In the middle of a heavenly morning on the last day of August, four days before the season-opener against Youngstown State, Paterno sat with a diocesan bishop, a priest and an archabbot of the Benedictine Order.

Benedictine means "the blessed," and Pope Benedict adopted that name for his reign.

Paterno prayed and briefly sermonized about his wife.

“I’ve done nothing, actually," Paterno said. "She reaches out to anybody who needs help. Thanks on behalf of the family. We love you, honey. We are proud of you. And we pray for you. The only reason I’m here right now is because I’ve got to go to a press conference, and I gotta tell a lot of lies. So I need some prayers.”

Then he went to Beaver Stadium, his football cathedral, to spend nearly an hour with the media at his first weekly news conference of the season, and he expressed more faith.

Earlier in the week, the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese in Pennsylvania named a building after Paterno's wife -- the Suzanne Pohland Paterno Catholic Student Faith Center -- and he attended the ground-breaking ceremony, looking spiritually and physically revived. The center will be built within walking-distance of the Paternos's home in College Heights along Park Avenue, and gameday traffic will crawl by it. The Paternos are leading a campaign to raise $6.5 million for the 22,000-square-foot center that will house a day chapel, library, student lounges and residential space for Benedictine clergy. Sue Paterno has spent nearly 50 years working with the campus ministry.

(View: Ceremony photos and an artist's rendering of the center)

"How proud are you of that and how happy are you for her?" Paterno was asked by a beat reporter in the middle of questions about the unknown starting quarterback.

"Well, she's a very unusual woman," Paterno said of his 70-year-old wife, whom he met in the library when she was an undergraduate, 13 years younger than him. "She's done a wonderful job. We've had Benedictines here for 40 years. And she's fed them. She's helped with a lot of different things. And as most of you know, she's been very active with the Special Olympics.

"There isn't a week that doesn't go by that somebody doesn't give her a call and ask her to pray for somebody that's either sick or has some problems. She's been a real asset. I'm very proud of her. I'm very proud of her.

"She's a wonderful mother. Five kids, 17 grandkids. They all showed up this morning for the ceremony. So I was really pleased that they would name the new Catholic youth center after her, because I think she deserves it.

"And I've been very fortunate. Have not had any problems. When I go home at the end of the tough practice or lost a football game, I go home and there will be a nice plate of pasta, a little ravioli and spinach in it.

"And you guys have heard me tell this story a thousand times: When I told my mom, I'm getting married, she said, 'Are you marrying that little German girl?'

"And I said, 'Yeah.'

"My mom says, 'What the hell are you going to eat?'"

His recent nourishment has worked, especially since the Big Ten meetings a few weeks ago in Chicago, when Paterno looked older than his 83 years and slurred his words, and prompted some panicky media mavens to begin a countdown to his retirement before, during or after this season. He blamed his fatigue on an energy-sapping illness of the lower bowel that weakened him and sapped him of weight that made his blue sports jacket seem too big. He said allergies affected his voice.

When asked at the weekly news conference whether he would be on the sideline this season, he winced, saying: "I'm on the field. I haven't missed one play in (preseason) practice. And I don't intend to miss any games, any plays."

There was a time when Paterno did not have faith, like when he opposed Beaver Stadium, which is celebrating its 50th birthday this season. A reporter reminded him that "you had said you thought it would be the ruination of Penn State football to come out here from Beaver Field?"

Paterno replied: "Years ago. 50 years ago, absolutely. I don't think there's any mystery about the fact that when Rip Engle who was the head coach at the time came in and said, 'The president wants to move the stadium because of the fact that he needed that ground for graduate school.'

"I said, 'You can't let them do that, Rip; it will ruin Penn State Football.' Because we were close to the Nittany Lion Inn and people were used to coming up there. We had a nice parking area across the street, where the golf course was, and the whole bit.

"Shows you how smart I am. It was a great move. And I think it's worked out obviously very, very well. ... I think it's a fun weekend. It's amazing how many people come up here even for, if we have a football team we don't know how good or bad it is yet, and yet we'll have a great crowd Saturday."

Paterno's real test of football faith will come when he names the starting quarterback. He has seldom gone this long in a preseason without saying publicly who the quarterback will be. His choice will be among the seldom-used veterans Kevin Newsome and Matt McGloin, and the freshmen Robert Bolden and Paul Jones. But Paterno said Jones was tentatively being red-shirted because of academic fumbles.

"There isn't anybody who has played much," Paterno said. "We can't make up our mind. We were going to try to make it up last week, and then I said, 'No, let's make sure we know what we're doing.' So we'll probably make up our mind in the next day or two, who we'll start, but we'll probably play a couple of kids.

"Every one of the four kids who are out there has potential. Every one of them has a chance to be pretty good. None of them has any experience. You're not sure what's going to happen when you put them in a ballgame.

So, we're just playing it by ear, day by day, and that's one of the reasons why we're so late in making a selection. I think potentially there's talent there. But right now it's no… they're just not that comfortable yet and we'll have to see what happens. Obviously, we have to make a decision to start one of them. And we, hopefully, will maybe do it tomorrow (Sept. 1) night."

Asked again, he said: "I have absolutely no idea what to expect from them in a ballgame. They can all throw the football. They're big enough. And you would hope that eventually they're going to be fine quarterbacks. Whether they're going to be able to get that done with the schedule we're playing, that's a tough call right now.

"I know you guys want me to be a little bit more definitive as to what we're going to do. But at this stage, I couldn't tell you which one's going to come to the front as the guy that's going to lead the team or whether we have one who can handle the kind of situations that a quarterback is going to have to handle as the season goes on."

When pressed yet again, Paterno deflected, saying: "I don't know what we're going to do with the quarterbacks, period. And I think that ought to end the discussion. I'm getting tired of talking about it. We've got kids that are good kids, good athletes. They're working hard. And they like the kind of game experience, and they like the kind of experience you like to see at quarterback when you're playing the kind of schedule we're playing. Period. I don't know what else I can add to it."

By Wednesday night, as promised, Paterno put his faith in Bolden, a true freshman who was rated as the nation's fourth-best quarterback recruit, as the conditional starter. Paterno said the quarterbacks would still be competing as a trifecta: Bolden will be listed 1A, Newsome 1B and McGloin 1C on the depth chart.

“Bolden has a slight edge right now, but we are confident all three quarterbacks are ready to go and hope to give them an opportunity to play until we settle on the one that gives us the best chance to win,” Paterno said.

Oh ye of little faith. Amen.