BOB ABERNETHY, host: The Vatican announced plans to make it easier for disaffected Anglicans to convert to Catholicism. Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, said new structures will be created to accommodate growing numbers of Anglicans who want to leave the worldwide Anglican Communion because of disputes over homosexuality and female clergy. Under the new plan, those Anglicans can become Catholics while still maintaining some of their distinctive beliefs and practices, including the tradition of married priests. Our managing editor, Kim Lawton, is here, and so, from Denver, is John Allen, longtime Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. Welcome to you both. John, what’s the Vatican up to here? Is it fishing for converts?

JOHN L. ALLEN, JR (National Catholic Reporter): Well, officially, Bob, the answer to that question is no. I mean, some Anglicans may see it that way, but the Vatican’s position is we didn’t go looking for these folks. They came to us. That is, there is a small but significant number of more traditionalist Anglicans who very publicly have asked to be received into the Catholic Church, and the Vatican’s line is that even though we didn’t solicit them, when people knock on our door we have a responsibility to open it up.

Cardinal William Levada

ABERNETHY: And Kim, what do you hear—reaction from the Anglicans?

KIM LAWTON: Well, officially, the spiritual head of the 77-million-member Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, has been, you know, somewhat positive about this. He says he does not see it as an act of aggression from the Catholic Church, but certainly his church body has been under enormous pressure from a lot of fronts, and this one more front, one more sort of exit possibility for many Anglicans who are unhappy with what’s been going on in their church.

ABERNETHY: What do you both think, John first, what do you think about the numbers that will be involved here? Will it be a lot of people that are switching, or just a few?

ALLEN: Well, the signals from the Catholic side, at least, is that expectations are this is going to be a fairly small number of folks. When Cardinal Levada was asked this question at a Vatican briefing earlier in the week, he said that there were 20 or 30 Anglican bishops in various parts of the world who had put out feelers, but of course putting out feelers is different than signing on the bottom line. And at the grassroots the expectation is that at least in the early stages you’re talking about fairly small pockets of people who will be coming over.

LAWTON: And especially, well, here in the United States, the people that are unhappy with the Episcopal Church, which is the US branch of the Anglican Communion—they come from two different wings of the church. One certainly are those who are more Catholic in their traditions and their style of worship, but there are also evangelicals, who are conservative theologically but not so comfortable with the idea of Rome and the pope, and those two groups here in the US have come together. They’ve formed their own structure, the Anglican Church of North America, and they’re really focusing on building that. So I think a lot of the traditionalist Anglicans here in the US may not immediately head to the Catholic Church.

ABERNETHY: But is there a possibility that out of this, Kim, will come a more conservative Catholic Church and a more liberal Anglican Communion?

LAWTON: Well, of course, if a lot of conservatives leave the Anglican Communion it will become more liberal overall, but another scenario is that it puts more pressure on the worldwide Anglican Communion to itself become more conservative so it doesn’t lose more members.

ABERNETHY: John, what about the effect on the Catholic Church of having more Anglicans in it, and especially with regard to married priests? I mean, is it a step, inevitably, toward a change in that position? If you let in a lot of married Anglicans, don’t you then have to change your position about existing Catholic priests?

ALLEN: Well, that’s certainly an argument some people are going to make. I mean, what we know for right now is the Vatican has clearly said that current Anglican ministers who become Catholics and become ordained as Catholic priests, if they’re currently married can remain married. The Vatican has also clearly ruled out married bishops. But what the policy is going to be going forward we don’t know. I mean, we should say that while the Vatican has made this announcement, they haven’t yet given us the legal document that provides all the fine points, and this is certainly one of those fine points people will have their eyeballs on. What Vatican officials are saying on background is that, whatever happens, they want to make sure that this doesn’t become a loophole that in the short term erodes the broader discipline of priestly celibacy in the Catholic Church.

ABERNETHY: And, John and Kim, very quickly, Kim first, what do you see as any larger effects, very quickly?

LAWTON: Well, certainly Christianity is realigning in many ways around the world, and you’re finding people grouping together in new and different ways than they had in the past.

ABERNETHY: John, what do you see?

ALLEN: Well, I think in many ways ideology has replaced theology as the thing that drives Christian behavior at the grassroots. I mean, in the old days it was debates over things like the authority of the pope versus the Bible. These days it tends to be where do you stand on the culture wars, and that in many ways is what’s in play here.

