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, correspondent: It’s often called the Emerald Isle—and with good reason. Ireland is as green as ever. But the country that once was a bastion of Roman Catholicism has changed. The vast majority of people here still call themselves Catholic—87 percent on the most recent census. But many of the most faithful church-goers in Ireland today aren’t even Irish. This Sunday Mass in Limerick is said in Polish for some of the thousands of immigrants who poured in during the economic boom of the past decade. But it’s hard to find an Irish congregation this packed, and especially this young, in bigger cities.

PATSY McGARRY (Religious Affairs Correspondent, The Irish Times): People still identify themselves as culturally Catholic even though they no longer go to Mass or go to confession. You’ll see them at first communions, you’ll see them at confirmations, and you’ll see them at funerals. They’re taking very much an a la carte view to the practice of their religion.

POTTER: As recently as the 1970s, almost 90 percent of Irish Catholics went to Mass at least once a week. Today, the number is closer to 25 percent. And in some parts of Dublin, just two or three percent of self-described Catholics regularly go to church.

(speaking to Irish woman): Did you grow up Catholic by chance?

WOMAN: Yes.

POTTER: Do you go to Mass now?

WOMAN: Not really that much. No, not much at all.

MAN: Weddings and funerals, things like that. That’s basically it.

POTTER: Those who do go for special occasions like this prayer service in County Galway can’t help but notice that the people in the pews have changed.

REV. TONY FLANNERY (Association of Catholic Priests): They’re old. That is the main thing. When you look down at a congregation from the altar now you’ll see mostly gray heads. The young people, the under 40s, have largely deserted the church in Ireland now.

POTTER: Irish priests are aging, too—on average, they’re well over 60. Many are still working into their 80s, and replacements have slowed to a trickle. At Maynooth, the country’s only Catholic seminary, the number of students being ordained to the priesthood has never been lower.

REV. HUGH CONNOLLY (President, Maynooth Seminary): Twenty years ago you could have been certainly over 20, maybe not that unusual to have a year where there would have been 30. Now we’re more likely to have somewhere under 10. Six, seven, that kind of thing.

POTTER: In the diocese of Dublin, not a single priest will be ordained this year—or next year. It’s been a stunning decline for a church that once virtually ruled the country.

McGARRY: It was a huge organization. It was like an alternative state within the state. It ran our schools, it ran our orphanages, it ran our reformatories, it ran most of our hospitals, and so therefore you can get an idea of the scale of what the Catholic Church was. It was an alternative society within Ireland.

POTTER: The Catholic Church here in Ireland saw its influence begin to wane with the social upheaval of the 1960s. But in the past twenty years, two factors combined to accelerate its decline: sudden prosperity and the shocking revelations of sexual abuse. The worldwide recession stopped the so-called Celtic Tiger in its tracks, but consumerism had already weakened the church’s hold on the Irish people, who had become far better educated over the previous 40 years.

McGARRY: They questioned their faith, they questioned the right of bishops to tell them how to live their lives.

POTTER: The body blow, however, came from the clergy abuse scandals that hit harder and closer to home in Ireland than anywhere else. Here, almost everyone knows someone who’s been affected.

FIRST WOMAN: Maybe we as older people did a lot of covering up. Also, we were very much into appearances, putting our best foot forward, saying the right things.

SECOND WOMAN: I think with all the scandals that have been revealed, it certainly made people think more and question a lot of things that were happening.

PEADAR CREMIN (President, Mary Immaculate College): Those who had a shaky faith now had an excuse for walking, because why would you go to the church every Sunday morning to hear somebody who potentially is in league with child abusers, and I think many people used the backlash against child abuse as a basis for saying, “Do I really want to subscribe, do I want to contribute, do I want to be part of that type of a church anymore?” I think at the heart of our problem is in a sense the church has lost its moral authority. The church has lost its right to speak out on issues.

POTTER: The abuse was a betrayal of trust, Pope Benedict acknowledged in a pastoral letter last year to Irish Catholics, his first-ever apology for the sexual abuse of children by priests. This year, during an extraordinary liturgy of lament and repentance at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral, the Archbishop of Dublin and Boston’s Cardinal O’Malley prostrated themselves, asking God and the victims for forgiveness. But it hasn’t been enough.

CREMIN: People are still waiting, I think, for the kind of great atonement and the kind of fundamental change that will convince them that things have changed. There isn’t enough evidence yet that things have fundamentally changed.

FLANNERY: It’s a crisis, and it’s not one of the future. It’s one of right now. It’s quite extraordinary an organization as big and as ancient as the church that we cannot face a crisis that’s right at our doorsteps and begin to talk realistically about it.

POTTER: The kind of change Father Flannery advocates would be dramatic.

FLANNERY: Opening up the ministry of the church to lay people, to married people, to priests, to women. In other words, not confining it to the male celibate priesthood as we’ve had in the past, because clearly that is not working now, so we have to begin to think in different ways, but the Vatican is increasingly forbidding any discussion on that.

