FATHER PAOLO DALL’OGLIO (Deir Mar Musa Monastery): I think that we need the protection of civilians that are involved in the civil war in some parts of Syria, especially on the Orontes River and in Damascus. So we need the protection of UN forces, and for this we need the agreement between US and Russia, in the first term. And we really hope that seeking the protection of people, Russia will accept to send, that the United Nations send forces for this. Then we need non-armed forces to help for the democratic transformation of Syria. it is the will of the people. But for this we don’t need an invasion; we just need people to be allowed to build the Syria they want.

The Syrians are suffering, because of the sanctions, economically. Many of them have been obliged to leave their own home. We have, I think, more than 2 million, more than 2 million Syrians are not living in their normal homes, have been obliged to leave. Most of the Syrians are afraid. So many have lost their children. They have people in prison. They have been shot by torturers. So we are a very pained people, and we beg the solidarity of the people of the world and of USA in a very particular way.

The fight for freedom will be transformed in a civil war, and this will create space for all kinds of extremisms and crimes against humanity and disasters. So it is the responsibility of the international community, of the global civil society, to come and take care and assist the transformation of Syria, in collaboration with the Syrian civil society.

Syria is, for example, one of the oldest countries that has received Christianity. All the Christians of the world, they are in a debt to the church of Syria. Syria has been one of the place where Islam has developed its most high qualities. All the Muslims of the world are in debt with Syria. Syria has been the place also for Jewish community. I think the Jewish community of the world should take care of Syria, and Syria has been one of the mothers of civilization, of the Mediterranean civilization and the human civilization, so please take care of Syria.

The monastery is still in Syria, thank God, and they are receiving people and acting for reconciliation and peace, and I think they are a good seed for a good Syria coming soon.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: More about the week’s religion and ethics news now from Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and David Gibson, national reporter for Religion News Service, who joins us from New York. Welcome to you both. David, out of all the tragedy in Colorado there has emerged another debate about gun control. Should it be considered a pro-life, a right-to-life issue like abortion? What are people saying?

DAVID GIBSON (Religion News Service): Well, this debate, Bob, was really prompted in the hours after the shooting by a column by Father James Martin, a Jesuit at America magazine, popular author, who wrote an essay saying, look, gun control and gun violence is a pro-life issue as much as abortion, as the death penalty, as euthanasia, and pro-lifers, traditional pro-lifers should get behind it in that context. Well, of course, again, of all the many debates that have come out of this horrific episode that opened up another branch in the moral and religious realm in our society, with a lot of people pushing back and saying no, abortion is the paramount pro-life issue. Anything else would be a distraction. So you kind of had an interesting paradox almost of pro-life folks who are arguing for restrictions on abortion saying there should be no restrictions on guns. And then you had a lot of liberals who favor the right to abortion saying no, we should have restrictions on guns.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: And it sort of highlights a debate that’s been going on among evangelicals and Catholics in particular about this hierarchy of the life issues. And we saw this also in the discussions between the nuns and the Vatican. Some people say if everything is pro-life then it really loses the meaning and that there is a hierarchy of life issues and abortion should be at the top and these other issues shouldn’t. So this situation sort of highlighted that ongoing debate.

ABERNETHY: David, another discussion or debate that came out of the Colorado thing was whether what happened was evil or whether whatever happened is the kind of thing that we ought to be able and should do something about so that it won’t happen in the future, that we have the power to act and repair the world if we can, as opposed to being helpless if it’s evil and nothing we can do about it.

GIBSON: Yeah, and Bob, it almost kind of goes back to the old faith-versus-works debate in Christian theology about, look, was this just a spiritual crisis, a triumph of evil, almost demonic possession some would say, that you really have no control about? This is “suffering happens.” Evil happens in the world. It’s about how we deal with that in the aftermath. Or whether, look, it’s not just about praying for victims and praying to hope that this doesn’t happen again, but also working as believers to, as you say, repair the world, to institute perhaps better gun control laws or make public policies that would prevent this kind of gun violence from happening again. You had a real fierce, really religious debate at the heart of this.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Monsignor William Lynn became the first Catholic official in the country to be convicted of a crime for covering up sex abuse by some of the priests that he supervised—three to six years he got. David, Kim, what’s being said about the severity of that sentence?

