BOB ABERNETHY: For a few short moments this week, a spirit of reconciliation and bipartisanship descended on Washington. It was the 48th Annual National Prayer Breakfast, attended by President Clinton and nearly 4,000 religious leaders, members of Congress, and heads of state. Kim Lawton reports.

KIM LAWTON: It’s a ritual that has been practiced in the nation’s capital for nearly half a century. For a couple hours a year, government and religious leaders from around the world put politics aside and gather for a morning of prayer.

Representative DENNIS HASTERT (Speaker of the House): Would you please bow your heads and join with me in prayer.

LAWTON: The National Prayer Breakfast began in 1952, when members of Congress invited President Dwight Eisenhower to pray with them. The tradition has grown over the years, and a private group now helps organize it. This year, there were a few departures from tradition. Pope John Paul II sent greetings, which were read to the largely Protestant crowd by a Vatican representative. Franklin Graham gave the closing prayer, substituting for his father Billy, a prayer breakfast founder. Perhaps the biggest surprise: the main speaker was an Orthodox Jew, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, who gave a well-received message.

Senator JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (Democrat, Connecticut): I want to ask all of you here to think with me about how we can strengthen and expand the current spiritual awakening so that it not only inspires us individually and within our separate faith communities but also renews and elevates the moral and cultural life of our country.

LAWTON: President Clinton attended for the last time as president. He emphasized tolerance and unity.

President BILL CLINTON: Here in Washington, we are not blameless, but we often, too, forget in the heat of political battle, our common humanity. We slip from honest difference, which is healthy, into dishonest demonization.

LAWTON: Unity may have been the theme, but controversy wasn’t far away.

Unidentified Police Officer: Again, if you don’t move out of this public space, out of this driveway at this time, we are going to place you under arrest.

Mr. MICHAEL HOROWITZ (Hudson Institute): I understand.

LAWTON: At the U.S. State Department, religious liberty crusader Michael Horowitz staged a one-man act of civil disobedience to send a message to the prayer breakfast. Horowitz said he was concerned about a business-as-usual prayer meeting while believers around the world are suffering religious persecution.

Mr. HOROWITZ: Combined with the prayer has got to be some real firm message coming out of it. Prayer is not some sappy business of people feeling good. Prayer involves responsibility. It involves commitment.

LAWTON: At the breakfast itself, many participants said they did receive a spiritual challenge.

Bishop WILLIAM MORRIS (United Methodist Church): It was made known that what is important is not just what we say, but how we live that out and how we live that out on a daily basis.

LAWTON: President Clinton admitted he would miss attending the prayer breakfast. Religious leaders were also reflective.

Reverend STAN DeBOE (Catholic Charities USA): It’s been a mixed relationship. He has always called upon clergy to help him out in times of not only national but personal crisis, and yet sometimes the clergy has been some of the strongest critics at times of national and personal crisis.

LAWTON: There’s been a lot of God talk this campaign season among the candidates who want to succeed Bill Clinton. Religious leaders at the National Prayer Breakfast said they hope the next occupant of the White House is a person of faith, but they also said they’ll be watching to see how that faith is translated into action in policy. I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

BOB ABERNETHY: One of the pastors active in the prayer breakfast movement is the Reverend Charles Wright, whose appointment to be the next House of Representatives chaplain faced renewed controversy this week. In December, House Republican leaders selected Wright, a Presbyterian minister, to replace Chaplain James Ford, who’s retiring after 21 years at the post. But some Democrats allege that a Catholic priest was unfairly passed over for the job. Republicans denied any anti-Catholic bias and spent this week shoring up their relations with the Catholic community. Wright’s appointment will be voted on by the full House later this month.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: Seldom has sin made bigger headlines than it did the past week. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a widely publicized article for the stylish new TALK magazine, stated that, “In Christian theology, there are sins of weakness and sins of malice,” adding that her husband’s adultery was a sin of weakness. Is there a hierarchy of sin? Are we using the insights of modern psychotherapy to excuse bad behavior instead of merely explain it? Does this foreshadow a kind of no-fault morality in America?

