CHRISTI DEEGAN (speaking to marriage workshop): So one of the topics the church talks about is living together, cohabitating…

JUDY VALENTE, Correspondent: These young Catholic couples in Chicago are attending a marriage preparation workshop required by their church.

DEEGAN: And this is always such a hard topic to talk about, because the church teaches, you know, wait to have sex until you’re married, right?

VALENTE: Despite that teaching, half these couples may already be living together.

(speaking to Catholic couples): No guilt about your decision?

MAN: No, it never really came into play for me.

WOMAN: We’re both artists, we just don’t have—we can’t support ourselves on our own.

MAN: It’s important to get to know the person as well as you can before you get married.

WOMAN: The priest didn’t say anything bad. They didn’t ever say that we shouldn’t be living together. There was no condemnation.

VALENTE: Sex outside of marriage, divorce, homosexuality. For many Catholics, these no longer hold the stigma they once did. Catholics disagree with the church on a variety of other issues. The vast majority of Catholics say women should be priests, and according to a recent survey 58 percent said abortion should be a personal decision. The bishops keep talking about these issues, but fewer Catholics seem to be listening. What’s a pastor to say to the people in the pews?

REV. PATRICK LEE: It’s like being a parent to be a pastor. You never give up on your children, but you keep holding the ideal and explaining the ideal and hoping people will strive for it, but not condemning them when they fall short.

VALENTE: With so many Catholics going their own way these days, the role of pastor is perhaps more complicated than ever.

Rev. Patrick Lee

REV. LEE: When I was growing up, the church was the ideal we tried to change ourselves to match. Now people want to change the church.

VALENTE: Father Lee is the pastor of two parishes in Chicago. Most of his parishioners are highly educated, and they represent a diversity of views about church teaching.

REV. LEE: All authority is being questioned in our times. Some of it selfishly, some of it enlightened. I think Americans are more comfortable in an educated democracy now, and so they want to spread that democracy to the church, which has never really been a democratic organization. I think we have to be open to a dialogue of understanding what the church teaches and really hearing it and not dismissing it instantly. On the other hand, I think the church has to open itself to the wisdom of its laity.

JOE MURRAY: I’m a Eucharistic minister, and I’m a lector and an usher, when need be.

DENNIS KLUGE: I’ve been on the parish council for several years, but also I’m a lector, commentator, Eucharistic minister, and the lead bass in our church choir.

VALENTE: Joe Murray and Dennis Kluge have been a couple for 31 years. They are active members of Father Lee’s parish.

MURRAY: I understand where my pastor’s coming from, and he understands where I’m coming from, and on that topic we do not necessarily agree, but that’s okay because we respect each other.

Joe Murray and Dennis Kluge

KLUGE: I think it’s important that Joe and I just approach it as we are just two guys coming to church and we’re just here to worship like everyone else, and we get involved, people get to know us, and so we’ve never, at least personally I’ve never felt excluded.

MURRAY: Women probably have more of a reason to be angry at the church than we do, because we’re not allowed marry, but they’re not allowed to become priests. They’re told that because of their biology, that’s excluded for them.

VALENTE: As at many parishes, women in Father Lee’s congregation aren’t shy about expressing their disagreement, but they remain practicing Catholics nonetheless.

MARY ANN TRAUSCHT: I personally stay in the church because I believe the basic tenets that are taught, and what I disagree with are man-made laws, not what Jesus taught.

VALENTE: What about artificial birth control? Do you know women who’ve left over that?

KATHRYN CUNNINGHAM: Most of the women I know are doing what they need to do and not talking about it.

VALENTE: A good number of Father Lee’s parishioners are divorced and remarried. If they have not gotten their first marriage annulled, the church says they may no longer receive Communion. This is often ignored.

REV. LEE: If they want to receive Communion I explain to them why they’re asked not to receive Communion, and if they make the decision they feel they want to receive Communion, I have to honor their conscience, if their conscience is informed.

VALENTE: “Informed conscience” is something Catholics are increasingly citing as support for disregarding official teaching. It means, in essence, that one has studied church teaching, reflected on it, and concluded that the teaching can in good conscience be rejected.

(speaking to Rev. Lee): If your conscience is telling you this is not a sin, but the church’s teaching says it is a sin, and you know what the church’s teaching is, then where do you stand?

REV. LEE: If you take exception to a church teaching, you better have a pretty good reason and not just “it’s because I want to do this.”

VALENTE: Reconciliation refers to the sacrament of forgiveness that used to be known as confession. Father Lee waits in the confessional every Saturday. Some days, no one comes.