LAWTON: Although a lot of the traditionalists would say those are theological issues, too.

ABERNETHY: Yeah. Kim Lawton, John Allen—many thanks.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a Road to Damascus story today about a hard-living, cynical Hollywood writer who says he hit bottom one day and was transformed by God. He used to specialize in scripts full of sex, violence, and evil. Now he’s a family man in Ohio. Our story is from Bob Faw.

BOB FAW: Once dubbed by Time magazine “America’s king of sex and violence,” Joe Eszterhas now bears the cross. This is more than ritual.

JOE ESZTERHAS: It’s a very, very serious and sacred moment to me.

FAW: You write, “I carry the cross as though I were actually carrying Christ.”

Mr. ESZTERHAS: Yes.

FAW: Worshipping at Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where he now lives, Eszterhas resembles only physically who he once was:  Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter, churning out erotic sizzlers like “Basic Instinct,” where depravity — indeed, evil — triumphed.

“I don’t know why God has blessed me and graced me the way God has.”

Actor WAYNE NIGHT (as Police Interrogator John Corelli in clip from “Basic Instinct”): Would you tell us the nature of your relationship with Mr. Boz?

Actress SHARON STONE (as Catherine Tramell in clip from “Basic Instinct”): I had sex with him for about a year and a half.

Mr. ESZTERHAS: I was drawn to dark subjects and dark themes, and I wrote out of a very dark space at that particular point in my life.

FAW: The 16 films he wrote grossed over $1 billion, financed homes in Malibu and Maui, along with an outrageous lifestyle.

(reading from notes): “I’ve been a bad boy all my life. I was the king-daddy of sex and violence, the wild hair, the rogue elephant, the drinking, drugging, wild man, the cocaine cowboy.”

Mr. ESZTERHAS: That’s all true. Yeah, I did do all that. The booze was out of control. The waking up in the morning and not knowing where I was or who I was with was out of control.

FAW: The alcohol and the cigarettes almost killed him. In 2001, doctors removed 80 percent of his cancerous larynx and inserted a trachea for breathing. Unable to change his ways, high-flying Joe Ezsterhas crashed.

Mr. ESZTERHAS: It was probably the most desolate moment of my life, and a block away from here I sat down on a curb, sweating, shaking, trying to get the bugs out of my trachea, trying to breathe properly, and I started to cry.

FAW: Slumped on that curb, Eszterhas says he felt a dazzling presence, and he heard a voice within.

Mr. ESZTERHAS: And I kept hearing this voice saying, “Please God, help me,” and I realized it was my voice inside my head and that I was praying.

FAW: He was, he writes in his memoir “Crossbearer,” God-struck, and the ultimate Hollywood animal who had scorned religion did not find God. God, he says, found him.

Father Dan Schlegel

Mr. ESZTERHAS: When you’re absolutely cracked open, and you’re completely vulnerable and desolate, when I opened myself up to the possibility of God entering my heart, I think God did. That day I was ambushed by God.

FAW: That recognition of weakness, says Rabbi David Wolpe, who has studied and written about how the desperate find faith—that recognition is the beginning of strength, even salvation.

Rabbi DAVID WOLPE (Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, CA): I do think that great joy and great sadness or illness sort of crack open something inside you, and it makes you open to things that you before that thought were absurd or ridiculous.

Father DAN SCHLEGEL (Church of the Holy Angels, Chagrin Falls, OH): Somebody wrote God comes through the wound, and, you know, sometimes it’s not until we’re really broken people that God has an entryway into our lives.

FAW: Father Dan Schlegel is Joe’s priest at Holy Angels.

Fr. SCHLEGEL: For Joe, I think that there were other gods before him, whether it was alcohol, or whether it was power or money or prestige, or whatever it was, and when all those things didn’t work anymore and he was broken, in  a sense there’s an openness for God to come in.

FAW: Joe Eszterhas had lived through radical change before. Born in Hungary during the Second World War, he spent nearly five years in refugee camps. But the change, which began on that sidewalk in 2001, his wife Naomi recalls, took some adjustment.

NAOMI ESZTERHAS: His transformation, to use that phrase, was so gradual. It was very gradual. Joe is a cynic. He’s had a very — he had a hard life, you know. He ate pine-needle soup in the refugee camps. He was scalded in the refugee camps. He had rickets. He lived in abject poverty. So when he first took those baby steps toward God, it wasn’t without cynicism. I think he went, “OK, I’m going to go down this road.”

