Still, the Pulitzer Prize winner took her game to another level in a recent column attacking Rome for its investigation of religious orders that shelter sisters who oppose many of the church’s teachings.

Wait, is “investigation” the right word?

“The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the ‘quality of life’ of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence,” she wrote.

Dowd rolled on. Reference to the fact Pope Benedict XVI was once a “conscripted member of the Hitler Youth”? Check. Reference to his Serengeti sunglasses and trademark red loafers? Check. Strategic silence on the fact that many traditionalist orders are growing, while liberal orders are shrinking? Check.

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan fired back at Dowd and her editors, going much further than the low-key criticism that mainstream religious leaders usually crank out when they are mad at the press. His “Foul Ball!” essay was as subtle as a whack with a baseball bat.

Anti-Catholicism is alive and well, he argued. Check out the New York Times.

“It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime,” wrote Dolan. “Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as ‘the deepest bias in the history of the American people.’ … ‘The anti-Semitism of the left,’ is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic ‘the last acceptable prejudice.’ “

A clash between the conservative archbishop and the Gray Lady was probably inevitable. After all, the newspaper is currently led by an editor who — months after 9/11, when he was still a columnist — accused Rome of fighting on the wrong side of a global struggle between the “forces of tolerance and absolutism.”

Calling himself a “collapsed Catholic,” well “beyond lapsed,” Bill Keller said the liberal spirit of Vatican II died when it “ran smack-dab into the sexual revolution. Probably no institution run by a fraternity of aging celibates was going to reconcile easily with a movement that embraced the equality of women, abortion on demand and gay rights.”

The archbishop offered his “Foul Ball!” commentary to the Times editors, who declined to publish it. Dolan then posted the essay on his own website, while also offering it to FoxNews.com — which promptly ran it.

Dolan was, of course, livid about Dowd’s broadside, calling it an “intemperate,” “scurrilous … diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish or African-American religious issue.”

The archbishop also accused the newspaper of various sins of omission and commission, asking the editors if they were printing stronger attacks on the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church than on other groups — religious and secular — that have struggled with sexual abuse. The Times, he claimed, was guilty of “selective outrage.”

For example, he noted a recent report on child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community that, after addressing the facts, “did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records and total transparency.”

Dolan also accused the Times, and other media, of downplaying public reports in 2004 and 2007 that documented the problem of sexual abuse of minors by educators in U.S. public schools. It seems, he said, that major newspapers “only seem to have priests in their crosshairs.”

This prickly dialogue is sure to continue. After all, the 59-year-old Dolan was installed as New York’s 13th Catholic archbishop last April — so he isn’t going anywhere. And while America’s most powerful newspaper faces a stunning array of financial challenges, the New York Times is still the New York Times.

Stay tuned.

“The Catholic Church is not above criticism,” stressed Dolan. “We Catholics do a fair amount of it ourselves. We welcome and expect it. All we ask is that such critique be fair, rational and accurate, what we would expect for anybody. The suspicion and bias against the Church is a national pastime that should be ‘rained out’ for good.”

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She was a Libra and lived on a peacock farm on California’s Central Coast. The Chicago Tribune also reported that Black was “a devout Catholic and a devoted follower of astrology, which holds that the position of the stars and planets has a direct effect on human affairs and personalities.”

This is interesting since the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that: “All forms of divination are to be rejected. … Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers.”

Then there was the tragic case of Lucille Hamilton, who paid $621 to have her, or his, “spiritual grime” removed by a voodoo high priest. However, something went wrong and Hamilton — a 21-year-old male living as a female — died on the second day of the “Lave Tet” voodoo baptism rites.

The Philadelphia Daily News noted that, “Hamilton was a devout Catholic, with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe tattooed on her foot.”

Yes, you read that correctly. You see, of all the labels used by journalists to describe believers — from “apostate” to “zealot” — surely “devout” has become one of the most meaningless. While this is true in a variety of world religions, for some reason things get especially interesting when “devout” appears in front of “Catholic.”

The bottom line: What’s the difference between a “practicing” Catholic and a “devout” Catholic? Do journalists simply know one when they see one?

