Beth Blinebury is the first to admit her photographs of women's bodies are provocative. That's partly the point. Still, the Tyler graduate never expected her art would get her fired from her job as marketing and recruitment director at St. Hubert Catholic High School for Girls in Northeast Philadelphia. She never expressed herself artistically at work or directed anyone associated with the school to visit Web sites featuring her images, but the Archdiocese of Philadelphia found the exhibits anyway, summoned her to a meeting and immediately directed her to clean out her desk.

Blinebury sees herself as a sacrificial lamb, someone the church could single out to show they were responding to decades of widespread sexual abuse detailed in a scathing grand jury report issued last month. The critique, resulting from a three-year investigation, found that former high-ranking priests covered up and allowed the abuse of hundreds of children.

"Pedophiles who rape little boys, they move around from school to school," she says. "Me, they fire."

When Blinebury, 23, graduated from the now-defunct Saint Leo Parish Elementary School in Tacony, she moved with her family to New Jersey. Still, she insisted on crossing the Delaware River every day to attend St. Hubert's like her mother, aunts and cousins did before her. Blinebury became a "Bambi Ambassador," representing the school at all sorts of events, and won an award for her dedication to St. Hubert's. So it made perfect sense that after studying photography at Temple's Tyler School of Art, the 2000 graduate would return to her alma mater to help with a fundraising campaign and design the school Web site.

"I love that school, which is part of the reason I wanted to go back," she says.

A year later, she was hired full time and promoted to a position she concedes was overwhelming at times. But she was doing well enough that school president Sister Alma Rose Schlosser asker her to take over the Bambi program, which had swelled to 50 ambassadors.

Things seemed fine until Oct. 9, the Sunday afternoon she got a call from Schlosser, telling her about a meeting the next morning with the archdiocese. Blinebury's first thought was that St. Hubert's was closing, but as the evening wore on, "in my gut I just knew something was wrong," she says.

On monday morning, Blinebury found herself sitting in a closed-door meeting with Schlosser and archdiocese education officials Stephen Pawlowski and Louis P. DeAngelo. They began pulling sheets of paper off a one-inch stack of printouts from her Web site — www.bethblinebury.com — and the subscription site www.inliquid.com, which they found through a Google search for her name.

In one online collection, pleasure/pain, Blinebury says she wants to illustrate the contradiction between what people desire and what they physically feel. Photographs from her Sex Talk series, in which sexually explicit words are written on women's mouths, "question whether a woman can ever really be the dominator in a sexual relationship with a man."

The images — and an offhanded remark about hating Catholicism she made on a blog after seeing the movie Saved — were all that the archdiocese needed to deem her a "liability." In a one-sentence letter dated Oct. 17, Schlosser wrote that Blinebury was terminated "[b]ased on inappropriate actions of [hers] that are not in accord with the educational philosophy" of the archdiocese and the school.

Schlosser declined to comment through her secretary and archdiocese spokeswoman Donna Farrell could not comment on personnel matters.

Blinebury has already landed another job with a Web design firm. She doesn't want to "walk away quietly" from St. Hubert's, but knows she has no legal recourse.

While parochial schools receive some public money for student transportation, textbooks, equipment and other things, Larry Frankel, legislative director of the Pennsylvania ACLU, says "in general, the Constitution does not apply" to private schools. So, Blinebury cannot retaliate on the grounds that the school violated her First Amendment right to free speech, and because she wasn't a member of the teachers' union, she can't look for help there either.

The archdiocese never asked Blinebury to explain her art or take it off the Internet. Tyler photography professor Sam Fritch, in whose class Blinebury created much of the work that got her fired, says that lack of discussion is the worst thing about censorship.

"It was just, "You've done it.' There's no forgiveness — aren't they the forgiveness factory?" he says. "Clearly this is their way of cleaning house, of saying, "This is the new Catholic Church. We're not putting up with any of this.' But really it's the same church who put Galileo on trial for saying the earth moves around the sun."