BOB ABERNETHY, host: The Vatican released a major report this week cracking down on the umbrella group that represents most of the Catholic nuns in the United States. The report criticized the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) for what it called “serious doctrinal problems.” While acknowledging the group promotes social justice, the report faulted the sisters for being silent on other issues dealing with the right to life, including abortion and euthanasia. Members of the conference were also chastised for publicly challenging the Catholic bishops on certain occasions.

We have an analysis now of the Vatican’s charges and their consequences from David Gibson, national reporter for Religion News Service, a longtime Vatican observer, and author of the book The Rule of Benedict. He joins us from New York. David, welcome.

DAVID GIBSON (National Reporter, Religion News Service): Good to be here, Bob.

ABERNETHY: What stood out for you in this report, this challenge?

GIBSON: Well, Bob, I think it was really significant that this announcement came the day before Pope Benedict celebrated the seventh anniversary of his election as pope. Back seven years ago in 2005 when he was elected, so many people thought he’d be the German enforcer when he became pope, and that really hadn’t proved to be the case for most of his seven years on the throne of St. Peter’s, and many are wondering if this signals a new crackdown overall from the Vatican. The nuns were certainly very surprised at this announcement. They didn’t expect it, and they’re sort of formulating their response, and how that back and forth goes over these next few months will be really telling, I think.

ABERNETHY: But what is the Vatican going to do. and what are the U.S. bishops going to do to the nuns? They’ve got—they’re going to have severe oversight, right?

GIBSON: Yeah. I think you could compare it to a hostile takeover, more or less. They’re going to take this organization. and the bishops have the canonical authority under church law, so they can kind of do what they want. In fact, the nuns, the LCWR is thinking or one option they may have is simply disbanding.

ABERNETHY: Leadership Conference on Women Religious.

GIBSON: Yeah, the Leadership Conference on Women Religious. They’re thinking of simply disbanding and reorganizing on their own, out from under the church’s purview. But the church will have, they have—the archbishop of Seattle has a five-year mandate to oversee this overhaul, and they can rewrite their statutes and vet their speakers for their conferences and pretty much do as they like.

ABERNETHY: Do you see a role that the U.S. bishops might have played in preparing and going along with this announcement?

GIBSON: Yeah. I think obviously the bishops were on board with this. In past years, even under the late Pope John Paul II, the American bishops often pushed back on some of these things and defended their own, or they were involved in negotiations to try and mediate an agreement before you had this kind of firm crackdown. But, obviously, I think the bishops were on board with the Vatican from the get-go on this.

ABERNETHY: Some people have said that they see signs of a split within the Catholic community—between attention to social service, taking the care of the poor and all on the one hand, and religious freedom, defending religious freedom on the other, as the bishops are trying very hard to do, especially on proposals for health care reform. Do you see that, and is this part of that?

GIBSON: I think to a degree it is, Bob. I think it’s really the split between social justice, between doing all those things that the nuns in America and sisters throughout Catholic history have done, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, running hospitals and universities, educational institutions, schools, and the more doctrinal issues, the pro-life, anti-gay marriage initiatives, the preaching that the bishops want to do, and the bishops are really wanting to get everyone on board here.

ABERNETHY:Thank you very much, David Gibson of Religion News Service.

GIBSON: Thank you.

Teacher (speaking to students): So I want about four people per bench. Go. Grab your journals.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: These boys, grades six through eight, are having fun examining mollusks and worms in a typical science class. The school they attend is anything but typical, however. There are only 40 students here—all boys—and though they study the usual subjects, these boys are here for something more. This is the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School. Boys come here to sing. Music is so important that this place has been described not as a school with a choir, but as a choir with a school. The music director is John Robinson.

JOHN ROBINSON: They would have started in the monastic tradition, when boys would have gone to the monastery to seek an education, and at some point during the time that the boys were getting this education, they would have joined the monks in singing.

VALENTE: Robinson, now 29, is the product of a famous choir school in England, where boys’ choirs have long been a part of the Anglican tradition.

ROBINSON: In England where I’m from, the choir schools began perhaps in the seventh century. Initially, the monks would have been singing chant, all on one note, and as the history of music progressed they started to sing in more than one part. They needed the boys to sing higher parts. The unique sound of a boys’ choir is particularly fascinating to work with, because we know it’s the sound that composers had in their ears when they were conceiving much of the music.

VALENTE: Boys’ choirs were never a large part of the Catholic tradition in the U.S., but in 1963 the choirmaster at St. Paul’s Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts established a choir school to help preserve and promote sacred classical music in the U.S. Today, the St. Paul Boys Choir is the only one of its kind in the country. There are no other Catholic choir schools. The reasons: changing tastes in music, the costs of training the boys, and the trend toward boy-girl choirs. Here, daily rehearsals start each morning before 8:00.

ROBINSON: At that first rehearsal, I’ll do some exercises to warm up different parts of their voices.

(to the boys) Okay, let’s get the lips warmed up.

ROBINSON: We do arpeggios with funny words. “My car has flat tires” is one that we often do.