POTTER: Still, there are small signs of renewal. Some parishes now have lay people in positions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Kevin Mullally is a full-time pastoral worker. Sheena Darcy works for the International Eucharistic Congress.

SHEENA DARCY: I’ve seen young people come back to know God’s love. I’ve seen young people get more involved in the church.

KEVIN MULLALLY: They’re also searching for basic things, belonging and love and, you know, acceptance and tolerance, and all those elements go together in a spirituality.

SHEENA DARCY: Yes, there’s that acknowledgment that what happened was dreadful. It was absolutely dreadful. However, we do also, we do need to move on.

POTTER: Whatever happens, the Catholic Church in Ireland has already changed irrevocably.

McGARRY: I do believe Catholicism will continue, will survive in Ireland, and I do believe the clerical church will not. That doesn’t mean there won’t be priests, of course there will be, but I don’t think as a force it will ever again, in my lifetime certainly, will never have the power it had when I was a child. And I think that’s a good thing because it abused its power massively, and it became, I mean, a dictatorship in a democracy which was answerable to nobody.

CREMIN: I still have the view that what’s happening is actually something quite healthy, because the church we will end up with will be a church of committed, passionate, and dedicated people who will live the gospels rather than talk about them.

POTTER: That undoubtedly means the Irish Catholic Church will be smaller, but it may be, in a very different way, stronger.

For Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Dublin.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Another historic event for Pope Benedict XVI this week— his four-day trip (September 16-19) to the United Kingdom, the first official state visit there by any pope. King Henry VIII broke ties with the Roman Catholic Church almost 500 years ago. As Kim Lawton reports, Benedict’s trip has not been without controversy.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Pope Benedict went to the UK at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth II, who is also the official head of the Church of England. The only other pope to visit Britain was John Paul II, who made what was billed a pastoral pilgrimage in 1982. John Paul was greeted with an outpouring of affection, but Benedict has faced tensions and even outright protest. One major issue is outrage over the clergy sex abuse crisis still swirling across many parts of Europe.

At the beginning of the trip, Benedict admitted the church was “not sufficiently vigilant, quick and decisive to take the necessary measures” to combat the crisis. Another difficult issue is relations between Roman Catholics and the Anglican Communion, whose spiritual head, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is based in Britain. Last October, the Vatican made it easier for disaffected Anglicans to become Catholics. A highlight of Benedict’s trip is the beatification of the nineteenth-century scholar and writer Cardinal John Henry Newman, a convert from Anglicanism.

But perhaps the biggest challenge has been making the case for faith in a nation known for its growing secularism. Throughout the trip, Benedict called for a return to the traditional values and cultural expressions of Christianity.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, this trip to Britain is part of the pope’s overall effort to try to roll back the trend of secularism all over Europe—no easy task.

LAWTON: It’s a big task and one that he’s very concerned about—he has been throughout his papacy. He just created a new department in the Vatican to focus on doing that, and in many ways Britain was a real test case or a real case study about this growing secularism. There was some new polling released with the visit that showed that 60 percent of British people say they never go to church. Forty-two percent say they don’t belong to any religion, and almost 20 percent said they’re sure there is no God. So that was a big task for him, to try to make a case that Christianity and faith are good for society. Now his message that he wanted to transmit faced a lot of challenges, one of which was the sex abuse crisis, and a lot of people were saying maybe his moral authority to make the case for religion being a cause for good was in some way compromised by the sex abuse scandal.

ABERNETHY: And also there’s some fence-mending with the Anglican Communion, isn’t there?

LAWTON: Well, practically since the time of Henry VIII there’s been talk of trying to get Anglicans and Catholics, these two big bodies of Christians, back together, and there are a lot of big issues, and the turmoil within the Anglican Communion over issues like homosexuality has only generated more tension, and so that remains a very big issue for those two Christian groups.

ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Pope Benedict XVI directly addressed the church sex abuse scandal this week. At the Vatican, the pope told pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square the church planned to take action in the face of allegations of abusive priests and negligent bishops. He did not elaborate, but soon afterward the Vatican accepted the resignations of bishops in Ireland and Belgium because of the scandal. Last weekend, during a visit to Malta, Benedict met privately with victims of clerical sex abuse, and with them he prayed and wept. The continuing crisis in the church has left millions of American Catholics sad, angry and wondering what can be done to resolve it. We want to talk about that with Margaret Steinfels, former editor-in-chief of Commonweal magazine, now co-director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. She joins us from New York. Peggy, welcome. How do you describe the range of reactions among the US Catholic laity?

MARGARET STEINFELS (Center on Religion and Culture, Fordham University): I think that many people are surprised that this has come back on the TV screen and the newspapers. American Catholics went through this a couple times before, most recently in 2002, and I would say that at this point there is among many people a kind of battle fatigue—why hasn’t this been dealt with?

ABERNETHY: Has it increased divisions among Catholics here, or increased divisions between the laity here and the hierarchy?

