After Maher made his move, she went to then-Bishop Francis Quinn in Sacramento, who welcomed her by saying: "No priest in this diocese will ever refuse to give you communion."Living in the Bay Area for a while, I had the impression that the term "post-Christian" fits California better than anyplace else in this country. It's true that there were still a lot of Catholic churches around, but most of them seemed like the closed facility in SOMA (I think it was once St. Joseph's parish) that serves an ironic backdrop to the orgiastic Folsom Street Fair. It sounds as if Archbishop Quinn did a lot to replace Catholic discipline with what passes in California for "conscience."After Maher's death, Killea said she "squared things away" with the new bishop and attends her church to this day. "Really, she said, "what it amounts to is that the final arbiter of this issue is your own conscience."