VALENTE: The boys, most of whom are Catholic, must learn to sight-read hundreds of pieces of music.

ROBINSON: The boys sing music right from the word “go” in music history. They sing classical music as well as the music by Mozart, Hayden, Mass settings by those composers, and into the Romantic period with motet–Bruckner, Mendelssohn, Romantic composers, and then into the modern day as well.
Piano Teacher: Good. Let’s just try the right hand alone from here, okay?

VALENTE: Each student is also required to learn to play the piano. Some learn other instruments as well. Alex Pattavina, a tenth-grader, learned to play the organ when he was at the choir school and now plays at a Sunday Mass here.

ROBINSON (speaking to choir): It’s a lovely sound, but it’s just very unclear, the words “I cry out “Praised be the Lord.”

Singing ” I cry out, “Praised be the Lord.”

VALENTE: The rigorous curriculum makes recruiting a challenge. To find boys who can sing like this, Robinson visits dozens of schools in the Boston area, auditioning third and fourth graders.

ROBINSON: We’d sing a song, maybe “Happy Birthday” or the National Anthem or something like that, and then test them each individually, just very briefly and very positively, to see whether they have that ability to match pitch. When we say “matching pitch” with a boy we mean that we play or sing a note to a boy and we see if he can sing that note back to us accurately. The one word that defines what we’re looking for is “potential”—that we don’t expect to find boys who can already do all the things that we’re going to teach.

AIDAN LEWIS (Chorister): When I was in the fourth grade, I tried out for a play, and it had a singing part in it, and my music teacher said that I had an amazing voice, and she told my mom about this school, and she sent me here, and then when I came here I started to realize I had a good voice.

VALENTE: The school’s $5,000 annual tuition doesn’t cover the cost of educating the boys. The difference is made up through donations and money the choir earns from what are called “working scholarships,” that is, public performances like this one at Fenway Park. The have also sung at weddings and at funerals, including those of Rose Kennedy and Tip O’Neill. They sing at Masses six days a week. But some boys may have to drop out of the choir before they graduate.

ROBINSON: Boys’ voices are going to change, and there’s very little that can be done about that. For many boys it really is no man’s land vocally, and the sound that they can produce is unpredictable and sometimes embarrassing, so we just have to be very kind to them when that day comes because, of course, it’s quite shocking that suddenly their whole life for the last four years as they’ve known it singing these beautiful treble parts is no longer happening in that way.

VALENTE: Those whose voices have changed can sometimes continue with the choir, learning to sing in falsetto. Others will serve as altar boys or ushers or will sit with the congregation, singing to encourage those around them.

ROBINSON: When I’m conducting the choir so many things are going through my mind. You’re thinking about the effect it’s having on the people listening. Sometimes their concentration will wander. They’ll start to do something they shouldn’t be doing. You have to wave at them and that kind of thing, and that can be very distracting to a performance, so you’re constantly trying to train those things out of them and get them purely to focus on singing.

VALENTE: How do you impart a love of this difficult music to these very young boys?

ROBINSON: They come to it, and they find something intrinsically beautiful about it, and other times they don’t really get it, and then my job’s harder to try and show them what’s good about it or what’s interesting about it, and different boys react in so many different ways. Sometimes they learn from each other. You’ll get one boy who loves it, and other people catch on when they see that he loves it.

VALENTE: Forrest Eimold is twelve years old. He sings, plays the organ, and composes.

FORREST EIMOLD (Chorister): It’s one thing to sing or play a piece by somebody, like let’s say Mozart, and you can definitely express emotion in that, but it’s another thing entirely to be able to express your own emotions and to write exactly what you want.

VALENTE: What have you written? What have you composed lately?

EIMOLD: I’ve composed many works for piano. I recently finished my second piano sonata. I’m currently working on a Mass for the choir school to sing, actually. And I’ve done some other short pieces.

VALENTE: At High Mass on Sunday morning, the boys sing with the men.

ROBINSON: When the boys sing with the men of the choir on a Sunday morning, the dynamic is rather different. If they hear professional adult singers singing, they’re far more likely to imitate something which is good like that and to learn from the way that the adults around them are singing, so I think it’s a very positive dynamic.

VALENTE: The pastor of St. Paul Parish is Father Michael Drea.

REV. MICHAEL DREA (Pastor, St. Paul Parish): That music that the boys provide can be such a source of inspiration to Catholics as well as those who are searching to better understand who God is and to come to a greater knowledge and appreciation of the many gifts and graces that God bestows on individuals.

ROBINSON: I think the boys get an absolutely unique experience, because they’re learning confidence to sing in front of people from an early age. One of the most satisfying things of all is to see a boy who doesn’t realize he has potential and talent coming into the school in the fifth grade or the fourth grade and leaving three or four years later having learned so many skills that he would never even have imagined he could have learned when he first came in, and seeing that confidence grow is a wonderful thing.

VALENTE: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Judy Valente in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: Many churches hold health fairs, but this blood pressure screening at Queen of the Rosary Roman Catholic Church in suburban Chicago is a little different.

