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.

LORIE CREPEAU (Director of Faith Formation, St. Edna’s Church): My name is Lorie Crepeau. I’m the director of faith formation here.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: These parishioners at St. Edna’s Church in suburban Chicago got a crash course on the changes in the Catholic Mass.

CREPEAU: I don’t want you to think of this as, “Oh great, come Advent I’m going to walk into church and the communion rail’s going to be back and ladies are going to have to wear Kleenex on their head and oh me, oh my.” That is not what is happening here.

VALENTE: What has happened is that the words to some of the prayers and music these people have known for the past 40 years have changed. It’s the most significant retooling of the Mass since 1973, when it went from Latin to English.

CREPEAU: We wanted to make it simple for the people to understand, so we didn’t stay true to the actual Latin translation. We wanted to find words that people felt comfortable with. Well, now you’re comfortable. Forty years later you’re comfortable. Now we’re going to try to make you uncomfortable by going back to where it should have been, alright?

VALENTE: The Vatican says the Mass is now more authentic, more accurately reflecting the meaning of the original Latin.

ARCHDIOCESAN DVD: Will the changing of this frequently used dialogue be easy? Certainly not.

CREPEAU: In the current translation we say that “I have sinned through my own fault.” Now I’m going to say, “I have greatly sinned,” but then they want to reinforce this, obviously, because now they’ve added “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault,” and you say, “I get it! It’s my fault! I get it!”

VALENTE: Some of the changes don’t fall trippingly off the tongue. In the Creed, for example, the part about Jesus being one with the Father becomes “consubstantial with the Father.”

CREPEAU: It is a $50 word. Now imagine a third-grader trying to do this, because third grade is where they teach the creed.

ARCHDIOCESAN DVD: “Dominus vobiscum,” and the response, “Et cum spiritu tuo,” presently translated as: “The Lord be with you.” “And also with you.”

VALENTE: “And also with you” becomes “and with your spirit.” Other changes are more extensive.

ARCHDIOCESAN DVD: Indeed, as you can see, the entire hymn is reimagined and restructured…

VALENTE: For priests, the Mass becomes quite different.

ARCHDIOCESAN DVD: The new translations of the Roman Missal involve a new way of speaking for the priest at Mass.

VALENTE: But many priests are not happy with the changes. They’ve criticized the new translation as archaic, ugly — even wrong.

REV. LARRY JANOWSKI: I haven’t met a priest yet who feels that this is a good thing, that this is an improvement in the liturgy.

VALENTE: Father Larry Janowski is a Franciscan priest in the Chicago diocese who objects to the literal translation of words from the original Latin.

JANOWSKI: From what I’ve seen they’re like sawdust in the mouth. They’re difficult to say.

VALENTE: For example, this prayer:

JANOWSKI: (reading) “Therefore, Lord, we pray, graciously accept this oblation of our service, that of your whole family, which we make to you also for those to whom you have been pleased to give the new birth of water and the Holy Spirit, granting them forgiveness of all their sins. Order our days in your peace and commend that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those you have chosen.” That’s quite a mouthful.

VALENTE: Janowski was so concerned that he wrote a letter to Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, which said in part:

JANOWSKI: (reading from letter) English has the greatest vocabulary of any living language on earth, yet the prescription is that we not only adhere to a stiff, ugly, nonvernacular translation, but actually delights in convoluted sentence structure and anachronistic language, and then calls it reverence.

VALENTE: The retranslation process began in the 1980s with a group of theologians working in concert with linguists, writers, even poets. But the Vatican rejected that translation and instead decided to rewrite the entire Roman Missal or prayer book, of which the Mass is only a part.

REV. EDWARD FOLEY: Then, in 2000, Pope John Paul II announced there would be a new missal, and if there was going to be a new missal you had to start the entire translation process all over again. So it began again.

VALENTE: Father Edward Foley is a professor of liturgy and music.

FOLEY: I think the most problematic part of the whole thing has been the process. I think it was much more secretive than the previous translation process. We knew who the translators were in the previous process. Here, we did not.

VALENTE: In an open letter to the US bishops, Father Anthony Ruff, a liturgist who had been heavily involved in the new translation, refused to promote it, saying “The Holy See allowed a small group to hijack the translation at the final stage, how unsatisfactory the final text is….how much deception and mischief have marked this process—and then when I think of our Lord’s teachings on service and love and unity…I weep.”

Eucharistic Prayer: “When supper was ended, he took the cup…”

VALENTE: The consecration is the holiest part of the Mass. Even a small change here—from the word “all” to the word “many”—has proven controversial.

Eucharistic Prayer: “He gave the cup to his disciples and said, take this all of you and drink from it. This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven.”

JANOWSKI: Our understanding of the sacrifice of Christ in the world today is that it is for all people, and to say “for many” is a very difficult thing for a priest to even get out. I know priests who say it violates their conscience to say that.

THERESA WATKINS (Parishioner): Change is always hard. So I think there will be some pushback from some people, especially because we’ve been doing it for so long.

KATHY KEMNETZ (Parishioner): I think they’re good, I think they’re good. Some will take getting used to.

ERNIE KEMNETZ (Parishioner): I lived through Vatican II and all of that change, and that was something else, and like she was saying, there were a number of pastors who were not fully involved. They fought it.