LAWTON: Well, you had some people arguing that maybe this was too severe. One of the priests that he was accused of sheltering got less time than he did, so there was some concern about that. But also in a week when you also saw the Penn State punishments coming down, there was some discussion about accountability, and is it institutions that should be held accountable or individuals, and who all is harmed? And certainly we saw with the Catholic Church there have been some concerns by some of the victims groups that there hasn’t been enough accountability at the top of the institution, and so that came out again this week.

ABERNETHY: And at Penn State it seemed like, to many people, like a kind of a blanket punishment rather than, as you say, singling out the people at the very top who could be held responsible.

LAWTON: Well, and there are some in the Catholic Church that would argue that a lot of people in the Church also ended up suffering the consequences of the situation.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly and David Gibson of Religion News Service.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Now a special report. Fifty years ago this fall, Pope John XXIII summoned church leaders to Rome for a series of meetings on how to make the church more relevant in the modern world. This Second Vatican Council, as it was known, produced some significant changes in Catholic life. Fifty years later, the legacy of Vatican II is still debated, and that debate has been evident in the current crisis between the Vatican and many US nuns. In April, the Vatican accused the umbrella group that represents the majority of American nuns of “doctrinal confusion.” But many of these sisters say they are just following the spirit of Vatican II. Kim Lawton reports.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: In Washington, D.C., Sister Maureen Fiedler hosts the public radio program Interfaith Voices. She tries to broaden interreligious understanding in order to further justice and peace, values she says come straight from her Roman Catholic faith.

SISTER MAUREEN FIEDLER (Host, Interfaith Voices): This isn’t something peripheral. This is central to the preaching of the Gospel.

LAWTON: Fiedler entered religious life 50 years ago, just before Vatican II got underway. She says the spirit of the Vatican meetings had a profound impact on how she viewed her calling.

FIEDLER: The Second Vatican Council had a marvelous document called “The Church in the Modern World,” which basically underlined the message of justice and peace in the Gospel.

LAWTON: Fiedler became involved in a series of social justice causes, including a 37-day fast in support of the Equal Rights Amendment and rallies in support of the ordination of female priests.

FIEDLER: It just all fit together as a piece for me, and it also fit together in my prayer as I tried to put this together with the Second Vatican Council. It simply made sense to try to alleviate the suffering of the poor, to end wars, to overcome discrimination. That for me was Christianity.

LAWTON: But some critics say many Catholic sisters have been using the Second Vatican Council to justify positions and activities that are in conflict with official church teachings. Colleen Carroll Campbell is a columnist and author.

COLLEEN CARROLL CAMPBELL (Author, My Sisters the Saints: A Spiritual Memoir): This idea that having this Second Vatican Council and pronouncing that there’s this amorphous spirit that gives us license to pretty much throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak, when it comes to Catholic doctrine—it’s simply wrong, and I think we’ve heard over and over from Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI that it’s wrong.

LAWTON: Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in October 1962 in order, as he put it, to “open a window and let in a little fresh air.”

PROFESSOR COLLEEN MCDANNELL (Professor of History and Religious Studies, University of Utah and Author, The Spirit of Vatican II): Even though in the United States there were a lot of changes going on in the 40’s and 50’s after the Second World War, in worldwide Catholicism these changes really hadn’t occurred. And so in order to open up a window for the whole church, not just in modernized countries, this council was called.

LAWTON: Over the next three years, church leaders at the council produced 16 documents on a host of topics, from introducing local languages into the Mass to expanding lay involvement and promoting more interfaith dialogue. One of the documents focused on religious life. It encouraged Catholic sisters to reexamine their mission, their rules, even their style of dress.

FIEDLER: It called us to go back and look at our foundresses and the spirit in which they started the communities, and when you look at those women who were foundresses, none of them are pussycats, I’m here to tell you. They were strong women who did things and started ministries that were, in many ways, unheard of in their own day.