Diane Tieman (speaking to parishioner): You actually cook for yourself? That’s good.

POTTER: It’s a regular event organized and run by Diane Tieman, a registered nurse who’s on the church staff.

TIEMAN: I do health education classes. I do blood pressure screenings. I take calls from people that want information about the health care system, about themselves and their health concerns.

POTTER: And she does a lot more. Home visits are an essential part of Tieman’s job as a parish or faith community nurse, helping church members, many of whom are elderly, prepare for doctor visits and surgeries.

Tieman: Let’s just listen to your heart.

POTTER: Parish nurses are health counselors and advocates. They do not provide treatment. But there’s more to the job than checking vital signs, reviewing medications, and helping people navigate the health care system.

TIEMAN: People just need to be heard and need to be listened to, and as a parish nurse that’s one of the greatest things that we do is be present and just listen.

BOB FORREST: Diane’s been a gem. If she doesn’t make it to heaven, nobody will. She’s been great.

POTTER: Parish nursing is one of the fastest growing specialty practices recognized by the American Nurses Association. Registered nurses with at least two years’ experience are certified after receiving additional training on how to care for the whole person—not just physically, but spiritually.

TIEMAN: It’s a matter of being an integrator of health and faith, and for us as parish nurses we really believe in that spiritual component, how important that is to an individual. And I know when I work with individuals many a-times if spiritually they’re not well, it’s very difficult for them to become physically well.

POTTER: Parish nurses also serve as lay ministers bringing prayers and sometimes communion to the people they visit.

Irene: I would have been lost without you. You kept me all in one piece, you know what I mean?

POTTER: Parish nursing traces its roots back to the 1800s, when religious orders in the U.S. and Europe offered care to the wider community. The modern program was launched 25 years ago by a Lutheran pastor here in Chicago, and it’s since spread around the world. Some 15,000 parish nurses are now at work in the United States alone.

MAUREEN DANIELS (International Parish Nurse Resource Center): It started out Christian, but actually we have a lot of Jewish faith community nurses. We have some Muslim—our Crescent nurses, and we also have some that are working in Buddhist communities, Hindu, and others.

POTTER: Maureen Daniels, herself a former parish nurse, now trains nurses to work in faith communities, looking after the whole person.

DANIELS: We’re not just our heart or our liver or our kidneys, you know. We have—there’s the person that’s there, and part of being a person is that whole dimension of spirit that makes us who we are. And you can’t break it down into pieces the way we’ve been doing, you know. It really needs to be, you know, who is this whole person? What is their life about?

DONNA SMITH-PUPILLO: Come in Susan, have a seat.

POTTER: Donna Smith-Pupillo coordinates a network of parish nurses in and around St. Louis. Some work mostly with the poor and uninsured or with young families. But they all share the same sense of purpose.

DONNA SMITH-PUPILLO (Deaconess Parish Nurse Ministry Network): Parish nursing is about the intentional care of the spirit and bringing back in for all of us a sense of wholeness that embraces both the mind, the body, and the spirit and that it’s doable for almost all congregations, synagogues, and mosques. It is doable. It’s not something that has to be paid. You can use volunteers. You can find someone who’s interested and wants to serve.

POTTER: Most parish nurses, in fact, are unpaid and work part-time. Some, like Diane Tieman, are paid partly by a church and partly by a hospital, where they also serve. On this day, Tieman has brought a hospitalized parishioner a handmade shawl.

Tieman (speaking to patient): It is filled with prayers, and this one was actually made by Jerri.

Patient: Thank Jerri for me.

Tieman: I will.

POTTER: There are some things a parish nurse can’t do, like administer medications or give injections. But they can offer programs other nurses don’t, like the Queen of the Rosary knitting group that makes the shawls…

Knitting Group: Dear Lord, bless my hands…

POTTER: …and prays for those who will receive them. Tieman also works with other faith communities setting up events like this labyrinth walk at a nearby Methodist church.

TIEMAN: I really feel like when people walk the labyrinth it’s a mind, body, and spirit experience because it not only makes you relaxed and stress relieved, but for those who regard it as a spiritual tool it really helps you to build your relationship with God.

POTTER: Tieman is not a member of the Catholic church where she works, although some parishes nurses are. Either way, experts say, the best predictor of success is the strong support of the pastor.

FATHER ED PERINE: I can’t be there for all those people all the time, and so she fills in, and parishioners fill in doing that. And she also keeps me apprised when there’s a special need, or somebody requests to see me, or someone is dying—that I can go and see them. I don’t know what we would do without Diane.

POTTER: Many parish nurses see their work as more of a calling than a job.

TIEMAN: For me it is. Yeah, it is. I feel blessed and really humble, because for me in this job it really has increased my own faith as I work with people.

LINDA LANTZ: She knows where I’ve come from. We’ve been prayer partners a long time. Without it, I don’t think I would survive.

(Praying): Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…

POTTER: Parish nursing can be demanding and stressful, like any other kind of nursing, but it has its own rewards.