VALENTE: Despite the controversy, the Mass remains the heart of their faith to most Catholics.

CREPEAU: Remember, the Eucharist is who we are. It is everything that we do. It’s the center of what we are, and everything else comes out from that.

FOLEY: The Roman Catholic Church is not a democracy, and we do have a pope and we do have bishops, and they are the arbiters. The Mass does not belong to me. The liturgy belongs to, the Mass belongs to the church, and I have been called to be an official representative of the church, and it’s not for me to change. It’s for me to do it as effectively and as well as possible.

VALENTE: In a statement, the US bishops said there is “an openness and readiness to receive the new text.” Some priests clearly aren’t ready yet.

JANOWSKI: At some point, I will be required to teach the congregation about what is coming, and I cannot lie to the people. I cannot pretend to be enthusiastic about a translation that I don’t believe in. I will say what needs to be said, but I will have to say to those people whom I love that my heart isn’t in it, and I dread saying that.

VALENTE: But for now, it seems, Catholics will have to learn to live with the changes, whether they like them or not.

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

BOB ABERNETHY: A new Vatican document this week called for sweeping changes in the global financial system in order, it said, to put “the common good” at the center of economic activity. One of the most controversial proposals would create an international political authority that would have broad power to regulate financial markets. The document was issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. It said changes are needed to address the quote “inequalities and distortions of capitalist development.”

Giving to the poor was one of many issues raised in a new survey of U.S. Catholics. According to the results, 60% now believe you can be a good Catholic without donating time or money to the poor. That number was 44% in 2005. The survey also found that a majority of Catholics now believes that individuals – not church authorities – should be the ones to make decisions about abortion, homosexuality and other social issues.

Joining me now are Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program and Kevin Eckstrom editor of Religion News Service. Welcome to you both. Kevin can you explain this astonishing figure that 60% of those surveyed, 60% of Catholics in this country say, they can be good Catholics without at the same time giving money to the poor or giving time to helping the poor.

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): It’s one of the great sort of paradoxes that this survey picked up. The other figure that was worth mentioning here is that two out of three Catholics said that helping the poor and the church’s teaching on the poor is important to me as a Catholic. So, they see it as core to the Catholic identity but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re actually going go out and do something about it. And it’s sort of broadly reflective of this trend that the survey picked up that I’m a Catholic and I’ll go to mass because I want the Eucharist, I want the liturgy, I think that the core teachings are important but I am not going to do it because some bishop somewhere tells me that I have to. Weekly mass attendance is down to like 30% and the number of people who go to church once a month is actually higher than people who go to weekly. So people are doing it on their own terms.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): And, also, in that survey, it did find that a big majority, 88% of Catholics, said that helping the poor, it was meaningful for them that their church had concern for the poor. It’s just, again, what the church says and does and how it translates into individuals’ lives. As one author of the survey said, American Catholics like being Catholic but they like to do it on their own terms, as well.

ABERNETHY: And the confirmation of some other long trends. For instance, making up your own mind about social and moral concerns rather than taking instructions from the hierarchy.

ECKSTROM: Yeah the big number there was on homosexuality, which is sort of a flashpoint issue but I think it’s telling. The number of people who say the church and church leaders should have the final word on the morality of homosexuality or same-sex marriage has dropped by half in the last 25 years. No other issue has seen that sort of shift but I think it’s really telling where people say, you know what, I’ve got gay friends, I’ve got a gay brother or gay neighbors. There’s a disconnect here between what the church is telling me and what my life experience is telling me and so I’m not going to necessarily go along with the church on this one.

ABERNETHY: And what are the implications of a third of Catholics now being Hispanic?

ECKSTROM: Well, within a generation they are likely to be the majority of the Catholic Church in the United States. And what that means, in practical terms, is that Spanish language mass might become the norm and English language mass is going to be sort of what they do on the side, on Saturday nights.

LAWTON: And some of these economic issues may come to the fore, as well. And again, going back to the Vatican document, I mean, a lot of the input for that came from outside the United States as church leaders from Europe, but also Latin America, have contributions about what the church has to say about the poor. And sometimes American Catholics weren’t, there was a lot of mixed reaction among American Catholics to that Vatican document. I mean some religious conservatives, Catholic conservatives, really tried to dismiss it a little bit and say it didn’t have the full force of a papal teaching but it certainly did quote from popes who have raised concerns about the poor.

ABERNETHY: And reminded everybody about how very liberal the church teachings are about how the poor should be treated.

LAWTON: Catholic social teaching does have what many people consider very liberal values when it comes to the poor. Some of the folks this week tried to associate this document with the Occupy Wall Street folks and the Vatican officials said this was not a direct response to Occupy Wall Street. But I saw a lot of similar language. The Vatican document criticized excessive greed as being sinful and evil. Certainly that’s a big theme with Occupy Wall Street. Talked about social inequities being morally wrong and again, that’s in the Vatican document.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Kim Lawton and Kevin Eckstrom.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: He is one of the best known priests in America, a respected sociologist, researcher, and commentator, and author of dozens of best-selling novels. Father John Cusick has known Father Greeley for forty years.

REV. JOHN CUSICK: When the history of the American Catholic Church is written in America, I don’t know if you’re going to find a more significant name or a more impacting name on church than Andrew Greeley.

