Passport to a global education. (editors' note).

"If a person who speaks three languages is trilingual and a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, what do you call a person who speaks only one language? An American? It's an old joke, but I heard it for the first time while traveling through the former Yugoslavia with a group of Catholic journalists from all over the world. The punch line struck stingingly close to home. Our group included 17 people from 14 countries on five continents, and all spoke at least two languages--except the three Americans.

Thank God for translators. Although the official language of the program--called Summer University and sponsored by the International Catholic Union of the Press (UCIP)--was English, communication was not problem-free. Our host in Bosnia, for example, spoke no English, and we were sans translator while traveling from town to town. He did, however, speak Italian, and so did Greta from Albania and Silvina from Argentina, so we were able to communicate our need to stop the bus for bathroom breaks.

Every other year UCIP sponsors this monthlong study tour for young Catholic journalists as a crash course in one region of the world. Margin Notes columnist Kevin Clarke studied in Hong Kong six years ago, and thanks to a scholarship from the Catholic Press Association, I had the opportunity to go to Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia last fall.

I went to the Balkans expecting to learn a lot about the Balkans. I did, and you can get my report from that still-suffering part of the world in my story "Rebuilding Bridges in the Balkans" (pages 34-39). But I learned just as much, if not more, about my own country--and the perception that others have of us.

It's not good, as most Americans are now aware. Months before millions around the world took to the streets to protest our foreign policy, I got an earful from my Catholic traveling companions from Pakistan, Hungary, Peru, and Tanzania. The saber rattling for war in Iraq had already begun, and I was constantly asked to defend President Bush's blatant unilateralism. I couldn't.

UCIP is dedicated to preventing such "unilateral" attitudes in journalists, and my trip really did make globalization personal. Now, when I hear about the war in Sudan, I worry about Jeff, currently exiled in Nairobi, Kenya. And when the U.S. began attacking Iraq, Ulrike from Germany e-mailed, "Whenever I cannot understand how they can throw these bombs on other people's lands, I'm thinking of you sitting in Chicago puzzled the same way. That helps a little."

This magazine is called U.S. CATHOLIC in reference to our primary audience, not out of a tunnel vision of concern only about this country. To be truly catholic (with a small "c") we must remember we are world citizens before American citizens. To that end, I am now taking Spanish classes. Paz y hasta luego!