Joining us are Reverend Dr. Cornelius Plantinga Jr., dean of the chapel at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a theologian in the Christian Reform Church. He is author of the book NOT THE WAY IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE: A BREVIARY OF SIN. And in Oakland, California, Catholic theologian and prolific writer Jane Redmont, whose new book, WHEN IN DOUBT, SING: PRAYER IN DAILY LIFE, has just been published.

Thank you both for being with us. Neil, weakness versus malice: Is there a hierarchy of sin?

Reverend Dr. CORNELIUS PLANTINGA Jr. (Author, NOT THE WAY IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE): The Christian church has always seen a hierarchy of sin, Catholics as well as Protestants. The Catholic tradition between mortal and venial sins is better known. The Protestants, too, have thought that some sins are more serious than others. The first lady’s distinction between sins of weakness and sins of malice is not a classical theological distinction.

WILLIAMS: Jane, what goes into making a sin?

Ms. JANE REDMONT (Author, WHEN IN DOUBT, SING): That’s the $60,000 question. I think it’s difficult for us to talk about sin outside of the context of biblical categories — it is a biblical category — and outside of the notion of relationship with God. Sin classically has to do with breaking or violating relationship with God and relationship with neighbor, which in the biblical traditions, Jewish and Christian, are understood as being one and the same.

WILLIAMS: Intentionally, with full knowledge and consent?

Ms. REDMONT: That is a traditional Catholic way of talking about mortal sin. And, yes, I think that the question that Ms. Rodham Clinton raised of the distinction between malice and weakness, while not a classical category, raises the question of intention. Was full human freedom, was the will completely involved in a particular sin?

WILLIAMS: Neil, have our notions of sin changed over time?

Dr. PLANTINGA: They certainly have. We traditionally have talked of the seven deadly sins where pride was the first. More recently, pride has actually made a real comeback in contemporary life. In fact, some folks think of self-esteem as the solution to all our problems. On the other hand, we’ve gotten more sensitive to certain sins, for example, to sins of disrespect against others.

WILLIAMS: Like bigotry?

Dr. PLANTINGA: Bigotry, racism, and sins against the whole creation, ecological sins.

Ms. REDMONT: I would add also that, in my own tradition, in the Catholic tradition, we have a renewed emphasis on the notion of social sin, so that people, in asking about sin, might well ask in, for instance, President Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which took food out of the mouths of children, was that a sin of weakness or a sin of malice, this kind of structural or social sin?

WILLIAMS: How has psychotherapy and the psychotherapeutic community changed our notions of what a sin is?

Ms. REDMONT: I think the classic example is the example of alcoholism, which, 100 years ago, we understood under the category of sin. And now, understanding physiologically and psychologically what goes into alcoholism, we know that although there may be sinful actions that come out of the condition of being addicted to alcohol, alcoholism itself is not a sin.

And so now with the field of trauma studies within clinical psychology, we’re understanding that there may be factors in people’s childhood that may not mitigate, but certainly don’t constitute in themselves a sin and may predispose people in certain directions.

WILLIAMS: Neil, does understanding the effect of, for instance, childhood trauma on adult behavior automatically absolve grownups from sin?

Dr. PLANTINGA: It can’t. We have to treat grownups as grownups, and a lot of the time when we think about how childhood events may influence grownup behavior, we’re engaged in amateur psychological speculation. At the same time, we all know that having a rocky childhood does influence how we live as adults. I think it’s instructive to notice that AA does hold alcoholics fully responsible even for managing what is, in fact, a disease.

WILLIAMS: In other words, it is, in the end, personal responsibility?

Dr. PLANTINGA: We all have it, we know it, and we try very much to keep it, but it’s one of the great human mysteries why we actually sin against the purpose of our own existence.