VALENTE: He was one of the first priests to criticize the Church’s position on birth control. He called for better preaching from the pulpit, a greater outreach to young people, and greater humility among the clergy. He promoted a more active role for lay people. Eileen Durkin is Greeley’s niece.

EILEEN DURKIN: He would write and write and write, and it was a part of his life. It couldn’t be separated from him. It wasn’t a chore for him. It just flowed out of him. Many people were touched by his stories and by his image of God as a God of love and a God of compassion and a God of forgiveness and a God especially of passion.

VALENTE: In November 2008, Father Greeley stepped out of a taxi in this Chicago suburb after a speaking engagement. His coat caught in the door, and as the taxi pulled away he was thrown to the pavement and suffered a traumatic brain injury. The prolific author who had written on so many subjects would write no more.

DURKIN: He’s suffering. Anyone who has had a traumatic brain injury to the extent that my uncle has, anyone who is a vibrant, intelligent, brilliant person who is now reduced to 24-hour care is suffering.

VALENTE: Father James Martin is an editor at the national Catholic magazine America.

REV. JAMES MARTIN, SJ: The mystery of suffering really does remain a mystery. There is no satisfactory answer to the question. It has bedeviled theologians and saints and scholars over millennia.

CUSICK: His attention span is certainly not what it used to be. He’s very slow. I mean, I think medical people have said it takes him a lot longer to process things.

DURKIN: Seeing his suffering has not necessarily affected my faith, because I know of his faith. For 80 years up until his accident I observed his faith, and I certainly heard about his faith because he shared so much of it and wrote about so much of it.

VALENTE: Father Greeley’s steamy novels won him both fans and critics. He wasn’t afraid to depict the sexual side of priests in his fiction and often included provocative sex scenes.

DURKIN: He would say all the other things he did as a sociologist, as a novelist, as a commentator were just his way of being a priest.

CUSICK: He would always stir things up, and people would be yelling and screaming and saying, how can he say that? How could he write that? And ten years later they’re saying it and they’re writing it.

DURKIN: Certainly the whole sexual abuse crisis in the Church—he was writing about that and identifying that long before it came out in most of the press in America.

VALENTE: Father Greeley warned of clergy sex abuse on national TV nearly a decade before the scope of the scandal became known.

Andrew Greeley on the Phil Donahue Show in 1993: I don’t think the Vatican cares. I mean they recently ordered the bishop of Pittsburgh to reassign a priest he had removed because he was a child molester, and so the Vatican doesn’t get it.

VALENTE: He has said that one of the church’s biggest problems is the status of women.

Andrew Greeley in 2002: The church just has not been able to cope with the demands for fairness and equality from women, so they’re very angry. For a long time, the bishops could console themselves, and I think some still do, that these are just your radical feminists. But the radical feminists include their sisters and their nieces and their mothers and all the women in their lives. They just don’t like the way the Church treats them.

CUSICK: He could drive the Vatican crazy, and I’m sure the Vatican could drive him crazy.

Andrew Greeley in 2000: The Vatican is cut off from the rest of the Church. It doesn’t understand. There’s no reason why it should, given its structure. It doesn’t understand what’s going on in the minds of the ordinary lay people or the ordinary priests.

CUSICK: When push came to shove, he said I’m not leaving and you can’t throw me out, and that was typical Greeley in his prime.

VALENTE: At a Mass celebrating his 50^th anniversary [2004] in the priesthood, Greeley, who said he had wanted to be a priest ever since the second grade, reflected on the controversies he had sparked.

DURKIN: He said I’m sorry for anything that I have done to people, and I’m not sorry for what I did in the name of people, in the name of helping people, in the name of challenging people, but I’m sorry for any relationships that were hurt.

VALENTE: After the accident family and friends wondered, would he ever again be able to say the Mass, which meant so much to him?

DURKIN: He has always written about the centrality of the Eucharist in the Catholic faith. We’ve reached out to his priest friends and tried to make arrangements for them to come to his home and to celebrate Mass with him.

VALENTE: Last year, with his family around him, Greeley helped celebrate Easter Mass at the home of his niece, Eileen.

Cusick presiding at Mass with Greeley: In the name of the Father…

CUSICK: I’m sad because such a brilliant mind and such a voice in the Catholic Church has been silenced by an accident.

MARTIN: When we suffer we are often made more vulnerable, and in our vulnerability God can break in more. But, you know, it’s up to us whether or not we accept those invitations to new ways of encountering God. But certainly Andrew Greeley is a deeply spiritual person, and I’m sure he is finding God in new ways in this terrible experience.

DURKIN: Does he have moments of grace, times when he flourishes? Yes, definitely, when he interacts with his family and with his friends, when he is still able to be a priest.

Cusick at Mass with Greeley: By the Spirit that is within us, grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ…

DURKIN: He is disabled, but he has been a witness to us in his attempts to celebrate the Mass. He is communicating in ways that have always been his priestly function.

Cusick at Mass: Can you bless them now?

DURKIN: The priest is still there. All those years of being a priest, all those years of blessing—they’re still there. They’re still connecting, and we don’t know what it all means, but we know that he’s blessing, and we know that he is blessed, and he’s blessing us, and it means a lot.

VALENTE: Though the public life of Andrew Greeley has come to an end, Father Andrew Greeley endures.

Presiding at Mass: The Lord be with you.

Response: And also with you.