TIEMAN: When I’m with somebody and look at them face-to-face or meet them heart-to-heart, I feel like it’s like meeting God head on and looking in his eyes.

POTTER: In Elk Grove, Illinois, I’m Deborah Potter for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Now, more on how the pope’s trip this week could affect Roman Catholics in Cuba. Joining me are Kim Lawton, our managing editor, and Patricia Zapor, a staff writer with Catholic News Service who was recently in Cuba. Pat, as recently as last month you were there, weren’t you?

PATRICIA ZAPOR (Catholic News Service): Yes.

ABERNETHY: For the ordinary Cubans, after all these years of official atheism by the state, persecution of religion in Cuba, are the ordinary Cubans wanting to have, be able to worship again? Are they wanting to be religious again?

ZAPOR: Well, Cubans want all sorts of freedoms, religious freedom among them. Atheism officially went away in 1992, and since then the Catholic Church has been creating more space for itself, and in ways that are trying to reach out to more Catholics, more of the general population of Cuba, and people want to participate in these things. There’s an energy.

ABERNETHY: But I think it’s, what, just a little over half of people who identify themselves as Catholics, and five percent of them only who go to Mass.

ZAPOR: Yeah, 60 to 70 percent of Cubans identify as Catholics. But people get their babies baptized, and they come back for funerals. So people are very culturally Catholics. It’s just the stuff in the middle that they’re out of the habit of participating in.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: How are they hoping that the visit of Pope Benedict will affect their lives, will maybe provide more space and more openness?

ZAPOR: Well, when Pope John Paul II visited in 1998, that led to new openness for the church, to the church being able to have outdoor celebrations for Easter and so on. And it also led to release of political prisoners and all sorts of other types of openness. And people have great hopes that that will happen again, that this pope will encourage and help prod the government to new openness in a whole variety of ways.

ABERNETHY: If a Cuban Catholic wants to participate openly in the church, and not hiding anything, is that person free to do so, or are they persecuted in some even informal way if they’re religious?

ZAPOR: I don’t have the impression that there’s ongoing persecution of people who just participate in the church. We did hear stories of people who very recently, for instance, a university professor lost a job after being on the board of a highly boundary-pushing laity magazine. So people who press the boundaries a little too much might end up getting smacked back, but everyday practice, I don’t think that that is a problem.

LAWTON: The church leadership has had a delicate balance, haven’t they, trying to push the government on some things, yet also maybe partner with the government?

ZAPOR: Yeah, and that’s been very controversial among Cubans themselves, among Catholics, among Cuban Americans, as to whether any kind of dialogue with the government is helpful or not. But it’s been working. It’s been creating more space for the church to provide social services, to start an MBA program, to do all sorts of things that 25 years ago, even 10 years ago would not have been possible.

ABERNETHY: I read that there is one priest for every 19,000 Cuban Catholics. They’ve got a long way to go.

ZAPOR: They certainly do, and that’s even more dramatic than the situation of priest shortages around the world. That’s about as many priests as there are in the entire archdiocese of Miami in the whole country. But their laity networks are strong and very well-developed. That’s a situation that they’ve encouraged in these intervening years.

LAWTON: What are these house churches that you’ve talked about? How does that work?

ZAPOR: Well, in places where there isn’t a convenient church, people develop ministries within houses and neighborhoods. I encountered one parish that consists of nothing but 42 house churches. They don’t have a building. They have 42 house churches; that’s their parish.

ABERNETHY: You wrote a piece saying that Cubans want, Cuban Catholics, want more, more of everything.

ZAPOR: Right, and they’ve been getting more. More freedom, more services, well, more priests, of course, but a little bit more of everything.

ABERNETHY: And you think that this visit by Benedict will lead to that?

ZAPOR: There certainly are hopes for that. That just the attention on the church in general, the attention on the progress that they feel has been made, the attention on the problems that still exist might help open things up.

ABERNETHY: Patricia Zapor of Catholic News Service, many thanks.

ZAPOR: Thank you.

ABERNETHY: Kim, thank you.

DEBORAH POTTER: The bells of St. Mary’s set the rhythm of life at this abbey in Glencairn, sounding the call to worship. On this day, Sister Michelle rings double bells for the Feast of the Ascension.

SISTER MICHELLE MILLER: It has a knack to do it, and about one or two of us have the knack, so that’s where I am. I was ringing the double bells yesterday. From a young age I had a yearning to be a nun, in my teens, so it was part of my journey in seeking a life where I felt I could be as close to seek God as possible.

POTTER: Life here is all about seeking God. This is Ireland’s only Cistercian monastery for women, founded in 1932.

MOTHER MARIE FAHY (Abbess, St. Mary’s Abbey): It’s a place where God is loved and worshiped, and it’s a place where we pray for humanity. We’re conscious of interceding before God for people, and it’s a place of conversion, where we constantly try to become who we are meant to be as fully human persons and overcome the demons and the less positive aspects of our life.