Father Bob Stec

FAW: For Eszterhas that road meant, with his entire family, starting to attend church weekly, also reading and studying widely about God and theology. Still, he found himself unsure, tentative, even wary until one Sunday when his former priest, Father Bob Stec, approached him after a service.

Father BOB STEC (Pastor, St. Ambrose Catholic Church, Brunswick, OH): I was literally just drawn to stop and simply share with him a simple phrase: “Joe, the best is yet to come”— with a message of hope, a message of assurance that it was going to be OK. It was just as if God said, “Joe needs to hear these words today.”

Mr. ESZTERHAS (praying): …to Christ our Lord. Amen.

FAW: Now, devoted to his wife and four young sons and pronounced cured of cancer by his doctors, Joe Eszterhas says life has never been better.

Ms. ESZTERHAS: I think he’s more careful. He’s more Christian. He’s more—less cynical and more willing to believe the goodness in people than he is the darkness. I always tell him, “You’ve been co-opted by God, and now you’re working for him, because you used to dance with the devil.”

FAW: The question you would ask yourself is, then, why do I deserve to be singled out like this?

Mr. ESZTERHAS: I don’t. I don’t. I don’t know why God has blessed me and graced me the way God has. In terms of my own view of my life, you know, it’s something miraculous. I thank God for gracing me. I always will. But in my own mind I don’t deserve it.

FAW: And it is that sense of mystery, even wonder, which he conveys at public readings of the book he subtitles “A Memoir of Faith.”

Mr. ESZTERHAS: This is how I found God, or how God found me.

FAW: Recently Eszterhas has completed two screenplays, each one a thriller, but neither focusing on the perverse or the tormented.

Rabbi David Wolpe

FAW: You can’t write “blood and hair on the walls” with God in your heart?

Mr. ESZTERHAS: Yeah, you know, to get involved in that thought process, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that.

FAW: Walking with his wife, or alone, three times every day Joe Eszterhas prays — mostly what he calls “thank you” prayers.

Mr. ESZTERHAS: I pray for God’s presence to be in my heart, to continue to be in my heart

Rabbi WOLPE: What I tell people to pray for who are in trouble is closeness, is to not be alone; is to feel that God is with you. That prayer — that’s a powerful prayer. That’s a real prayer, and that’s a prayer I believe that gets answered.

FAW: And seven years after being what he calls God-struck, Joe Eszterhas, a lifelong skeptic, has no doubts that his prayers have been heard.

Mr. ESZTERHAS: I think questioning and doubt are good, and I think they build faith, in my own particular case. Seven years down the line I can say to you that my life has been transformed, and I find a sense of solace and strength that simply wasn’t in my life before.

FAW: Joe Eszterhas then, born anew — from Malibu to Ohio; Jack Daniels to Sprite; Sharon Stone to Jesus. From darkness into light.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Bob Faw in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: There’s a woman in San Francisco, Sara Miles, who used to be a journalist and an atheist. But she had a conversion experience and is now a leader in her church, where she feeds the homeless full-time. Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: It happens every Friday. Sometimes the line stretches around two city blocks — people who are hungry, poor, some homeless, all struggling to make ends meet, waiting outside San Francisco’s St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church.

SARA MILES (Director, St. Gregory’s Food Pantry and Author, TAKE THIS BREAD): They’re members of the “Church of the One True Sack of Groceries.”

SEVERSON: The woman greeting everyone as if they are old family friends is Sara Miles. This is the same woman who spent most of her life as an avowed atheist and who is now running a church food pantry.

MILES: Church was not part of my family life, and I don’t think I ever expected to find myself being a Christian or, as I used to think of it, a “religious nut.” And again, I met plenty of Christians who I respected. But I think also I had this idea that Christianity was a religion that was kind of fundamentalist, kind of harsh, and more about setting rules of who belonged and who didn’t belong.

SEVERSON: She is the very same woman who as a journalist covered the 1980s wars in Central America up close where people were dying, and later became an editor for the left-leaning investigative magazine “Mother Jones.” It was after that that she found herself walking into St. Gregory Church.

MILES: I was just curious. I’m a reporter. I’m curious. I like to poke my nose in places, and I walked into this building thinking, “Huh, wonder what’s going on in there?”