Presiding at Mass: Almighty God bless you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Response: Amen.

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

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Saints have been part of the Roman Catholic Church for centuries as heroes, patrons, intercessors and spiritual companions. But the path to sainthood is never an easy one.

REV. JAMES MARTIN, S.J. (Author, My Life with the Saints): The lives of the saints show us that, you know, God makes holiness out of all sorts of different materials.

LAWTON: Many religious traditions honor people who are considered especially holy.  But the Catholic Church has a uniquely complex system for declaring someone a saint. It’s a multistep canonization process that has evolved since the thirteenth century. Father James Martin is author of the book My Life with the Saints.

MARTIN: The Catholic Church has a more complicated process than anyone else on almost any topic, basically. I think it’s important for people to know that when we hold up someone for public veneration, or as an example, that their life has been thoroughly investigated.

LAWTON: The process usually begins in the region where the potential saint lived or is buried. After local Catholics show a particular devotion to the person, the bishop opens an investigation into the case or “cause” for sainthood. A point person called a postulator oversees the cause. According to the rules, there should be a five-year waiting period after the person’s death. But in the cases of both John Paul II and Mother Teresa, that waiting period was waived.

MARTIN: Some people have argued, you know, why rush them? You know, what’s the rush? I mean, they’ll be a saint in ten years, or 20 years, or 30 years, so why not let the process sort of go its normal route? On the other hand, people say, “Well, you know, the pope is responding to the desires of the people,” which is what people always want the Vatican to do.

LAWTON: At the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., Father Gabriel O’Donnell is a postulator. He actually went to postulator school at the Vatican. O’Donnell shepherded the cause for Father Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus. That cause has advanced several stages in the process. O’Donnell has now begun work on a new cause for Rose Hawthorne, the daughter of nineteenth-century author Nathaniel Hawthorne. She cared for low-income cancer patients.

REV. GABRIEL O’DONNELL, O.P. (Dominican House of Studies): The first thing you have to do is research anything the person has written or published, and then you begin studying anything they have left behind in terms of documentation.

LAWTON: It can be a tedious, arduous process, which includes interviewing people who knew the potential saint or were affected by his or her work. The church teaches that in order to be a saint, someone must have lived a life of “heroic virtue.”

MARTIN: A life of holiness, basically, a life of charity, Christian charity and love, service to the poor often, but, you know, the person has to be holy on a personal level beyond just doing, you know, great deeds, beyond just founding a religious order or being pope or something like that.

O’DONNELL: But you’re also looking for the flaws, because the whole idea of the saint is that they’ve overcome their difficulties, you know, not that they didn’t have any. One of the things that the church is very strong about is that if you can find anything negative you have to make that known.

LAWTON: There even used to be an official role for someone to argue against the cause. It was known as “the devil’s advocate,” although the position was eliminated in 1983. The evidence, usually thousands of pages, must be assembled according to the Vatican’s strict set of guidelines or norms.

O’DONNELL: Page after page of norms and you have to follow each step carefully. If you miss a step the whole thing can be thrown out as invalid, and it’s happened to some causes.

LAWTON: If the evidence is approved, the person is declared “venerable”—worthy of consideration. A special Vatican office, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, takes over the cause, and the search begins for a miracle attributed to the intercession of the potential saint after his or her death. In Catholic teaching, the miracle is confirmation that the person is indeed in heaven.

O’DONNELL: The point of the miracle which fascinates many people but also puzzles them is that if the church is going to declare this person to be blessed or a saint, the church is looking for some sign from God, so it’s what we call the “digitus dei” or the finger of God says yeah.

LAWTON: Any reported miracles are subjected to rigorous review by a panel of scientists and doctors.

MARTIN: The Vatican’s bar is very high. So the miracle, which is usually a medical miracle or a healing, must be instantaneous, right? It must be non-recurring. It must be not attributable to any other treatment, basically, and it must just be the result of praying to that one saint, so—and it must be medically verifiable.  The doctors and scientists basically don’t say this is a miracle or not. They say to the Vatican, “This is inexplicable.”

LAWTON: It’s up to the pope to declare it a miracle, and if he does so, the person is eligible for beatification, although martyrs—those who died for the faith–may be beatified without a verified miracle. In beatification, the person is given the title “Blessed.”

MARTIN: It’s a recognition of the person’s holiness and importance for the worldwide Church, and of course canonization is a much more sort of broad stamp of approval by the Church. But even “blessed”—I mean someone like Blessed Mother Teresa, you know, is already being venerated worldwide, as she was in her lifetime.

LAWTON:  For a declaration of sainthood a second miracle must be verified, and it must have taken place after beatification. That can take many more years. The first American citizen to be proclaimed a saint was Frances Xavier Cabrini, who was canonized in 1946. Mother Cabrini was born in Italy but came to the US in 1889 to help Italian immigrants. Every year, some 80,000 people come to her shrine in New York, where a wax figure lies over some of her remains.

SISTER THOMASINA LANSKI (St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Shrine): She is a person who had many struggles, many faults, many failings, but her life was centered on God.

LAWTON: Sister Thomasina Lanski is administrator of the shrine. She says like all saints Mother Cabrini plays several roles for Catholics.