POTTER: In some ways, life here is the same as it’s always been, governed by the Rule of St. Benedict. Seven times a day, the nuns gather for prayer, starting well before dawn. They spend hours in church and in lectio divina, reading the Bible and other sacred texts.

SISTER MICHELLE: The first word in the rule is “listen.” So in that sense you learn to listen to how God is speaking to you, and to the Holy Spirit in daily life, and how you gradually more attune yourself to his grace. And it takes a lifetime to sustain that, and in that sense you learn to love, and love your sisters as they are, where they are. And it’s a sense of freedom.

POTTER: Most of the day is spent in silence. It’s peaceful most of the time. The abbey is also a working farm with eighty head of cattle.

SISTER LILLY: Takes energy to keep up!

POTTER: For four hours a day every nun works, as they always have. It’s what they work at that’s changed.

NUNS AT COMPUTER: They just added that blue part on top of the head. Ah, yeah, that’s an extra job.

POTTER: Computers and automation have come to the convent. In addition to a small greeting card business, a bakery produces Eucharist bread that’s sold to churches across Ireland. The oldest nuns help with the shipping.

MOTHER MARIE FAHY: We live by the work of our hands and also have some left for helping out those who are maybe less fortunate. Work is creative. Part of you needs to have some kind of creative expression; you can’t spend all the time praying and reading. It’s very important to have a balance.

POTTER: The balance of life here is partly what drew Sister Fiachra, who used to run a garden center.

SISTER FIACHRA NUTTY: You know what they say about weeds? They’re like the poor, they’re always with us.

POTTER: She entered the convent five years ago and expects to make her solemn profession next year, committing to live the rest of her life as a cloistered nun.

SISTER FIACHRA: I felt I needed space to be with God, and that’s not very easy, I’ve found, for me in the outside world, because I am quite an extrovert, and I get involved in an awful lot of things, so enclosure was important to me, but at the same time I have a horror of restriction, as in claustrophobia. So here we are absolutely truly blessed. We have 200 acres within which to wander, you know, so that was a huge factor for me. Also the enormous welcome and warmth I felt from the community on my very first visit. That was just so wonderful.

MOTHER MARIE FAHY: We’re not completely silent. We value communication, and communication is important to maintain good relationships.

POTTER: Thirty-seven women now live at the abbey, and unlike in the past when all would have been Irish, today there are sisters from India, Nigeria, and the Philippines. They’re also older. A third are well above retirement age. The oldest is 93. In the past decade, a dozen nuns have died. Like most monastic communities, St. Mary’s is smaller than it used to be. But six women are in formation, on the path to becoming nuns—far more than might be expected. Only nine women entered religious orders in all of Ireland in 2006, according to the most recent survey.

SISTER SARAH BRANIGAN (Vocations Director, St. Mary’s Abbey): I knew that people wouldn’t be rushing in the door, but I am surprised at how occupied I am, actually, with inquiries from people of all different ages. People from 20 to late 60s, so there are a steady flow of inquiries about this kind of life.

POTTER: Several times a year, the abbey hosts “monastic experience weekends” for women of all ages who want to try it out, and they share the experience in more modern ways, too, on their Web page and even on Facebook, where they’ve picked up more than 400 fans.

SISTER SARAH: I feel that monastic life has an enduring kind of appeal. I don’t see it as part of the traditional Catholicism that is in demise, if you like. I see it as lasting.

POTTER: For those of you who live here, what makes it really unique and special?

MOTHER MARIE FAHY: I think the opportunity to live close to God and close to one’s self and have time for prayer and have time for leisurely walks and good reading and reflection on God’s word, and I think living at a deeper level.

POTTER: As the world outside the cloister becomes ever more frenetic, the sisters of St. Mary’s live a simple life in communion with each other and with God.

MOTHER MARIE FAHY: “Christ Jesus intercedes for us before the Father. With him we pray…”

POTTER: For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Deborah Potter in County Waterford, Ireland.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Familiar social issues led the religion news this week. In Washington, the Obama administration made a significant change in its policy on insurance coverage of contraception by religiously affiliated organizations. Any employer with a religious objection will not be required to offer or pay for contraceptive services but insurance companies would have to offer those services to women free of charge. This change follows a huge controversy over the administrations original plan which US Catholic bishops and several other religious groups said would have violated their constitutionally-guaranteed religious freedom. Republican candidates for president also weighed in on the controversy. Mitt Romney became the latest GOP candidate to accuse the president of waging “an assault on religion”. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have launched similar attacks. On Tuesday, support from religious and social conservatives helped Santorum win the Missouri primary and caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado. Following those victories, Santorum traveled to Texas where he spoke to more than 100 Christian ministers about his Catholic faith.

We want to explore the contraception debate further. Kim Lawton our managing editor has been following the issue which produced for many people Kim, as you know, this terrible bind between having to obey the law on the one hand or follow their churches’ teachings and their own consciences on the other.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor): Well, that’s what the big debate was. The original policy allowed exemptions for most churches, but for these religiously affiliated institutions like hospitals or Catholic universities or charitable organizations—they felt like they were being forced to pay for something that their church says is wrong, and so they did feel that there was this bind, which is why there was this outcry.