(speaking to Rev. Lee): Do people know what sin is?

REV. LEE: I think they do. I think our whole being tells us when we’re being sinful. It’s unpleasant to deal with our own brokenness, and yet for those people who are brave enough to take that step, there is such healing in that sacrament that I can’t imagine my life without it.

VALENTE (speaking to Joe Murray): In your view, is it possible to be a faithful Catholic and yet disagree very strongly with some church teaching?

MURRAY: You can be faithful, and you can dissent. Dissent is challenge, and had we had more dissent, public dissent, we may not have had to have gone through what we’re going through in terms of the clergy sexual abuse.

VALENTE (speaking to Rev. Lee): Is this new round of scandal making it more difficult for you to be a pastor?

REV. LEE: It makes me feel ashamed. It makes me look at that clerical culture of secrecy and say this is unhealthy. It needs to be blown open.

VALENTE: Recent allegations about that culture of secrecy have rekindled outrage at the institutional church. But people make a distinction between the Vatican and their own parish.

KLUGE: That’s the big church. The little church is really where my heart is, alright?

MURRAY: You have to define what church is for us. The church is our parish, so our experience of church is through the parish.

REV. LEE: I think part of it is the strength and beauty of the Catholic culture. I don’t think it’s a religion like some religions. I think it’s in your bones.

CUNNINGHAM: Women and some other people who have left the church come back to the church. Whenever they’re asked why did you come back, they say not having the Eucharist, something was missing. That brings them back. That hunger brings them back.

REV. LEE (preaching to congregation): We see the love of Jesus when he meets sinners in the gospels. He doesn’t condemn them. Instead, he invites them to come and accept healing, to come and accept forgiveness.

It’s certainly an important role to be compassionate, to draw people in from wherever they are into a closer relationship with Christ, and so you don’t achieve that by throwing up barriers and saying you can’t belong, you’re excommunicated. That strikes me as not terribly Christ-like. I’m the shepherd. I have to get the strays and keep nipping at their heels to get them back into the flock, where they’ll be safe.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Judy Valente in Chicago.

Presiding Bishop KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI (U.S Episcopal Church): We got quite quickly into very significant and deep conversations. We certainly didn’t all agree with each other about various issues, but we listened respectfully.

Kim Lawton

ABERNETHY: About 650 Anglican bishops from around the world were at the meeting, but more than 230 others stayed away. The bishops didn’t vote on any resolutions, but instead held a series of small group discussions about the many issues that divide them. Our managing editor Kim Lawton covered the meeting. Kim, welcome home. What happened, or perhaps, didn’t happen?

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY): Well, I think the big news from the meeting was that there wasn’t any big news. A lot of people feared that there might be some kind of an actual split at this meeting. That didn’t happen. About a third of the bishops boycotted. That did have an impact, but there wasn’t any big explosion. They’re still hanging together, but this sort of uneasy stalemate continues.

ABERNETHY: And what does the stalemate mean for the typical American Episcopal parish?

LAWTON: Well, not much in the short term. There are — the majority of the worldwide Anglican Communion is upset that the U.S. elected a gay bishop, that same-sex blessings occur inside some Episcopal churches. The Communion would like that to stop. But the bishops that are doing that in the U.S. say, “We’re not going to stop.” The majority of the Communion is not happy that some Americans have said, “We don’t want to be part of the Episcopal Church,” and so they’re affiliating with these African churches in some cases. The Communion says well, we don’t like that, that isn’t done in the Anglican Communion. That should stop. But it probably will continue. And so the question is, can all of this still happen within one Anglican umbrella?

Bob Abernethy

ABERNETHY: You had the feeling, I think, one had the feeling that the American Episcopal Church was very much in the minority. You felt that sense of it’s being in a minority, at least I did from here.

LAWTON: Well, indeed, the U.S. — and there are a few other member churches, Canada, some places in England that would agree with the U.S. But by and large many of the members are concerned with what’s happening here in the U.S.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.

Q: What has been your impression here at Lambeth, in the midst of so much diversity?

A: I think my impression overall so far is that, unlike the last Lambeth when I was here, there’s been a tremendous opportunity for people to talk and to share their theological views, their views about mission, and the people have been listening to one another, in some pretty deep ways, on the work that we do together.

Q: The format was different this year — no legislation, no voting, and all of that. How did that change the tone or the content of the meeting?

A: I think it’s changed the meeting in that people seem much more willing to listen to each other than they were in the past when there was legislation that we had to face and you were either for it or you were against it. This one seems to allow for more dialogue so far.

