LYDIALYLE GIBSON

Cathleen 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.

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.

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