ABERNETHY: And so what does the compromise say?

LAWTON: And with this solution, as the Obama administration calls it, they say they’re accommodating two core principles, the core principle of giving women access to affordable preventative health care, which they say includes contraceptive services. That was a core principle for the administration. But it also, they say, now accommodates religious liberty concerns so…

ABERNETHY: They also called it a public health issue.

LAWTON: Yes, and they say that, you know, they want women to have access to these contraceptive services as a matter of public health, so now the insurance companies will directly offer those to the employees, and the religiously affiliated institutions won’t have to provide those or pay for it.

ABERNETHY: Or refer?

LAWTON: Or refer people to it. It would be the responsibility of the insurance company, and so, you know, this is their way of getting around it. There were a lot of people in the religious community, especially in the mainline Protestant community that said they supported the original mandate, but for, you know, some people, including moderate to liberal Catholics, they had a problem with it.

ABERNETHY: And so is it all solved now? Is everybody happy?

LAWTON: Well, there were a lot of hard feelings that were generated in all of this—and again this notion that the Obama administration is in some way at war with religion or at war with the Catholic Church. That was the slogan that was out there. As we’ve reported, a lot of the Republican candidates certainly jumped on that some might say, the president says, you know, cynically for political gain. That issue’s still out there. Is there some sort of, you know, growing secularism or attack on religious exercise in this country? And so I think the administration does have, you know, some repairing to do. A lot of moderate and liberal Catholics who supported this president, who supported the health care bill when it was going through Congress, they felt a little betrayed. I’m hearing from people who say, you know, yeah, the majority of Catholic women may use birth control, and yeah, a lot of people disagree maybe with the church’s policy, but this issue is bigger than that in their view. And so, you know, for them they were pleased that the administration made this compromise, but there was some damage that was done.

ABERNETHY: And we will be hearing more about this as the campaign goes on.

LAWTON: Well. certainly I think a lot of the Republicans aren’t going to let this go. They are going to keep at it. They see it as a good issue, a good issue to battle the president with.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.

RICHARD ROHR: There’s no place where you can’t pray.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Richard Rohr, a Catholic priest, is addressing a packed house at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon.

ROHR: I love beautiful spaces. But if creating beautiful spaces like this for one moment leads you to think that God is not equally out there on the streets of Portland, then religion is not doing its job.

VALENTE: For the past 25 years, Rohr, a Franciscan [priest], has run the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque. He calls himself a “radical traditionalist.” For example:

ROHR: It’s not correct to say Jesus is God. Now, don’t run and report me to the bishop, all right? It’s not correct to say that — Jesus is the union of the human and the divine. That’s different. I’ve been a priest 43 years. Most of the Catholics Christians I’ve met would for all practical purposes believe Jesus is God only, and we are human only. We missed the big point. The point is the integration, both in Jesus and ourselves.

VALENTE: Such provocative ideas make him an enigma to some, and a modern day prophet to others. Richard Rohr is one of the most popular spirituality authors and speakers in the world. His ideas appeal to people across faith traditions, and to spiritual seekers as well. Rohr argues that most organized religions dispense doctrine when they should be encouraging personal transformation.

ROHR: Without transformation, you can assume you’re at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people.

VALENTE: Rohr’s popularity may be surprising since his ideas are highly nuanced and draw deeply from mythology, philosophy and psychology. He’s lectured across the globe. And his books have been translated into numerous languages. His latest book is called “Falling Upward,” and addresses the importance of the spiritual journey.

ROHR: It feels like falling but it isn’t falling, it’s learning. It’s transcending.

VALENTE: In what he calls the first half of life, Rohr says we’re mostly concerned with everyday interests: building our self-image.

ROHR: Our culture is made to order for that. Defining the self almost entirely by external achievements, by external appearance, by skin color, by the car you drive, where you live, and so forth. You know, that… all great spiritual traditions will call that illusion. Illusion. Foolishness. There’s a further journey. There’s something more than, you know, accumulating more money in the stock market.

VALENTE: But in the second part of life, the spiritual part, we are more likely to see meaning in the losses, disappointments and failures we have suffered. It is not necessarily a chronological period. It can occur at any age, but is always characterized by a greater ability to appreciate mystery and paradox.

ROHR: It’s the holding of tensions, of ambiguity, of pain, if you will, that in fact teaches us wisdom. There’s an increased capacity for compassion, forgiveness, love.

VALENTE: He calls himself a loyal Catholic, but maintains too many churches emphasize teaching, which can leave us stranded in a “religious comfort zone.”

ROHR: We ask Catholics to believe that Mary was a Virgin and Jesus is God and you know, that’s no skin off your back. I believe that. Believe that, believe that, believe that. So what?

VALENTE: Rohr says that there is such a thing as absolute truth, and that religious doctrine has its place. But he maintains that a rigid adherence to doctrine is sometimes part of the problem.