LANSKI: People actually can come, we have her relic, and they can be blessed by her, and I think it’s important that when people come to pray to Mother Cabrini they’re praying for her intercession. We never worship her. We worship the Lord, and we talk always about prayers through Mother Cabrini to be answered by the Lord. We never say the prayers are answered by Mother Cabrini.

LAWTON: Father O’Donnell says the concept of intercession is often misunderstood.

O’DONNELL: The idea of a saint is that he or she is before the throne of God in heaven and that one asks them, you know, to intercede and pray for us. So we’re all praying to God together, because we believe that they are with God. They’re the friends of God, and it’s not bad to talk to some of somebody’s friends, you know?

LAWTON: Are there people who might be saints, but just not recognized?

O’DONNELL: Oh, sure. Oh, my gosh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I could name my own parents, at least my own mother, I don’t think my father would. You meet saints all the time. But they’re never going to be beatified, you know, or canonized. No, there—it is quite amazing how many people live heroic lives. Quietly.

LAWTON: Father Martin says he prays to saints every day. He keeps what he calls his “wall of fame,” with pictures of saints and potential saints.

MARTIN: Some of my favorites are Mother Teresa is here as a real example of working with the poor. Joan of Arc, I think, is someone who is true to her vision. Dorothy Day was an apostle, really, of social justice here in New York. Here’s St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order over there. When I’m sick I pray to St. Bernadette, the visionary of Lourdes. When I pray for humility I pray to Therese of Lisieux. So they each sort of have different roles, as it were, in my life. These are really the ones I look to as my heroes, really, my spiritual heroes.

LAWTON:  He says it’s spiritually encouraging to learn that saints were real people.

MARTIN: By putting the saint on a pedestal, sometimes literally, we remove them from our own lives, and we make them less meaningful, and it sort of gets us off the hook. We say, “Let’s leave the tough Christianity to them.”

LAWTON: Martin acknowledges that for some Catholics veneration of the saints can border almost on the superstitious. But he believes a bigger problem is dismissing them altogether. In an era of skepticism and scandal, many Catholics believe saints can help attract people to faith.

O’DONNELL: I find that when I’m preaching or talking in a parish or talking to people in general about this, they’re pretty receptive to saints, even if they’re not so receptive to the hierarchy or a priest or something. The holy person, the holy man, the holy woman—this fascinates people still, and I think it draws them.

LAWTON: And the Church teaches that’s the way it’s been for centuries. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: But, Kim, I gather that not everyone is totally enthusiastic about John Paul’s beatification.

LAWTON: There has been some controversy. Advocates for people who were abused by priests say it really sends a bad message for the Church to be beatifying, to be granting honor to someone that presided over the Church at a time when sex abuse crisis was really spiraling. There are questions about what John Paul knew, how much he could have done and didn’t do to prevent the crisis, to punish some of the priests who were involved, and so they’ve raised objections on that grounds. Other people have talked about the timetable. It was a very fast–tracked process, and why not let it take its normal route to sainthood? So there has been some controversy, but the Church says that it’s just responding to the groundswell of support for John Paul II, which is how any sainthood process begins.

ABERNETHY: But that said, there are messages that are sent by who is put on this track and how fast it is.

LAWTON: There are several people who question whether political influence is involved in the process. The fact that some people do seem to get fast-tracked and others—the late Pope John XXIII, who did the Vatican Council, or the slain Archbishop Oscar Romero, very popular as well—but their cases haven’t been fast-tracked, and so there are people who look at that and say, why these guys and not these guys?

ABERNETHY: And John Paul II, when he was pope he presided over a lot of saints.

LAWTON: He loved the saints. He felt they were important for the Church, and so he actually streamlined the process for sainthood when he became pope, and during his almost 27 years as pope he actually canonized almost 500 people and beatified another some 1300, and that’s more than all of his predecessors combined.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Welcome, I’m Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us. Today, a special report on the events and issues we see ahead in 2011. We do this with the help of Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, the Washington Post, and Georgetown University. Before we begin our discussion, as we close out the first decade of the new millennium we remember some of the stories that set the stage for the news we expect to cover in 2011 and beyond. Our managing editor Kim Lawton took a look back at the events of the last decade.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were perhaps the defining moment of the decade, and the repercussions are still being felt on many fronts. In the wake of the tragedy, mainstream Muslim leaders tried to spread a message that Islam is not synonymous with terrorism. But those efforts were complicated by an expanding extremist movement that recruits over the Internet, as well as several high-profile arrests of Muslims plotting more attacks. American Muslims worked to define their place in US society, but many felt unfairly targeted by enhanced security measures and what they saw as a rising tide of Islamophobia. President Obama made improving relations with the Muslim world one of the priorities of his new administration.

The 9/11 attacks led to American involvement in long and difficult wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Religious and ethical leaders debated whether each conflict was just. President George W. Bush argued for a doctrine of preventive war, the idea that it was moral to attack a country to prevent it from attacking us first. The ethical debates intensified with revelations that the US was using torture as a means of getting information. After thousands of deaths of troops and civilians, President Obama announced the end of combat operations in Iraq and the intention to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Economic crises dominated much of the end of the decade as recession, unemployment and foreclosures took a toll on faith-based groups and the people they serve. Religious institutions were forced to slash their budgets and lay off staff even as they were asked to do more to help needy people.