STEINFELS: I don’t know that it—I guess we could say that it has increased the ongoing factionalism of the church. Where the right declares this is the problem of the sex revolution of the sixties and homosexuality in the clergy, people on the left say no, no, if we had women priests, bishops, and cardinals this would never happen. So I don’t know that there are additions to this, but I think there is certainly ongoing factionalism among Catholics.

ABERNETHY: The church is a very top-down organization. Are there things that Catholics in the pews can do from the bottom up that might be helpful?

STEINFELS: Of course it’s top-down, but it’s not the Marine Corps, and I do think that at the parish level, and my own parish, for example, the pastor has dealt with this forthrightly and directly, and I think the people in our pews anyway have a feeling, well, here’s somebody who really understands the problem and who’s prepared to talk about it from the pulpit. I think that is a great benefit to those Catholics who actually still go to Mass. Of course, those who don’t don’t hear that message.

ABERNETHY: So what should Pope Benedict do?

STEINFELS: Well, I think the whole Vatican needs to come to grips with this. They need to get the truth out insofar as they know it. They should get it out quickly, and I guess they should stop blaming the messengers, whoever they may be.

ABERNETHY: Do you think the messengers have been exaggerating the story?

STEINFELS: I’ve been a little surprised at the viral nature of the stories, and I do think that there has been a certain lack of professionalism among journalists in tracking down details of the stories, but again I don’t think we should blame the messengers. I think the Catholic Church needs to take this issue in hand and deal with it.

ABERNETHY: Margaret Steinfels of Fordham University, many thanks.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: New evidence came to light this week that raises questions about Pope Benedict XVI’s response to the abuse scandal. Documents surfaced that suggest the Benedict, before he became pope, may have been involved in protecting abusive priests. Meanwhile, Benedict issued a letter of apology to Irish Catholics that was read at Sunday Masses. He also accepted the resignation of an Irish bishop. But many lay people criticized the Pope for not taking stronger actions.

Joining us is Father Tom Reese, Senior Fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. Father Reese, welcome.

FATHER THOMAS REESE, SJ: Thank you.

ABERNETHY: The allegations just keep coming about sex abuse by some priests, about cover-ups by some bishops—in the US, now in Europe, all over Europe, reaching into the Vatican, maybe, too. You’ve served the church all your life. How do you react to all that?

REESE: Oh, it just turns my stomach. I mean this is such an awful thing first of all that happened to these children. I have sat and listened to their stories, and it scarred them for life, and it’s a terrible experience for them, and it’s gut-wrenching to listen to these stories and to hear what happened to them and how they were treated by the church. I think it’s terrible and, you know, even though it was only four percent of priests that were involved in abuse, all of us priests feel shame and sorrow that this happened to children in our churches.

ABERNETHY: You feel betrayal by those who were leading the church?

REESE: Well, you know, there’s a lot of anger out there, not just in the pews but also among the priests that these bishops who didn’t deal with this properly have just scarred the church and hurt the reputation of all priests, even good ones.

ABERNETHY: There are allegations, as you know so well, that before he was pope, Benedict presided over offices in Germany and in the Vatican that were, let’s say, less than fully responsive to some of the allegations and situations that they faced. What should Benedict do now?

REESE: Well, I think it’s clear that Benedict grew in his understanding of this crisis. Like many of the other bishops at the beginning, he didn’t understand it. He thought it was overblown. For example, at one time they said that only one percent of the priests were involved in it. Well, that was what one study said at that time, and we found it was four percent. But he grew in his understanding because he listened to what the US bishops had to say. He in fact got it quicker than other people in the Vatican. He got it quicker than John Paul II did. So I think that we can say in his favor that he grew in his understanding and responded to it better as time went on.

ABERNETHY: But when he sent the letter last weekend to the Irish bishops, yes, he apologized and apologized, but he also did not go nearly as far in terms of discipline as a lot of people wanted to see.

REESE: I think that’s true, and the difficulty is that I think that the pope needs to be on message. In that letter he said a lot of things. He said good things. He said he was sorry, he said that this was a terrible crime and sin, he acknowledged the fact that bishops didn’t respond adequately. Those were good things that he said.

ABERNETHY: So what should he do? What should the church do, learning from what the US experience was?

REESE: Well, I think that the European bishops really need to learn from the US experience. They need to put into place a zero-tolerance policy, which means that any priest that is involved in abuse is never going to be acting as a priest again. They need to cooperate with the police in reporting these accusations. They need to have a child protection program in parishes and churches, where people are trained. They need to apologize over and over and over again.

ABERNETHY: You’re talking about the European bishops, but what about Benedict himself?

REESE: Well, I think, you know, he needs to apologize also, just as he did when he came to the United States. You remember in that visit he apologized in the plane on the way over, he talked to the US bishops about this, he met with victims of abuse. He needs to do more of that.

ABERNETHY: And what about punishment?

REESE: I think that priests that are involved in abuse should be totally banned from any ministry into the future. I think that the mistake that the US bishops made that the European bishops should learn from is that it is necessary for some bishops to stand up and say, “I did this, I had bad advice, I made a mistake, I’m really sorry, but I take full responsibility and I resign.” I’m glad to see that some bishops in Ireland have done that.