ROHR: Without honest self-knowledge religion ends up, I’m going to say it, being more a part of the problem than the solution. I mean, we’ve seen it now for centuries, that people who call themselves Christian can be utterly racist, utterly sexist, utterly greedy, no questions asked. This is the kind of religion we end up with when you don’t do your shadowboxing.

VALENTE: Shadowboxing, to Rohr, means taking a hard look at our flaws, our weaknesses and biases. It’s an important first step, Rohr says, toward uncovering what he calls “the true self.”

ROHR: The spiritual life is very much a matter of cleaning the lens, clarifying how you see. So the shadow is what you don’t want to see. Shadowboxing never stops, that you keep seeing the parts of yourself that are paranoid, angry, defensive, accusatory, fearful, attacking.

VALENTE: Rohr calls solitude “a cure for loneliness” and describes it as an essential element for living a more contemplative — and compassionate — life.

ROHR: Whenever you have a return to solitude and silence, you know that there’s been a rediscovery of the contemplative mind. I think we should close down every pastoral program in a diocese and just teach our people how to pray. It’s the built-in therapy to let go of your addiction to yourself and to your repetitive obsessive thoughts, which just screws up just about everything.

Without the contemplative mind, which at this point in history we have to be taught, you simply don’t have the wherewithal to deal with great spiritual truths.

VALENTE: According to Rohr, our society has plenty of elderly people, but lacks true “elders.”

ROHR: Elder is a capacity of soul that allows you to patiently understand things, and again I’m going to repeat our word for that is wisdom. It is not chronological maturity. It’s how you’ve dealt with the dark side and how successfully you’ve dealt with disappointment, betrayal, abandonment, failure, and rejection.

VALENTE: Do you think that the spiritual journey only begins in earnest when we hit rock bottom?

ROHR: Only at that point which they call powerlessness do you learn to draw upon a bigger source. There’s no other reason you will. And that’s what I would call the spiritual journey. Up to that point, and I don’t mean this in a negative way, but up to that point it’s largely religion. Religion isn’t bad, but until religion becomes actual spiritual experience, it is just religion.

I think of the Catholic parents who’ve demanded that their kids go to Mass every Sunday, but then they’re sitting there themselves bored to death and hate every minute of it and walk out early and, I mean, the kids knows by three, “This is not a good thing to go to Mass,” you know?

VALENTE: The things he sometimes says have, so far, not gotten him into trouble with the official church.

ROHR: You can’t just have Catholic truth, Methodist truth, Buddhist truth. If it’s true, it’s always true, and that’s what we mean by the perennial tradition. This desire to find the big patterns that are always true. I think that’s been my desire and right on the heels of that has been my equal desire to show that Christianity has always taught those truths. So in that sense I’m very traditional Catholic, even though I often say it in different ways that make people think I’m not.

VALENTE: He maintains he’s neither a skeptic, nor a rebel. He speaks of faith and mystery this way:

ROHR: I love to define mystery as not that which is unknowable, but that which is endlessly knowable. So you never get to the point where I know it all. And wouldn’t we assume that would be the nature of God? That God will always by definition be mystery. More knowability, more knowability, deeper experience, deeper surrender. So that’s the meaning of faith, and why faith has such power, not just to transform people but to keep them on an ongoing path of transformation and growth.

VALENTE: To take that path, Rohr says, is to choose a life of growth, over spiritual stagnation.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Judy Valente in Portland, Oregon.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Martin Sheen says “The Way” is ultimately about a journey—a journey of the spirit as well as the flesh.

WOMAN (in film clip): So what is it, on a pilgrimage to change your life?

TOM (in film clip): Something like that.

MARTIN SHEEN: All of our journeys are personal, deeply personal, and they’re all mysterious, you know. We’re all looking for that transcendence, but we’re looking to each other, and we identify with each other. I think the genius of God is choosing to dwell where we are least likely to look, within the depths of our own being.

DANIEL (in film clip): If I don’t have your blessing that’s fine, but don’t judge this. Don’t judge me.

DANIEL (in film clip): You don’t choose a life, Dad. You live one.

LAWTON: The story centers around Sheen’s character, Tom, a doctor who has a strained relationship with his free-spirited son, Daniel. Daniel dies in a freak storm in Europe, and when Tom goes to collect his remains, he discovers his son had been walking the famed 500-mile pilgrimage across Spain known as El Camino de Santiago—The Way of Saint James.

MAN (in film clip): We believers are told that the remains of Saint James, the apostle of Jesus, are interned there, and so we make pilgrimage. This is what your son, Daniel, was doing.

LAWTON: Grief-stricken, Tom decides to finish the pilgrimage himself, sprinkling Daniel’s ashes as he goes. Along the way he meets three other pilgrims, and together they search for healing and ultimate meaning in their lives. The story was inspired by a trip Sheen took to the Camino several years ago, although he drove instead of walking. He came home and told Estevez they needed to do a project around it. Estevez wrote the script, casting his father, who is a practicing Catholic, against type.

FATHER FRANK (in film clip): Are you a Catholic?