SEVERSON: What Sara found was a church that offers Communion to everyone, including strangers.

MILES: And then a woman put a piece of fresh bread in my hand and gave me a goblet of some rather nasty, sweet wine. And I ate the bread and was completely thunderstruck by what I felt happening to me. So I stood there crying, completely unsure of what was happening to me. Got out of the church as quickly as I could before some strange, creepy Christian would try to chat with me, and came back the next week because I was hungry, and kept coming back and kept coming back to take that bread.

SEVERSON: Now she and her hearty band of volunteers collect five to six tons of donated bread and tomatoes and groceries every week, and then give it away. Many of these volunteers were once standing in the line themselves waiting for help. The priest at St. Gregory, Father Paul Fromberg, says many of them still need it.

Father PAUL FROMBERG (St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church): A lot of people here are, you know, addicts that have overcome their addictions. They are people that have been locked up, people that are actually homeless, people that live in marginal housing. But it actually doesn’t matter where people come from because we’re not doing purity checks. You know, we’re not trying to say, “Are you good enough to be here?”

SEVERSON: David first came to St. Gregory looking for food six years ago.

DAVID: This is my workout for the week.

SEVERSON: What do you do the rest of the week?

DAVID: I’m looking for work right now.

SEVERSON: Eduardo has been volunteering for eight months.

EDUARDO: I think it’s just fantastic. It’s a nice thing to do because it fills your heart.

SEVERSON: Mike gave up his heroin addiction in San Quentin prison and has been drug-free 14 years.

MIKE: The whole church and the whole ambience in this church — they’re the most easy-going people, and they don’t try to impose their belief on anybody else.

Fr. FROMBERG: So the good news today is the good news that everybody here is welcome.

SEVERSON: The altar at St. Gregory’s is located in the middle of the chapel, accessible to everyone. The murals on the ceiling honor people of all faiths. On food pantry day, the lay preacher who was an atheist becomes a chef, something she was actually trained to be. She and Father Paul are elbows-deep in the kitchen preparing lunch and a show of appreciation for the volunteers.

Fr. FROMBERG: When I cook lunch for people, I do it because that’s what a priest does. A priest feeds people. And the delight that I take in it is the delight people have when they are able to eat together, sit down at a table with tablecloth and with real plates and real silverware. Like Jesus said, you will know me when you break bread together.

MIKE: Battle stations! Come on. Chop, chop.

SEVERSON: After lunch, it’s time to get to work. Volunteers only let in a few from the line outside at a time, so these people in need won’t feel rushed or insignificant. The goal is to treat everyone with dignity. They feed as many as 500 families every Friday this way, but it’s more like a celebration than a handout.

MILES: We offer food to everybody without exception. We offer food to whoever walks in the door. We’re the people that nobody wanted. You know, we’re gay people and we’re poor people and we’re people living on the streets. And we’re old ladies and cripples and whores and little children and foreigners and exactly the kind of people Jesus liked to hang out with.

Fr. FROMBERG: The Gospel is full of stories where Jesus is eating with inappropriate people. And in fact at one point in the Gospel, the critics of Jesus say the worst thing they can think to say about him, which is this man welcomes sinners and eats with them.

SEVERSON: God’s love, in Sara’s view comes down to one thing, feeding the hungry. Her mission and her faith always seem to reach back to that moment she first took Communion at St. Gregory.

MILES: I think what I discovered in that moment when I put the bread in my mouth and was so blown away by the reality of Jesus was that the requirement for faith turned out not to be believing in a doctrine, or knowing how to behave in a church, or being the right kind of person, or being raised correctly, or repeating the rituals. The requirement for faith seemed to be hunger. It was the hunger that I had always had and the willingness to be fed by something I didn’t understand.

SEVERSON: Since her conversion, it hasn’t always been easy. She’s lost some old friends who think she’s nuts. And collecting enough food for her growing clientele is a constant challenge. But she has not looked back.

(to Ms. Miles): You think you’ve found your calling?

MILES: Feeding people and being fed? Yeah, I do. I love doing this. I love doing this. You know, people sometimes say, “Oh, you’re so good. What a good deed you’re doing.” You know, I don’t do it to be good. I just have a blast. I love this work, and I love these people.

SEVERSON: Sara Miles now has plans to put food pantries in schools and community centers. Her most recent book is about her transformation. It’s called TAKE THIS BREAD.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in San Francisco.