WILLIAMS: All right. Thank you so much, both of you, for being with us, Reverend Dr. Cornelius Plantinga Jr. and theologian Jane Redmont. Thanks.

Ms. REDMONT: Thank you.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS, anchor: Our top story: it sounds like a triumph. Three years after the most radical overhaul of the nation’s welfare system ever, the number of people on welfare has been cut in half. Today, 7.3 million Americans remain on welfare, down from more than 14 million when President Clinton took office. But it has not changed other factors that effectively keep people in poverty. Chris Roberts reports.

CHRIS ROBERTS: In Chicago this week, President Clinton proclaimed the success of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act.

President BILL CLINTON: A big part of this is the decision that the American people, through their elected representatives, made to end welfare as we know it.

ROBERTS: He said there’s still work to be done and pledged new programs for job training, transportation, child care, and housing.

Pres. CLINTON: Let’s spend this money to develop the human capacity of our people. It will make the economy stronger, and we will all be better off.

ROBERTS: Janet Russell used to be on welfare, but now she’s happy to be working at a Marriott hotel in Maryland.

Ms. JANET RUSSELL (Marriott Hotel): When you don’t have money and you don’t have any income and you have to rely on the state, then people treat you differently.

ROBERTS: But Janet also highlights a problem with welfare reform. It doesn’t necessarily lift people out of poverty.

Ms. RUSSELL: I pretty much juggle from month to month — not enough for food, not enough for utilities, not enough for a couple of things.

ROBERTS: Janet’s problems are typical. A new report from The Urban Institute in Washington, DC, has found that, after leaving welfare, many people have jobs, but they’re still poor. The report’s author is Pamela Loprest.

Ms. PAMELA LOPREST (Urban Institute): The average wage is $6.60. You’re at about the poverty level for a family of three, about $13,000 a year.

ROBERTS: Loprest found that, among people who used to be on welfare, 57 percent worry about having enough money for food, 39 percent have been unable to pay housing bills, and 41 percent of adults and 25 percent of children lack medical insurance. Loprest says the priority of welfare reform is placing people in jobs, not ending poverty.

Ms. LOPREST: Right now, there’s a lot of desire to have welfare recipients work, and for some, that means kind of a punitive thing, “Well, we’re working, so they should work,” but for others, it’s a real, “Join the mainstream of America.” People are working; there’s kind of a status and dignity and self-sufficiency involved in that.

ROBERTS: Theologian Ron Sider isn’t satisfied with this kind of welfare reform.

Mr. RONALD SIDER (Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary): Well, it’s a good thing to get people off welfare. There have been incentives in the 1996 welfare bill that have moved us in the right direction. The tragedy is that the poverty level is not going down hardly at all.

ROBERTS: Over 35 million Americans live in poverty, and for Sider, this is an ethical problem.

Mr. SIDER: The Judeo-Christian heritage makes it very clear that caring for the poor is one of the top priorities of the God of the scriptures. Christians and Jews are blatantly defying what the Bible has to say when they allow that kind of poverty in the richest nation in human history.

ROBERTS: In the fall, Sider will launch what he calls the Generous Christians Campaign, hoping to mobilize churches against poverty.

Mr. SIDER: The Generous Christians prayer says, “Lord Jesus, teach my heart to share your love for the poor.” If a few million Christians would take that pledge and then live that out in moving from a quarter of a tithe to half and then a full tithe of 10 percent — and that would be very easy — that would not in any way drive middle-class Christians into poverty.

ROBERTS: All Janet Russell wants is a home and an education for her kids.

Ms. RUSSELL: I don’t think that the things that I want are that extravagant over anything anybody else wants.

ROBERTS: For many Americans, these are prosperous times. We live in an era of government surpluses, a booming stock market, and debates about tax cuts. But millions still live in poverty, and whether we can end welfare as we have known it as well as share the prosperity remains an open question. I’m Chris Roberts reporting.