LAWTON: Many US sisters began modifying or even eliminating the traditional habit. The clothing changes for prioresses of the Dominican sisters in Amityville, New York, were dramatic.

SISTER MARY HUGHES (Dominican Sisters of Amityville): You’ll see in the early years it was very much the same, and then there were some modifications, and then right after Vatican II, immediately, Mother Francis Maureen Carlin is in the modified habit completely, Sister Irene Garvey is in a white suit, and then from Mary Ryan on you’ll see suits, you’ll see various forms of clothing.

LAWTON: Sister Mary Hughes is the current prioress. She says even more than clothing changes, Vatican II urged nuns to get out into the community.

HUGHES: I think that’s one of the great gifts of Vatican II—that it sent us back to study what the Gospels were saying, and over and over again it was about feed the hungry, visit those in prison, help the poor.

LAWTON: The Dominican sisters in Amityville have a variety of ministries designed to help those at the margins, such as literacy classes to teach new immigrant women English. There are homes to help women and children with nowhere else to live, and there’s even an organic garden, where about 20 percent of the produce is donated to an interfaith food network.

Under an umbrella organization called the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, or LCWR, many communities of nuns began shifting their ministries in the wake of Vatican II. For some sisters, it was an exhilarating time. But others were concerned.

MCDANNELL: There was a minority of women who didn’t feel that the changes were appropriate, that the adaptations to modern life, the moving out of the parish into the world, that these movements had gone too far.

LAWTON: Some nuns became part of a separate organization that holds more traditional views.

SISTER MARY JOSEPH HEISLER (Carmelite Sisters of the Divine Heart of Jesus): The Vatican II documents are a pretty straightforward read. I think the difficulty comes when you don’t read everything in context, perhaps. I would find it difficult to read the documents, then come up with them saying something more than what they say.

LAWTON: The LCWR still represents about 80 percent of the some 57,000 American nuns. The group has increasingly taken on advocacy positions, including some that are controversial.

MCDANNELL: These are the sisters that publicly stated to John Paul II that women should be ordained, that women should be allowed to work in all the ministries of the church. This is the same organization that signed the New York Times letter which said that there is a legitimate, diverse opinion on the question of abortion.

LAWTON: Sister Mary Hughes is immediate past president of the LCWR and still part of its leadership team.

HUGHES: Are there persons who have divergent opinions? I think that’s true in the whole church; it’s not just true in religious life. I think sometimes there’s a concern if we raise a question that means that we are in defiance, and that’s not at all what happens. But I think we’re going to continue to raise the questions, because there might be areas that we would hope the church would look at.

LAWTON: In 2008, Vatican officials began an investigation into the lives and doctrine of US women religious. This past April, the Vatican released a report accusing the LCWR of having “serious doctrinal problems.” The assessment specifically criticized the group for being largely silent on right-to-life issues, and it mandated that the group come under the authority of some US bishops.

HUGHES: We’re stuck with a situation that a mandate that we are not happy about, that we answered all the questions that we’re given to us in the doctrinal assessment honestly, carefully, prudently, and when we didn’t hear back, I guess we thought that we were believed. And I think there are aspects of the mandate that make us wonder if our materials were read.

LAWTON: For example, Hughes says she believes there is more than one way to promote the sanctity of human life. She says her community’s ministries against domestic violence and in support of homeless mothers and children is also prolife work.

HUGHES: That’s about the sanctity of human life. It’s about doing it differently. I think it’s complementary. I don’t think you can have one without the other.

LAWTON: Others say that’s not enough.

CAMPBELL: We’re talking about defending the sanctity of every human life from the cradle to the grave, defending the sanctity of marriage as the church sees marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and just generally promoting church teaching, and upholding that teaching and witnessing with joy to that, and that’s not what many lay Catholics have seen.

LAWTON: Professor McDannell says since the death of John the XXIII church leaders have appeared to be consolidating authority.

MCDANNELL: The new generation of men want a Catholic Church which is more traditional, which is more devotional, which is more willing to be obedient to the authority.