Q: We know some tough issues have been on the table, and some controversial subjects have been raised, especially about the US Church. How is the rest of the Communion seeing some of the things that are happening in the US?

Bishop Tom Shaw

A: I think up until a certain point I was encouraged because of the conversation, the way people were listening to one another. I think when the hearings on the Windsor Report have come up in the conference, that’s not going to help the conversation, and it feels to me as though we’re getting back into a juridical understanding of how we’re going to be one Communion, and I think that that’s the wrong way for us to be examining the kinds of issues that we face.

Q: What kinds of things are you hearing? What are some of those tough issues that are really causing tensions?

A: Well, I think the toughest issue is human sexuality and I think that that’s — there are lots of other issues that are around that issue, but that’s the one that seems to be the hot point for everybody.

Q: And what are you hearing from your fellow bishops on that issue?

A: Well, you hear the whole spectrum, from people that basically agree with the role that the American church has taken in examining this issue, and people that disagree with us but still want to work together in mission and still want to be in Communion, and then there are those parts of the Communion who feel that the Episcopal Church has gone too far, and they want us to leave the Communion or be part of it in a different way.

Q: How is that working out in the dialogue? Is it frustrating relationships?

A: Well, for me whenever we move into that place where we’re talking about the juridical aspects of this, it makes me think that we’re not going to move forward as a Communion and that we’re not going to be able to be patient with one another, we’re not listening to one another and really taking an issue that’s a huge issue, that represents a whole lot of other issues, and try and talk them through.

Q: It does seem like there’s almost a stalemate. Do you see any forward motion, or does it feel like the same arguments over and over again?

A: Well, it depends on the day you talk to me. On some days I’ve had really significant conversations with individual bishops and groups, and I get a sense that we really are listening to one another and trying to find a path forward, and then on other days it doesn’t seem like really talking to one another, and it’s hard for me to see how we can go forward.

Q: How much is the Anglican identity at stake, what it really means to be an Anglican today?

A: I think part of being an Anglican is not being a confessing church but being a catholic and a community church, and I think that if we were to become a confessing church, by not allowing for the breadth of opinion and the breadth of interpretation of Scripture, that that would really threaten our Anglican identity.

Q: Do you get a sense here of great diversity, not just ethnically but also theologically or ideologically? With your fellow bishops do you get that sense of the bigness of the Anglican Church?

A: Oh, yeah. I’m in a fascinating Bible study, studying the Bible with people of Africa and from New Zealand and from Great Britain and from the United States and from Japan, so I do every day, and in going over Scripture I get of sense of the breadth of the Anglican Communion, and it’s exciting, and it’s challenging.

Q: And in a global, fast-changing world is that difficult, then, to work out under the Anglican umbrella?

A: Well, I think that’s the challenge that we’re facing, ultimately, is how are we going to be this Anglican Communion, how are we going to be this Anglican Communion in the 21st century? That’s the real question behind all the disagreement over Scripture and about human sexuality and all the rest of it is how are we going to do this in the future with the challenges that we have in the 21st century?

Q: A lot of people aren’t here. A significant group of bishops aren’t here. Some are boycotting, some weren’t invited. What does that say about the challenges?

A: Well, I think that the most unfortunate thing is that we miss their voices. We miss something of the breadth of the Anglican Communion, whether it’s Gene Robinson who hasn’t been invited or whether it’s members of GAFCON [Global Anglican Future Conference] who decided not to come. Those voices would be tremendously important to this conversation that we’re trying to have. But I also have to say that the conversation goes on, and it’s still very, very fruitful.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: There is a group of Benedictine nuns in Missouri who bake and sell millions of Communion wafers, small and large. But some would-be communicants complained that they are allergic to the gluten in the wheat in the nun’s wafers — the hosts, as they are known. So they could not receive Communion. For the sisters that was a challenge, as Betty Rollin reports.

BETTY ROLLIN: They are the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. They live in Clyde, Missouri, a remote — a very remote — part of the state, and what they do is pray.

Sister LYNN D’SOUZA: Our main work is prayer. That is what we see as our mission for the Church, for the world: to pray for the needs of people of all places of all times.

ROLLIN: They pray together five times a day, and they pray alone two-and-a-half hours a day. But that’s not all they do. The mission of the Benedictines is both to pray and to work. These sisters’ work is to bake, and they’ve been baking for nearly 100 years. Today, they are the largest religious producers of Communion wafers, shipping two million wafers a week.