ABERNETHY: And do you expect that?

REESE: I hope so. The mistake that the American bishops made and I’m afraid the European bishops will also make is that they’ll think that this is going to blow over in a couple months. It’s not. We are going to see thousands of cases come forward in Europe over the next three to five years, if it’s anything like what happened in the United States. They need to get ahead of this, they need to be transparent, they need to call on victims to come forward now and respond to them right away. Otherwise this crisis will just continue to fester.

ABERNETHY: Father Tom Reese, many thanks.

BOB ABERNETHY (anchor): The Vatican faces growing anger over a burgeoning sex abuse scandal in Europe. New allegations of abuse by priests in Ireland and Germany are raising questions about the culpability of church leaders, including Pope Benedict. Joining us to talk about this is David Gibson.  He’s a Vatican expert who writes a column for the online newspaper Politics Daily.  He’s also the author of a biography of the pope called The Rule of Benedict.

David, welcome. Take us back, if you would, 30 years ago to the time when the man who is now pope was the Archbishop in Munich in Germany. What happened?

DAVID GIBSON (Author, The Rule of Benedict): Well, Bob, this case really started, like so many of these cases from that era started, where a priest in another diocese who had been known to abuse children was sent for therapy. He went to a psychiatrist in Munich, and Cardinal Ratzinger, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger signed off on that transfer. Subsequently, the Vatican says, and the Archdiocese of Munich says, a lower-level official in Munich sent that abusive priest, Father Peter Hullermann, to a parish in Munich where he subsequently abused other children and was eventually convicted of a crime. So the question now is really what did Benedict know and when did he know it? Did he sign off on this priest going to this other parish or did he not?

ABERNETHY: Now, it’s being said at the Vatican that those times were different, the rules may have been different, and in any event what happened or didn’t happen is being blown way out of proportion. What do you think?

GIBSON: Well, there is that claim. They’re saying, look, this is just wildly exaggerated. Benedict did not know about the reassignment of that priest. Others would say, well, if it wasn’t a sin of commission it was a sin of omission, that as the Archbishop of Munich, assigning priests and especially keeping track of an abuser is one of his main tasks. But also, Bob, this didn’t happen in isolation. This is coming in the midst of a huge, perfect storm of scandals sweeping across Europe from Ireland, as we’ve seen so recently, now to the Netherlands to Germany to Austria and now reaching even to the Vatican. So, again, this is not something that just is a one-off kind of scandal, and it also comes in the wake of the American crisis, which since 2002 we’ve been dealing with.

ABERNETHY: And what are the consequences, then, for the church in Europe and for Benedict himself?

GIBSON: Well, I think there are really two ways that this really hurts the pope. Look, he’s not going to resign from this unless something dramatic and drastic happens, and I don’t expect that, anticipate that. Popes don’t resign, but also popes cannot command any more, as they say, they must convince. He must be able to get a willing audience to listen to him as he preaches the Gospel and tries to carry out his priority, his agenda of re-Christianizing Christendom, that is, Europe. That’s really his main goal. So if his credibility is undermined by this, people are not going to listen to him. The second point I’d make is that as these scandals are emerging, these revelations are coming out in Europe, much as they did in the United States, you’re going to have great calls for accountability of bishops who covered up for abusers or moved them around to other parishes. If the pope is seen as culpable in the same way, how is he going to tell these other bishops that they in fact must step down or accept some kind of penalty?

ABERNETHY: David Gibson, many thanks.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This is our annual look back at the major stories in religion and ethics during the year now coming to an end. We do this with the help of Kevin Eckstrom, the editor of Religion News Service; with E. J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, the Washington Post, and Georgetown University; and with Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program. We begin with Kim’s reminder of the top news of 2009.

Click here to view Kim Lawton’s review of the top religion stories of 2009.

ABERNETHY: There was an enormous number of enormous issues, all at once confronting this country and especially President Obama.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly: Exactly. I think he took office amid this great optimism and reality set in pretty quickly of the many complex things that need to be done.

ABERNETHY: E.J., at Oslo, when he received the Nobel Prize and spoke about going to war…

E.J. DIONNE, Brookings Institution: In fact, Obama could have evaded the paradox of a president who has just sent 30,000 troops into Afghanistan and getting the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, he embraced that paradox, and he gave what I think is one of the most powerful arguments for a just war approach to foreign policy that we have heard from a president in a long time, perhaps ever. You could hear the echoes of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism. A lot of us have talked about how Obama is a Niebuhrian. I think you saw it very clearly there. He also, in a way, was bringing us really back to a kind of Truman-Roosevelt sort of liberalism out of the late 1940s, where there were echoes of the Four Freedoms in that talk. I think it’s rare that you get a president sort of laying out the moral assumptions behind his choices, but that’s what Obama did in that speech.

ABERNETHY: Christian realism—how do you define that?

DIONNE: Christian realism is sort of based on the idea that it’s the obligation of human beings to try to bring justice to a sinful world. It acknowledges human failure. It acknowledges the utopias cannot be built on this earth, but it asserts that human beings have the capacity to make things better, and that human beings have to make choices — some of them very, very difficult.