Religion continued to be a potent force in politics. In 2000 and 2004, President Bush rallied religious conservatives. He set up a new White House office to expand government partnerships with faith-based social service organizations. Analysts spoke of a God gap, with voters seeing the Democratic Party as unfriendly toward religion. In the run-up to the 2008 elections, Democrats and the Obama campaign developed an unprecedented outreach to compete for religious votes. Many in that faith coalition were disappointed the Democrats didn’t build on the momentum in the 2010 midterm elections. Meanwhile, religious conservatives were energized by the Tea Party movement and vowed new activism leading up to the 2012 elections. Religious groups across the spectrum were involved in policy debates, from health care to immigration and gay marriage.

Issues surrounding homosexuality provoked bitter debates within religious institutions and American society as a whole. The 2003 election of Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop in the US Episcopal Church brought the worldwide Anglican Communion to the brink of schism, even as other denominations continue to debate the role of gay clergy. In 2003, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, with four other states and the District of Columbia following suit. The issue continues to work its way through the courts.

For the Roman Catholic Church, a dramatic changing of the guard with the 2005 death of John Paul II, who had been pope for more than 25 years, and the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. For the US Catholic Church, much of the decade was focused on addressing a massive clergy sex abuse crisis, enacting new guidelines to prevent abuse, and confronting litigation that saw more than two billion dollars in payouts to victims. In 2010, the clergy abuse scandal exploded across many parts of Europe and posed new challenges to the Vatican and top church leaders.

The new millennium began with a sense of relief that a predicted Y2K computer meltdown never materialized. It ends with the development of social media like Facebook and Twitter offering new online possibilities for personal connection and outreach, enabling information to be disseminated at lightning speed—both for good and for ill.

ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks for that. Welcome to you, to Kevin Eckstrom, and to E.J. Dionne. E.J., we have a new Congress, Republican control of the House, more Republican votes in the Senate. Walk us through that a little bit. What do you expect that will mean for some of the social issues that are of most concern to religious communities?

EJ DIONNE (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): You know, watching Kim’s set-up piece I was thinking of Yogi Berra’s great line: ‘Predictions are hard, especially when they’re about the future.” And who would have imagined a decade unfolding the way this last decade just unfolded? So I think we’re all in a difficult situation here. I think when you look forward to this Congress, so much of it is not going to be about social issues. The last Democratic Congress kind of acted to get some of those out of the way, notably don’t ask don’t tell. I think they really wanted that through because they knew it was going to be very difficult this time over. You may have some debate about abortion around the healthcare bill. Republicans want to repeal it. I don’t think they’ll be able to but they going to have a variety of ways of trying to hem in President Obama in sort of putting it into effect. So I think you may see it there. I think one of the sleeper issues will be fights we might have around the National Endowment of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, where you have, if nothing else for purely political reasons it’s a question where conservatives can talk about it as an economic issue: should we be spending the money? But there are always issues related to cultural values that get into those debates. So I suspect you are going to see some of those arguments around the humanities and arts endowments. Personally, I hope it doesn’t happen that way, but I think that is going to happen.

ABERNETHY: How about immigration?

LAWTON: Well, I was going to say that I am going to be watching to see how some of the evangelical political activists maneuver with the Tea Party politicians that got elected. You know, in this last election there was so much talk about how the Tea Party was so ascendant and there were a lot of religious conservatives that were supportive of the Tea Party. But when you get to issues like immigration or some of the other issues involving a social safety net for the poor, evangelicals don’t always line up as economic conservatives. And so while they might be hoping for some action on abortion or maybe even some of the gay marriage type issues—I don’t know that that’s going to come up in Congress, but I’m going to be watching some of the economic issues that do have some moral implications to see how much evangelicals, and some Catholics who were supportive of the Tea Party—where they come down.

ECKSTROM (Editor, Religious New Service): Right, and there are a lot of moral issues that a lot of religious groups care about. And so I think what you’re going to have is maybe a different set than what we’ve seen in the last couple years. Whereas under the Democratic Congress we were talking about moral issues like the environment and the minimum wage increase and things like that, you’re probably not going to see as much of that with a Republican House. Instead, you’ll have issues that maybe more conservatives tend to latch on to. But it’s not that these social issues are going to disappear, it’s just that there are going to be a different set of them.

DIONNE: That’s a good point, because you are going to talking more and more about budget deficits and cuts in government programs, and I think it’s going to be fascinating to see how religious groups that sometimes seem to be aligned with conservatives on some of the cultural questions are actually going to be saying no, you can’t cut this program for the poor or that program for the poor, because there are a lot of Catholics, a lot of evangelicals, and many in the rest of the religious community—mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims—who really want to protect some of those programs. So I think their voices are actually going to be very important at a time of budget stress.

ECKSTROM: And one issue I think that’s worth watching that we’ve already seen indications of is that House Republicans want to hold hearings on American Muslims and the radicalization of American Muslims – sort of home-grown terror threats – and what’s going wrong within American Islam that it’s allowing this to happen? So it’s a different kind of religious issue but one that’s already going to be on Congress’s agenda.

ABERNETHY: Before we leave that, E.J., what about the tone, the spirit that you expect. Is it going to be awful?

DIONNE: I’m not very optimistic that we’re going to see an outbreak of comity and friendship across party lines. On the Muslim hearings, having Congress sort of investigate a religious group in the country raises all kinds of questions, which I hope get raised. I’m not sure that the deal that President Obama reached with the Republicans on taxes can be easily replicated across other issues. After all, tossing out about $858 billion is a lot easier than cutting $400 billion or whatever they decide to do. So I think it’s going to be a very difficult couple of years.