Wall Street Journal editors recently raised questions about this “devout” issue in an online “Style & Substance” newsletter. This editorial note warned that it’s important for journalists covering criminal cases to consider whether a person’s faith background — devout or lapsed — is even relevant. For example, religious references may add vital information in reports about frauds committed by a Catholic individual against a number of Catholic organizations.

Meanwhile, the editors asked, “Hasn’t devout Catholic become a cliche, rather like oil-rich Kuwait? It would seem that only Catholics and Muslims qualify as devout, since devout Catholic has appeared in our pages four times in the past year and devout Muslim twice. Zero for devout Jews and Protestants.”

There is no question that the term “devout” is used far too often and in a sloppy manner, said Richard Ostling, a religion-beat veteran best known for his work with Time and the Associated Press. This fact could be a comment on how little exposure many mainstream journalists have to religious life and practice.

“Perhaps, to someone with only secularist experiences and friends, any level of religious interest of any type might seem ‘devout,’ ” he said. But, in the end, “reporters can only observe outward behavior, not the inner soul. … There’s usually a connection between observance and personal faith, so generally it makes sense to assess personal belief by externals.”

Many of these common labels used to describe believers — terms such as “serious,” “practicing,” “committed” and, yes, “devout” — are completely subjective, agreed Debra Mason, director of the Religion Newswriters Association, which is based at the University of Missouri. Different people define these words in different ways. With the “devout” label, there is even the implication that these believers may be fanatics.

When in doubt, reporters should simply drop the vague labels and use plain information, she said, echoing advice offered by Ostling and others.

“Since journalists do not have a direct line into the soul to discern a person’s faith, it is far better to use precise descriptions of a person’s religious practice and observance,” said Mason. For example, a reporter could note that, “Joe Smith attended Mass every day” or that “Jane Smith attended worship every week, even when ill.”

The goal is to use clear facts instead of foggy labels, an approach that Mason admitted may require journalists to add a line or two of context or background information. Non-Catholics, for example, may not understand the importance of a Catholic choosing to attend Mass every day.

However, she stressed, this extra work is “a small price to pay for more accurate and precise reporting.”

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During this era of crisis and decline, some Catholic religious orders have chosen to enter a time of “sojourning” that involves “moving beyond the church, even beyond Jesus,” Sinsinawa Dominican Sister Laurie Brink told a 2007 national gathering of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

“Religious titles, institutional limitations, ecclesiastical authorities no longer fit this congregation, which in most respects is Post-Christian,” added Brink, a former journalist who is a biblical studies professor at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union. For these women, the “Jesus narrative is not the only or the most important narrative. … They still hold up and reverence the values of the Gospel, but they also recognize that these same values are not solely the property of Christianity. Buddhism, Native American spirituality, Judaism, Islam and others hold similar tenets for right behavior within the community, right relationship with the earth and right relationship with the Divine.”

It took time, but ripples from her address have grown into waves of debate about the health of many religious orders, especially in light of reports that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is supervising a “doctrinal assessment” of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The question is whether many sisters have rejected doctrines stated in Vatican documents focusing on the male priesthood, homosexuality and the Catholic Church’s role in the salvation of souls. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — played a crucial role in the development of these documents.

Catholic conservatives are convinced that Brink crossed an important line.

“If you’re going to be Post-Christian, then be Post-Christian. I don’t say that with snark. It’s just reality,” argued Catholic blogger Amy Welborn of Beliefnet. “If you’ve moved on — move on. Step out from the protective mantle of identity that gives you cachet, that of ‘Catholic nun.’ “

However, it’s important to note that this “Post-Christian,” “sojourning” strategy was only the third of four strategies critiqued by Brink in the online text of her presentation, entitled “A Marginal Life: Pursuing Holiness in the 21st Century (.pdf).” Her goal was to urge leaders of Catholic religious orders to make clear, if painful choices in an age in which “indecision” is the proverbial elephant in the living room.

Sister Laurie began with this assumption: “Old concepts of how to live the Life are no longer valid.”