ABERNETHY: And that human beings have the capacity to make things worse, too.

E. J. Dionne

DIONNE: Quite. I think there was a kind of moral humility in that speech, where Obama was not celebrating the need to go to war. He was talking about it as a tragic necessity. That is, again, not something you often hear from a president of the United States, who often has to call men and women to war.

LAWTON: I find it interesting that while, as E.J. said, there is this philosophical, and some would say theological, underpinning in that speech, it really disappointed a lot of religious liberals who did not want to see a build-up in Afghanistan and were concerned about the president using some of these concepts to, in fact, bolster a war effort.

DIONNE: But I think that’s really an old argument between just war liberals and pacifists. Pacifists have a consistent ethic on war, but it’s not the same as the one held by just war theorists. What was interesting was that Obama said, “Look, I am in a different position than Gandhi or Martin Luther King, because I am the leader of a nation.” I thought that was a very interesting moral distinction he chose to make.

LAWTON: Again, the realism.

KEVIN ECKSTROM, Editor, Religion News Service: I think one of the interesting things that the Oslo speech pointed out was the comfort in the ability that this president has in speaking in religious terminology. You saw that when he was in Cairo speaking to the Muslims he invoked the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad. And when he was at Notre Dame speaking to the Catholics he talked about Catholic social teaching. And when he is accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, he is talking about war and peace and sin and human frailty. So this is a president who is very comfortable using religious language.

ABERNETHY: And you don’t get the impression—at least I don’t—that there is anything forced about this. It seems to come naturally.

ECKSTROM: That’s right. Part of the reason why he was able to speak, I think, so clearly to the Muslim world is because he has Muslims in his own family. So there is a naturalness and an authenticity there that I don’t think you see very often in very many politicians.

ABERNETHY: But in the Muslim world outside this country, how do we stand? After Cairo there was such enthusiasm for what Obama said, and then there was this escalation in Afghanistan.

ECKSTROM: It’s a little bit of a mixed bag, because I think American Muslims here at home felt very gratified by the things that he was saying. It’s important to note, I think, that in Cairo he was not just speaking to the Muslim world. He was not just speaking to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but he was talking to the folks here at home, Muslims who have pretty much had to go underground for a good part of this decade, and now they are sort of re-emerging in political life I think he was speaking to them. But as we saw with Fort Hood, in the shootings there, they have some serious problems of their own that they’re going to have to deal with in terms of home-grown extremism.

DIONNE: By the way, it is intriguing that President Bush came under a lot of criticism for using religious language. In fact, in some ways, a more liberal or progressive president may be invoking religious language even more than Bush did, albeit in a very particular way. But on the Cairo speech, it got an enormously positive response from the Muslim world, and then the president ran head-on into the difficulties resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. I think that was one of the real failures of the year for the president. Maybe it wasn’t something he could succeed at, but I think he had sort of expected the Israelis to do certain things It was probably unrealistic to expect that. Having done that and made some effective promises to the Palestinian leaders, they felt let down. So he really is, if not back to square one, awfully close. I think it’s going to be one of his real challenges in the coming year, to try to restart some process.

ABERNETHY: After the shootings at Fort Hood and after the five Muslim young men from northern Virginia ended up in Pakistan, apparently wanting to join the Al Qaeda, has there been some increase, Kim, in the concern that most people in this country have about Muslims in this country?

LAWTON: That’s the concern the Islamic community has. They’re very worried about how they’re being perceived outside, as well as being worried about what’s happening within their midst and among their own young people So I am hearing a lot of Muslim leaders, U.S. Muslim leaders, saying we need to do a better job of combating some of the hate speech that is out there. Especially online, they need to do a better job of talking about their view of Islam, which they think is being distorted by a lot of extremists. So they are very worried about how all of this is affecting not only the outward stuff, but their own internal problems as well.

DIONNE: When Fort Hood happened, I got an e-mail from this fine officer I’ve gotten to know, where he said, “This was a terrible, tragic problem” because, on the one side, clearly some folks, somewhere along the line, had fallen down on the job in protecting the troops from this shooter. On the other hand, he said, “I have troops under me who are Muslim, who are very loyal Americans, and we have to keep a balance here of preserving security for our troops without sort of throwing into one pot all of these Muslim American soldiers who are very loyal to the country.”

ABERNETHY: Let me turn your attention to some of the social issues of the year, especially abortion coming back with such strength, and that debate as part of the health care debate, and the issues around gay marriage, homosexuality. Talk about that, Kim.

Kim Lawton

LAWTON: There’s a lot to talk about. There was a lot of activity on both of those issues. Certainly, the issue of abortion, we saw that moving to the center, especially in the health care debate. Of course, some of the tensions were already heightened. You had the murder of Dr. Tiller in his church, a doctor who performed abortions. Then you had an abortion opponent who was murdered while holding anti-abortion signs. So some of the rhetoric and the tensions had already been heightened. I think in the health care debate you saw that issue really putting a big challenge on people that wanted to have health care reform, even the U.S. Catholic Bishops, who said, “We want to see health care reform , but not if in any way it includes funding for coverage of abortions.”