LAWTON: And also, sort of in the backdrop, this coming year in politics is going to be the run up to the 2012 presidential election, and so that’s going to be complicating anything anyone wants to get done because there’s going to be a lot of posturing as people try to set themselves up for the next presidential election.

DIONNE: Which brings us to some very interesting debates inside the Republican Party. Your point about the Tea Party and the Christian conservatives overlapping but distinct groups—how are they going to play those roles inside the Republican fight for the nomination?

LAWTON: And a lot of religious conservatives were very unhappy with the Republican establishment, felt like they took them for granted, Republicans took the religious conservatives for granted—wanted them to come out and work and vote but didn’t necessarily take care of their issues. It will be interesting to see whether they feel the same way about the Tea Party as well.

ABERNETHY: And back on this question of tone, everything perhaps is going to be made more dramatic by the fact that it’s going to be, this year, the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

LAWTON: It’s hard to believe that it was almost 10 years ago when those attacks happened and that really did set up a lot of difficult issues for us as a country, both in terms of the war and as well as in terms of interfaith relations. I know a lot of Muslim groups are sort of bracing after seeing in the previous year a lot of protests against mosques and things of that nature. They’re concerned about the atmosphere and a lot of Muslims I’m talking with are worried about what’s going to happen leading up to the 9/11 anniversary.

ABERNETHY: But Kevin, you or E.J. have made the point that we have this real problem of trying to deal with homegrown terrorism and terrorism here that just emerges out of the suburbs some place, and on the other hand protecting the civil rights of a whole group of people.

ECKSTROM: This is a huge challenge for American Muslims and one of the big debates within the American Muslim community right now is how much do they cooperate with law enforcement on trying to prevent these sorts of attacks that nobody wants to see? How much should parents report their kids if they’re acting strangely or going to bad Web sites or talking in radical terms? And there’s a lot of Muslims who are afraid of being entrapped by the FBI and being led into plots that they might not otherwise do. But then they also know that if they don’t report them nobody else is going to and if there’s an attack, things are only going to get worse.

DIONNE: You’ve got tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in American suburbs, living middle-class lives, and if one or two or three or five of those thousands of kids is discovered to get involved in terrorism, suddenly we’re talking about these very middle-class, classically American places being breeding grounds for terrorism. I think one thing that is going to sort encourage that is if we make this big American Muslim middle class feel excluded from the rest of us, and we’re really going to have to think that through. Of course we don’t want home-grown terrorism, but we’re nowhere like where the Europeans are, because we have this great tradition of upward mobility and inclusion in our country.

LAWTON: And this has been a challenge for American Muslims themselves within their communities. If we launch programs to combat homegrown terrorism, homegrown extremism, if we launch programs in our mosques, does that appear like we’re giving in to the stereotype that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and so they’ve really struggled within their community how to approach this problem. They want to look proactive. They want to look like they’re addressing this as good, loyal Americans, but how do you do that without giving into the perception?

ABERNETHY: Kevin, what do you expect to happen with the cultural center/mosque near Ground Zero?

ECKSTROM: Well, it’s going to be a challenge. They presumably have all of the zoning things that they need. They’ve got their permits and the city is going to allow them to build it. What they’re missing right now is the money. And it’s going to take them a while to raise as much money as they’re going to need, but it’s also going to be difficult to get, I think, a lot of people to support that because that center is so radioactive and it’s generated so much heat that there’s going to be a lot of people who maybe don’t want their names associated with it. And on the flip side, there’s a lot of Americans who don’t want the money coming from some foreign anonymous donor somewhere, so they have a big challenge there.

ABERNETHY: Now you were referring earlier to the fact that the beginning of 2011 may well seem like the beginning of the election campaign of 2012, E.J.

DIONNE: Right, and I think you’re going to see some sort of interesting positioning inside the Republican Party. I mean, we still don’t know if Sarah Palin is or is not going to run for president. Sarah Palin seems to be more representative of the Tea Party side of the right, although she has clearly some Christian conservative support. Mike Huckabee is going to be competing with her as the spokesperson for Christian conservatives, but every Republican running for president wants a piece of that vote, because it is such an important vote in the Republican primaries, and that’s going to start right now. It’s already started, before the show went on the air.

ECKSTROM: And I think something worth watching there is Mitt Romney, who is at the front of a lot of these polls, these straw polls, whether or not he tries to make the case about his Mormon faith again with the evangelical base. A lot of people say, you know, he did that; he doesn’t need to do it again. Other people say that he’s never going to win them over; there’s a certain amount of the base that’s just never going to accept a Mormon candidate. So I think it will be interesting to watch how he navigates the Mormon question.

ABERNETHY: And meanwhile, E.J., every pundit worth his salt is giving Obama advice about what he needs to do, how he needs to change himself, how he needs to change his language. Talk about that.

DIONNE: Well, the range of advice goes from you must be nicer to the Republicans and look like you’re a centrist to you’re political and moral obligation is to confront these guys and have a big argument so that the issues can be clear to the country. And I think he’s going to try to do a little of the former to say I’ve reached out my hand to them, and when the hand is rejected on certain issues, he’s going to flip to the second. But I think one of the things to look for is whether he does speak more in a moral and spiritual language both about himself and the underpinnings of his policies, but also about this sense of America can grab its position in the world back after a period when Americans felt we were in decline. I think there’s going to be some John Kennedy-esque rhetoric coming out him getting the country moving again in the coming year.