Sister LYNN D’SOUZA: We as Catholics believe in the true presence of Christ in the Communion wafer, in the
wine that we use at Eucharist. In the Gospel, Jesus says those who eat my flesh and drink my blood dwell in me and I dwell in them. To receive the wafer and to receive the wine is integral to the faith life of most Catholics.

ROLLIN: But a problem arose when the sisters began to hear from some Catholic parishioners who couldn’t receive the all-important sacrament of Communion because the wafers contained wheat. They had celiac disease, a disorder which makes the gluten contained in wheat undigestable.

Sister JANE HESCHMEYER: I was working in the customer service department in the early ’90s and a woman called in and said, “Do you make hosts that have no gluten in them because I’m intolerant to gluten and I need that?” I’d never heard that before, and we certainly didn’t, because wheat has gluten in it, and that was that.

Sr. D’SOUZA: The Catholic Church requires that breads used at Eucharist contain some wheat, and this is in keeping with the tradition of the Church. It’s believed that’s what Jesus used at the Last Supper.

So the Catholic Church is saying we need a wheat bread to be used. People with celiac disease are saying, “We need a bread that has no gluten in it.” Wheat equals gluten pretty much, so that was the dilemma we were working with.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: And gradually more and more calls started coming in. So I started doing research and talked to technicians, bakers, lawyers, doctors, people who couldn’t tolerate gluten, to try to find out everything I could about it.

ROLLIN: Years later, in 1999, Sister Lynn, newly arrived at the monastery after receiving a degree in biochemistry, joined the baking effort.

Sr. D’SOUZA: I just like happened to cross Sister Jane in the kitchen one afternoon working on these breads, putting stuff together. Just because I have somewhat of a scientific background, it intrigued me as a science project-type thing. It wasn’t that I had high lofty ambitions of providing someone’s need. I just thought, oh, this is a science experiment.

ROLLIN: Given the Church’s insistence that wheat had to be in the wafer, they thought that wheat starch might be a solution, since most of the gluten is removed.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: What the scientists were telling us what we were trying to do was impossible. If you add wheat starch and water you get glue. Or if you bake it, it gets very hard, which is what we found out. It was a certain intrigue for me when they said it was impossible.

I said, “Oh, that’s a challenge!” And so, if the Holy Spirit was asking people to ask us to do it, the Holy Spirit had something in mind. There was just something in me that just said go with this thing — we could do it — although I had no idea that 12 years later I would still be doing it or trying to do it.

ROLLIN: A supporter from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops took their plight to — where else — the Vatican.

Sister HESCHMEYER: He had been in Rome, and when he came back he said he had just talked to then-Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict, and said that Cardinal Ratzinger said if the sisters in Clyde can produce this bread, we will fully support it.

ROLLIN: With that encouragement and armed with two different kinds of wheat starch supplied by the bishops, the nuns gave it one last try.

Sister HESCHMEYER: We decided to try mixing both of those together with some water, and what we came up with was like sticky goo. It stuck to our fingers.

Sr. D’SOUZA: I mean, really, it’s like we could not get it off the spoons. We tried to scrape it off the spoon to the finger. It stuck on our fingers. It was such a mess. We put a blob of it on the waffle irons we were using, and we went to clean up. We said this batch isn’t working. We are just going to start over and try something else. We had cleaned up everything, and we left some of the dough on the waffle iron, and we opened up the waffle iron and –

Sr. HESCHMEYER: Voila!

Sr. D’SOUZA: Voila! There was a bread.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: It was not pretty. It was a very interesting looking little bread on the plate, but it had withstood the baking process. It was intact. It was not gooey. It didn’t stick to the plate. We picked it up. I mean, for us it was beautiful

Sr. D’SOUZA: Yes

Sr. HESCHMEYER: We knew this bread had potential.

Sr. D’SOUZA: Our first reaction was to eat it.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: Yes, we have to try this, and it tasted delicious. It was light and crisp. It was just what we were looking for, we hoped.

ROLLIN: So what did that feel like?

Sr. HESCHMEYER: It was wonderful.

Sr. D’SOUZA: It was. I can see in hindsight that we were being used by God. You know, we were God’s hands, God’s instrument, and when I look back on it, I’m kind of awed.

CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE (speaking to Sr. D’Souza): And Sister, I left you all the low-gluten orders, and I think there are five new accounts that we’ve gotten today.

Sr. D’SOUZA: Oh my gosh! All right. It must be because of Easter.

ROLLIN: It is peak season for wafer production, both for the wheat variety and the now thriving low-gluten specialty. Business is booming. A patent is pending.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Betty Rollin in Clyde, Missouri.