ECKSTROM: Abortion has always been one of those issues that’s been kind of a litmus test for politicians: How do you stand on that one issue? And that sort of translates into how people view your larger profile. But I think what was interesting this year was that it became a litmus test, if you’re a politician, for your respect for people of religious faith who don’t support abortion. So if you supported health care that included some sort of abortion provision, then all of a sudden you obviously didn’t respect people of faith who are opposed to it. So it became, I think, even more of a litmus test this year.

DIONNE: Especially about the health care fight, in a broad sense, both sides had agreed ahead of time that they weren’t going to fight about abortion, and then they had a fight about abortion. The agreement was neither side would use the health care debate to push beyond existing law, the Hyde Amendment, which essentially prohibits government funding for abortion except for a case of rape, incest, and where a mother’s life is at stake. But then they couldn’t agree on what it meant to preserve the status quo. The House passed the Stupak Amendment, which essentially said any insurance policy sold on the exchange that might get government subsidies, none of them could cover abortion. Then the Senate came up with another compromise which essentially said if you get coverage in your policy, you’re going to have to pay for it separately — a tiny amount of money. What’s amazing is they finally did seem to settle it. We’ll see this play out at the beginning of the year, but it shows how persistent this fight is when you can’t even agree on the definition of the status quo.

LAWTON: This has been a challenge for President Obama, who in his big speech at Notre Dame, for example, said we’re going to find common ground on abortion. Everybody was expecting a big statement or some kind of thing on common ground on abortion. I think the end of the year showed that it’s tough to find common ground there.

ECKSTROM: Even within your own party.

LAWTON: Exactly.

ABERNETHY: What about the gay issues, especially in the churches?

LAWTON: Looking at it in the religious denominations, it proved to be a huge challenge. Generally speaking, as more states legalized gay marriage, that put a challenge for religious clergy: Do you perform a same-sex wedding if your national denomination doesn’t approve of that? And so there were a lot of tensions at the local level for clergy. I think, on a denominational-institutional level, we saw the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a mainline denomination, lifting its ban on clergy who are in relationship. They only had allowed celibate gay clergy in the past. And, of course, the Episcopalians and the Anglicans are still fighting about this issue. This summer the US Episcopalians said gays and lesbians are eligible to be bishops. This is something the international Anglican Communion that the US church is part of said we don’t want to see you move forward on this. And the U.S. church said we’re moving forward anyway. Indeed, Los Angeles has elected a lesbian bishop. Her election must be still confirmed, but it has put enormous new tensions on the worldwide Anglican Communion.

ECKSTROM: The fights within the churches are really a proxy for a larger fight within society over this issue. We saw that this year over gay marriage. It’s hard to remember that this year saw the birth of gay marriage in Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, and also the District of Columbia. So it’s not just that the churches are fighting about this, but they are fighting a version of a national fight.

ABERNETHY: In all this, what’s going on internationally? What’s going on with these social issues? It’s happening against the background of a recession that’s having profound effects on the churches, denominations, as well as on everybody else.

DIONNE: What’s striking about this year is that there was an occasion where we might have had a very large moral argument about the nature of capitalism, about what kind of capitalism do we want to have, what are the responsibilities of people in the finance sector. We had some of that debate. Pope Benedict came out with a very strong encyclical that, in some ways, put him to the left of President Obama. But I think we didn’t have the larger debate that you might have expected, partly, I think, because we were numb, numb from the economic troubles, desperate to make sure that we didn’t fall off the precipice into something much deeper. But I don’t think this is over yet. I think we are destined to have a larger moral debate about the nature of capitalism and how we want it to work.

Kevin Eckstrom

ABERNETHY: I’ve been astonished that there wasn’t more visible, and perhaps even violent, protest about the bailout of the big financial institutions at a time when, at the Main Street level, everyone was suffering so much. It seemed to me if it had been the days of the civil rights movement, or the anti-Vietnam War movement, there would have been people in the streets. That didn’t happen. Well, it did happen on the right, didn’t it?

DIONNE: I think you’ve got an essentially progressive president in power. There’s been some grumbling on the progressive side that President Obama hasn’t been tough enough on Wall Street. I think that grumbling will continue, and I think he’s going to respond to it. But given that you have a progressive president in power, it’s not surprising that this populism has taken a sort of conservative or right-wing form and is directed less against Wall Street than the government bailing out Wall Street. That just may be a natural result of where politics are at the moment.

ABERNETHY: Kevin, there’s some Vatican news, pope news.