LAWTON: Some wonder if there is any room for dialogue and debate.

FIEDLER: This is not just about the Vatican versus the nuns. This really is about the future of how we interpret the message of the Second Vatican Council, and what’s going on right now quite frankly makes me sad, because I see certain people in Rome, in the Vatican, who want retrenchment, who want to go back to the church the way it was before the Second Vatican Council, when the church was essentially the hierarchy, and they determined everything down to sometimes the minutia of Catholic life.

CAMPBELL: Women religious need to stand with the Church, and if they don’t feel that they can in good conscience do that anymore then I think it would take more integrity to simply step back and say, you know, maybe we’re not called to be Catholic women religious anymore. Maybe we want to be something else.

LAWTON: Many lay Catholics have been rallying in support of the sisters. Hughes says they been getting letters of encouragement from across the country. She says she remains hopeful that, in the spirit of Vatican II, healing can prevail.

HUGHES: There’s always a blessing that comes with every conflict. Perhaps the blessing is that we continue to open up within the Church avenues for true dialogue and true dialogue isn’t about winners and losers. It’s about people truly being able to listen to understand the other perspective before making any judgments.

LAWTON: LCWR members will be meeting in St. Louis in early August to discuss their official response to the Vatican assessment.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

DR. SHEILA CANBY (Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Islamic Art): Overall, the collection has twelve thousand objects; and we are showing twelve hundred.

There are motifs that you find across a very wide geographic spread, and that wouldn’t have happened if those regions hadn’t been unified by a single religion, being Islam.

The use of the Arabic script, of course, spread, as the religion spread. They reverse it, they do mirror writing, tiny writing, huge writing.

The written word in Islam is of absolute paramount importance. And the act of copying a Quran is an act of devotion, religious devotion.

A mihrab is, of course, the central focus in a mosque. It’s what people face when they pray and in a mosque would be lined up so that the people facing it are facing the direction of Mecca.

We have glass mosque lamps. We have one or two ceramic ones as well. They were probably made in sets to be used in mausoleums and madrassas and mosques.

Our newest gallery is our Moroccan court, which was built here over a six-month period by a group of craftsmen from Fez. What it is is an adaptation of the type of courtyard that one finds in several madrassas, religious schools or seminaries, in Fez. But, you know, our court is just tiny by comparison to those, so the challenge really was that we had to design it in such a way that they could kind of shrink but keep the proportions right. The tile panels are actually inspired by a tile panel in Alhambra.

One of the stories we wanted to tell, really, was about the complexity of society in Spain while it was still under Muslim control, and so we have actually two Hebrew manuscripts. The Hebrew Bible is fascinating because it has a page with what looks like geometric designs. But then if you look closely you realize that all these geometric designs are made from micro-writing, and in the same case we have pages from a Quran that was written in micro-writing. So not only were the geometric designs being shared and used by people of different faiths, but also the whole idea of this tiny writing seems to have appealed to both Muslims and to Jews in Spain.

We have a recent acquisition, actually, which is a painting that depicts the goddess Bhairavi Devi, and she sits with the god Shiva in a sort of charnel ground. It’s a Hindu subject; it’s a ferocious Hindu subject, in fact, and it has this goddess whose eyes are just drilling the viewer. So it just shows, especially in a place like India, what a completely complex society in terms of religion it was at the time.

Muhammad is depicted in certain contexts. There were illustrated histories which show the life of Muhammad. Then in the poetic context, really in mystical poetry, we find depictions of this Mirage, the Night Journey, and he’s riding on a human-headed horse up to heaven. These were images that were painted by Muslim painters for Muslim patrons. So it was completely within a Muslim context that they were done. There was nothing untoward at all about them.

What I would hope is that people would understand that although the religion infuses all of these lands and these historical periods that regions were individual, and regions had particular styles. And also the commonality with mankind, which is that we all have—we all eat and have bowls to eat from, we all, you know—there are so many things that are common to all of us, and to think of things in that way, I think, humanizes the religion and humanizes the objects to people who are not familiar with it.