FATHER FRANK: No, please take it. There are a lot of lapsed Catholics on the Camino, kid. Besides…

EMILIO ESTEVEZ: There cannot be conversion if you already start out being devout. Let’s open the film where you’re not even interested in praying with your parish priest, right? He’s reached bottom now. He’s a widower, he’s now lost his son. He’s totally alone in the world, he’s without family. His idea of community is, you know, playing golf with his fellow doctors at the country club, and so I needed him to be at that place so that by the time this character arrives at the end of the film, there is a transformation. He is awake. He is converted.

LAWTON: Sheen says his Catholic faith was strengthened by seeing and experiencing the rituals of the Camino pilgrimage and the Mass that takes place at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela when the pilgrims finally arrive.

SHEEN: The botafumiero, you know, the incense ceremony at the end of the Mass, brings out a deeply moving exaltation from the congregation. They burst into applause, and many of them burst into tears. And, you know, the incense is an offering to God, you know, but it’s also an ancient tradition and ritual, and we don’t have a whole lot of ritual in our lives. You know, we’ve lost more and more of ritual just within our own family structures—evening meals, evening, you know, family prayer. So I think people are—they respond to ritual. It’s something that you can get reconnected with, in a way. You know, they’ve been doing that since the Middle Ages.

LAWTON: And you had mentioned earlier just with pilgrimage, the sense of the physical, the flesh and the spiritual coming together. How did you see that, especially there?

SHEEN: Well, you know, pilgrimage is kind of a demanding struggle. It must be to take you out of your comfort zone. So you go to a place, whether it’s Mecca or Santiago or Tibet or Rome, Jerusalem, wherever it is—you’re seeking something, and you’re going to have to do it on your own. Nobody can carry your pack. Nobody can walk in your shoes. You must do it alone, but you cannot do it without community.

LAWTON: The difficulty of the journey, he says, touches the soul.

SHEEN: You begin the journey within. Now the real pilgrimage begins, because now you have to open up the dungeons and jail cells of your heart and release all of the things that have been keeping you from being yourself, keeping you from, you know, discovering who you really are. So you let go of your resentments and your anger and your jealousies and your hatreds and all the dark parts, and eventually you’ll become free, you’ll become yourself, and you’ll become part of your extended family, which is community.

ESTEVEZ: And sometimes that family and those people you pick up along the Camino are not necessarily people you would choose. They choose you in many ways, and yet those are the people that we sometimes learn the greatest lessons from.

LAWTON: Estevez describes his own spiritual situation as still evolving.

ESTEVEZ: I’m what my mother likes to call a work in progress. My parents—I grew up in a house where my parents differed on what religion was all about. She was raised Southern Baptist, wasn’t allowed to see movies or dance. It was very, very strict. He was raised a devout Catholic.

SHEEN: We sang and danced all the time.

ESTEVEZ: So as a young boy—I was baptized Catholic, but all I heard were arguments about religion. There was no talk about spirituality. So I sort of had to take a step back from that.

LAWTON: He says this film has opened him up to new spiritual possibilities.

ESTEVEZ: I think it’s an example, a shining example of where I’m at right now in terms of my spiritual path, the path I’m on.

SHEEN: Are you saying there’s a chance you could become a Catholic?

ESTEVEZ: I’m just saying there’s a possibility of everything. I’m open to the possibility of absolutely everything.

SHEEN: Buddhist even?

ESTEVEZ: I said everything.

SHEEN: Okay, I’m just asking. We don’t get this opportunity.

JACK (in film clip): So far, there are some 15 percent say they are doing it for health. Fewer than 5 percent say they are actually looking for a miracle.

TOM (in film clip): Miracles are in short supply these days, Jack.

LAWTON: Despite the setting and themes, the film’s religious messages are subtle.  Estevez says he didn’t want to hit people over the head. But they have been marketing “The Way” at special screenings for Catholic groups—and for evangelical audiences, too.

ESTEVEZ: People will stand up and begin to witness and give testimony, and probably 60 percent of the Q and As really have no Qs. They basically just want to stand up and say thank you for making this film, and this movie touched me because…

LAWTON: What’s been the reaction of the church, the Catholic Church?

ESTEVEZ: Amazing. Yeah, amazing. Across the board. And it started in Spain. You know, we screened the film in, opened the film in Santiago. We were there for the pope’s Mass last October, and then two days later we screened the film for the archbishop of Santiago and the government of Galicia, and we were sitting in a little tiny box in a 200-year-old theater, and we were sweating because we were so nervous about how they would react.

SHEEN: They were the first audience.

ESTEVEZ: Right, and so the archbishop turned to my father after the screening and hugged him and said, “This film is a gift. Thank you.”

SHEEN: They were very relieved, basically.

ESTEVEZ: And so were we.

LAWTON: They say they hope their audiences get as much out of this project as they did.

SHEEN: Whatever the audience takes away is going to be their gift, if you will. We offer this gift. If they accept it, we’re delighted.

ESTEVEZ: We don’t impose our Camino on anyone, but we say get outside of yourself and join us on this journey.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton reporting.