ECKSTROM: There is. This was sort of, I think, a watershed year for the pope in that you saw the real contours of his papacy emerge. He is sort of doing things on his own timetable, for his own reasons, regardless of what people are going to say. So he’s going to welcome back traditionalists, even if one of them turns out to be a Holocaust-denying bishop. He’s going to find shelter for the Anglicans, even if it’s going to upset interfaith or ecumenical relations. And, as we ended the year, he’s going to move Pope Pius XII, the World War II pope who is accused of not doing enough to save Jews, he’s going to move him one step closer to sainthood. So it’s almost like either the pope doesn’t care what people are going to say, or he doesn’t know. But he sort of is doing things on his own timetable.

DIONNE: I think he’d make this a lot more palatable to a lot of people if he were also moving to canonize Pope John XXIII — one of the great heroes to progressive Catholics. I think one of the things it says about the organization of the Vatican, some of these things seem to happen when one part of the Vatican acted without another part of the Vatican knowing that it had acted. This was particularly the case with the Saint Pius XII Society, where there were parts of the Vatican that didn’t really realize they were moving this quickly. Some folks in the Vatican said we could have told him about the problem that he was going to have with this Holocaust-denying bishop, if someone had just told us that this was going on.

ECKSTROM: The Christian Unity Office really didn’t know about his outreach to the Anglicans to offer them shelter. So it’s almost like the left hand doesn’t quite always know what the right hand is doing.

LAWTON: That’s been a problem with the Vatican for a long time now. That’s not unique to this papacy. I think one of the differences is the personality. You see the differences between John Paul II and the great love and just positive feelings that he generated. Benedict doesn’t have that same kind of charisma, so I think he gets criticized for some of the same things that happened under the John Paul II papacy.

ABERNETHY: Let me ask you all a question. Did you see any signs in this year past that tell you something about how the whole religious enterprise is doing? Is it getting stronger? Is it getting weaker? Is it just kind of rolling along? Sixteen percent of people in the polls say they are unaffiliated. What do you see? Is there anything that can tell you about the health of religion in the United States?

DIONNE: Sometimes I think only God knows what the health of religion is in any given any country. I think what you’re seeing is that the old story is still true: that compared to other wealthy, industrialized countries we are still an exceptionally religious nation. But I think you’re also seeing, in some of the surveys, particularly among young people, perhaps the rise of a certain amount of secularism, or perhaps just disaffiliation from religious traditions. Young people are often less engaged in religious activity than older people, but this seems to be a change over time. I think that’s going to be something to watch, because you may have among young people a kind of sorting out that had not happened among older people. You do have a very significant number of highly religious young people, but some other young people who might in the past have been believing doubters or doubting believers, but still engaged in religious institutions, are now pulling back altogether. At least that’s a hypothesis that I think we’re going to follow for a while.

LAWTON: The old categories don’t fit as strongly as they used to. People are moving around a lot more. That doesn’t necessarily they’re becoming less religious. Even the unaffiliated very often are deeply spiritual or even deeply religious; just not within a particular box that the old categories used to put them in.

ABERNETHY: As you look back, let me ask you whether you see some things from your perspective now that didn’t seem to get the attention when they were happening that they deserve, they were underreported.

ECKSTROM: There are two very interesting cases in Oregon and in Wisconsin about faith-healing deaths, where children who were denied medical care died and their parents were put on trial. In Wisconsin, the parents were sentenced to probation; in Oregon, the parents basically got off. And there is a third case coming up in 2010 in Oregon. But there is a really interesting clash between personal beliefs and public responsibility, and it’s not going away, so there’ll be more to watch on that.

DIONNE: I think the activities of President Obama’s faith-based office, how he’s changed and hasn’t changed what President Bush did in this area, is probably an underreported story, but it is underreported because I think this is exactly the way the administration wants it. I think that they have been very determined, in the first year, not to make waves in this area, to be reassuring to people, and so the underreporting of this story is probably a victory for the administration.

LAWTON: I really watched a growing religious coalition, a very diverse coalition, on nuclear nonproliferation. It’s not something people really paid a lot of attention to, but there are evangelicals who are taking this on as an issue, sort of like they did on the environment. I am seeing the same thing, mainline denominations, even the Catholic Church and evangelicals coming together saying we are really worried about this issue.

ABERNETHY: Thanks to Kim Lawton and to Kevin Eckstrom and E. J. Dionne. A wonderful discussion. Thanks very much. Happy New Year to you and to our viewers.

Rabbi RON KRONISH (Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel): Every step that the pope takes in every place he goes, including the Temple Mount or the Western Wall, is a gesture of reconciliation to both sides, and he’s tried during the week he’s here to play a balancing act, and it never quite works out perfect for everybody.

LAWTON: Pilgrims came from around the world to be part of the pope’s visit here, but his main focus was on the local Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The visit certainly encouraged the region’s shrinking Christian population. In 1948, Christians made up about 20 percent of the population here. Today, because of emigration and declining birth rates, they represent less than two percent.

Reverend IBRAHIM FALTAS (Latin Parish of Jerusalem): We are worried about the Christians here in Jerusalem and all the Holy Land. To be here is our mission, to be here, to continue to be here in this land.

LAWTON: Benedict urged the Christian population, predominantly Palestinian, to persevere. His support meant a lot to local Christians.