LAWTON: And the Democratic Party is going to have to figure out what it wants to do in terms of faith-based outreach. There was a lot of criticism from Democrats about how the party handled that in the last midterm elections and a lot of faith-based moderates and liberals and even some conservatives that don’t consider themselves Republicans felt that the party didn’t do enough to reach out to them, so that’s going to be something they’re trying to figure out as well.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is supposed to begin n 2011. What are your expectations there?

LAWTON: Well, there’s some really difficult ethical debates still lingering in terms of what America leaves behind in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of civil society and …

ABERNETHY: And safety and protection for the people who helped us.

LAWTON: Exactly. Religious minorities and people who were seen as being part of the American offensive—what’s going on with them and what responsibility does America have within that? And those are going to be difficult questions. I’ve been surprised how little the religious community has been focusing on these issues of war. It seemed like last year, in the last election, people just didn’t really talk about those ethical, moral issues.

ECKSTROM: And, you know, we’ve heard a lot of talk about the president’s problem with his base—you know, the liberal base is dissatisfied for any number of reasons. But it’s worth remembering that a good chunk of that base voted for him because he said he was going to close Guantanamo Bay, and it’s still open, and that he said he’d get us out of Afghanistan, and he actually sent more troops in. So there’s, I think, some ethical problems that he faces in terms of not moving fast enough on that issue.

DIONNE: Actually, he said he’d get us out of Iraq, and he said Afghanistan was the good war, and we’ll presumably continue to pull out of Iraq. My hunch is that if we have a withdrawal this year from Afghanistan it’s going to be very small. It’s clear that the new timeline that the administration wants seems to be 2014. And there’s going to be some opposition in his own party to not withdrawing more quickly. I also think some of the new conservatives who are less interventionist in Congress may also be a surprising opposition to a long commitment there.

ABERNETHY: Let me ask you to look at Europe and the Vatican. What do you expect there in terms of this ongoing struggle about the sex abuse of kids by priests? Anybody?

DIONNE: Everyone is silent.

ECKSTROM: Happy topic. Well, this pope has the unfortunate possibility of his legacy being presiding over this sex abuse scandal that reared its ugly head—that the church didn’t learn anything from the first time around. And I think he has made some progress in sort of admitting that the church needs to do some introspection and figure out what went wrong so that we don’t make this happen again. But the pope is going to be 84 in 2011. I don’t know how much more time he has left in that job, but probably a few years, and I think he’s going to be doing some legacy-making, because this is now at the point where he can still do some things and see what happens.

LAWTON: Well, so many people in the church are frustrated because they want to get beyond this issue but they just can’t do it, and so that’s been something they’ve all had to confront.

DIONNE: I think it’s sort of an argument between people who defend the Vatican and the church say look, they understand, they’ve tried to fix this, they’ve made some moves versus others who say that they still haven’t fully taken responsibility for changing the structures of the church. It’s a classic argument between more conservative or traditionalist people and people looking for greater change in the church because they think it needs it, and I think that is an ongoing struggle and that the sex abuse scandal is a piece of that larger struggle.

ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up, but before we quit, in this coming year do you see something happening or that might happen or do you see some person that you’re going to be paying particular attention to?

LAWTON: Well, we should also point out that last year a lot of the things we discussed we didn’t predict. So, as E.J. said, it’s hard to know that. I think it is going to be a pivotal year for religious groups and issues surrounding homosexuality, whether we’re talking court cases around gay marriage or whether we’re talking denominations still really struggling over how to handle gay clergy and gay bishops. And the Anglican Communion, which has really been torn about by this subject, is also going to have to face some tough questions this coming year.

ECKSTROM: I’m going to keep an eye on Archbishop Tim Dolan in New York, who is the new president of the Catholic bishops conference. He’s a media-savvy guy, he gives you a bear hug, he’s sort of a telegenic face for the church. But he’s no shrinking violet. He will take on the issues of the day, but in sort of a friendly kind of way. It will be interesting. The only real power he has is the power of the megaphone, and which issues he chooses for the bishops to emphasize.

DIONNE: I think that’s an excellent selection. I would say if I could combine Palin, Huckabee, Obama, Romney—we’re going to see if the nature of the discussion of religion in our politics changes substantially this year or not. As we’ve already said, there are challenges to each of those figures, and it will be interesting to see how they deal with it.

ABERNETHY: I have been wondering with respect to Iraq and now Afghanistan why there was no peace movement—not more of a peace movement. Do you think with Afghanistan, as we begin to come out of there, that there will be such a thing?

DIONNE: I think going into Afghanistan there was very broad support when we started because many people, except for pacifists and a few others who have legitimate reasons for opposing all war, most people thought this was kind of a just war response, so you didn’t have a big opposition. I think now a lot of people say God, this is a terrible mess. I don’t have a good answer coming out of it, and I think that sort of undercuts what might otherwise be a big peace movement.

ABERNETHY: Thanks, E.J., our time is up. Many thanks to Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution. That’s our program for now. I’m Bob Abernethy.

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