HANAN NASRALLAH: He is the big man, the holy — well, you consider the holy man and representing the Catholic Church over the world, so for him to come in an area where there is a conflict — a very small country, but it’s a big issue here, I think it’s very important for his visit.

KHALIL ANSARA: The talk is always about the relationship with the Muslims and the Jews, but it’s very important for the pope to come here too with the relations with the Christians.

LAWTON: Meanwhile, many Jewish leaders had high expectations that this visit would be a visual demonstration that their community still has strong relations with the Vatican, despite recent tensions after Benedict lifted the excommunication of a traditionalist bishop who denies the Holocaust.

Rabbi DAVID ROSEN (American Jewish Committee in Israel): Most people don’t know about statements and declarations. Most people don’t read properly, but nevertheless people do view the visual images.

LAWTON: Benedict met with Israel’s chief rabbis and visited the Western Wall, where he left a prayer for peace in the Middle East. He also visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. But his speech there generated controversy. Some Israelis were upset that he did not acknowledge the role Christian anti-Semitism played in the Holocaust, and he did not refer to his own background as a German growing up in the Nazi era.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the pope had addressed those points before and didn’t feel the need to repeat them.

Reverend FEDERICO LOMBARDI (Vatican Spokesman): He had already spoken many times about these problems.

LAWTON: Rabbi Ron Kronish of the Interreligious Coordinating Council of Israel said he believes, overall, the visit was a positive thing for the Jewish community.

Rabbi KRONISH: It strengthens Israel’s place in the family of nations and in the world community. So I think that people are going to be happy about it when they look back. He went to Yad Vashem; he went to the Western Wall; he went to all the right places. He’s made all the right gestures that count for both peoples, and I think we ought to not focus on all the things he could have said or not said.

LAWTON: Benedict also did some fence-mending with the Muslim community, where tensions linger after his controversial speech in 2006 where he quoted a Byzantine emperor who linked the Prophet Muhammad and violence. Benedict was the first pope to visit the compound of Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites in Islam and a place of deep contention between Muslims and Jews.

Muslim leader Issa Jaber is an Israeli Arab who helps coordinate interfaith dialogue.

ISSA JABER (Association for Jewish-Arab Coexistence in the Judean Hills): We believe that His Holiness’ visit to the Mosque of Al Aqsa and the Dome Rock was very important and may open new dimensions of dialogue — a new dialogue between the different religions, especially Islam and Christianity.

LAWTON: But the complexities of interreligious dialogue here were also evident. At an interfaith gathering, Sheikh Taysir al-Tamimi, an Islamic court judge in the Palestinian Authority, made an impromptu 10-minute-long diatribe against Israeli occupation, prompting some of the Jewish representatives to walk out of the meeting.

Mr. JABER: Maybe it was not exactly on the agenda of the program, but for Sheik Tamimi it was very important to show the pope and to let him understand the painful — the pains of the Palestinian people in Jerusalem and outside of Jerusalem.

ELANA ROZENMAN (Trust-Emun Group): It demonstrated our reality here, and if things were simple and the religions could easily get together and meet together without any problems we would already have peace.

LAWTON: Elana Rozenman is part of an interfaith movement called the Abrahamic Renunion, which seeks to build personal relationships and trust among people of the three major religions.

Ms. ROZENMAN: Yes, the reality of conflict and war and killing exists daily. Right now people are being victims of violent acts here. We know that, but also there is another level of reality that exists of peaceful, harmonious, loving relationships between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

LAWTON: She works closely with her friends, Eliyahu McLean, a fellow Jew, and Ibrahim Ahmad Abu El-Hawa, a Muslim.

IBRAHIM AMAD ABU EL-WAWA: We are stubborn people. We are the children of Abraham. We are from the same seed. Okay?

ELIYAHU MCLEAN (Jerusalem Peacemakers): This is a point that Ibrahaim always makes, that God chose two of the most stubborn people in the world, the Arabs and the Jews, to live in this land, and it is actually God’s decision, and this is why it’s also so difficult to make peace, because we’re both very stubborn. But at the same time we need to be stubborn to be peacemakers.

LAWTON: The three say the pope’s visit encouraged them in their work.

Mr. MCLEAN: I really felt personally empowered when the pope gave a specific blessing to the peacemakers, to the Jews and Arabs, Israelis and the Palestinians who are working to make a better future for the children of Abraham in the land of the prophets, in the Holy Land.

LAWTON: The pope may have urged the religious community to be a force for peace, but many leaders in the movement for interfaith dialogue acknowledge that politics can’t be separated out.

Rabbi KRONISH: The road ahead is bumpy. It’s not a smooth road, because we are linked to the political processes. We try to keep a flicker of hope alive in a sometimes desperate situation, and we believe that when the peace process moves forward, we will be able to move, in cooperation with governments, in bigger and more systematic ways in the future.

LAWTON: Benedict prayed for peace at every stop in this week-long Holy Land pilgrimage, and in spite of everything else, Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike said they hope that message of peace is the ultimate legacy of this trip.

I’m Kim Lawton in Jerusalem.