The first option, she said, is “death with dignity and grace,” as opposed to becoming a “zombie congregation” that staggers on with no purpose. This option must be taken seriously since the average age of the 67,000 sisters and nuns in the United States is 69. Many retreat ministries are closing and large “mother houses” are struggling with finances, while some congregations no longer invite or accept new candidates.

Meanwhile, Brink noted with sadness, some orders have chosen to turn back the clock — thus winning the favor of Rome. “They are putting on the habit, or continuing to wear the habit with zest. … Some would critique that they are the nostalgic portrait of a time now passed. But they are flourishing. Young adults are finding in these communities a living image of their romantic view of Religious Life. They are entering. And they are staying,” she said.

Finally, some women are fighting on, hoping to achieve reconciliation someday with a changed, egalitarian church hierarchy. Thus, the current conflicts in American Catholicism cannot be hidden, she said.

“Theologians are denied academic freedom. Religious and laywomen feel scrutinized simply because of their biology. Gays and lesbians desire to participate as fully human, fully sexual Catholics within their parishes,” said Brink. Many Catholics also oppose the “ecclesial deafness that refuses to hear the call of the Spirit summoning not only celibate males, but married men and women to serve” as priests.

These religious orders will strive to recruit new sisters and train them to continue the struggle against the “men who control the power in but not the Spirit of the Church,” she said. If reconciliation occurs, it will take place in a reformed church.

Right now, she stressed, the Catholic hierarchy is “right to feel alarmed. What is at stake is the very heart of the Church itself.”

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But as any reporter who actually interviewed her quickly learned, Calcutta’s “saint of the gutters” could be remarkably blunt. She once noted — in a half-serious jest — that she would rather bath a leper than meet the press.

“Mother was not known for the ambiguity of her feelings,” noted Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, at a recent gathering of journalists at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. “A lot of people in the church, especially those who practice their faith in an active and regular manner, would agree with what she meant — because they feel the same way.”

The archbishop stressed that he does not feel that way, especially when working with journalists who have acquired the knowledge and skills needed to do accurate, critical coverage of religion. However, he is convinced that many religious believers simply do not appreciate the vital role that journalists are supposed to play in public life.

“Journalism is a vocation, not a job,” said Chaput. “Pursued properly, journalism should enjoy the same dignity as the law or medicine because the service that journalists perform is equally important to a healthy society. I really believe that. You form people. You form the way they think and the way they live their lives. So journalists have a duty to serve the truth and the common good.”

That’s the good news. I have heard Chaput make that point more than once during the quarter of a century since I first met him, while he was a Capuchin-Franciscan priest in urban Denver and I was a newcomer on the local religion beat.

Chaput was already interested in mass media, popular culture and the changing landscape of American religion and those interests only deepened when, in 1988, he was ordained Bishop of Rapid City, S.D. Soon after he returned to Denver as archbishop, in 1997, he organized a conference on the cultural and religious implications of the Internet.

These were precisely the kinds of topics that I wanted to emphasize when — 21 years ago this week — I began writing this column for Scripps Howard. Our interests also overlapped when I began teaching about religion and mass media, first in a Denver seminary and then in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. Our paths have been crossing ever since.

When it comes to journalism, Chaput knows the good news and the bad news.

The bad news, he said, is that far too many journalists who cover religion events have no idea what they are doing. They may be talented and intelligent, but when it comes to religion they just don’t get it.

“I don’t expect journalists who track the church to agree with everything she teaches. But I do think reporters should have a working knowledge of her traditions and teachings,” he said. “I do think editors should have the basic Catholic vocabulary needed to grasp what we’re talking about and why we’re talking about it.”

Consider, for example, the media storms surrounding discussions of Holy Communion and the sacramental status of Catholic politicians who disagree with their church’s doctrines on abortion, marriage and similar issues. In his book “Render Unto Caesar,” Chaput argued that it’s the “political duty” of Catholics to “know their faith and to think and act like faithful Catholics all the time” — even those who work inside the Washington Beltway.

Alas, the journalists think they are writing about the rights of politicians, while some Catholic bishops want to discuss the salvation and, yes, damnation of souls. If journalists insist on describing this conflict in strictly political terms, he said, there is no way the public will ever understand what is happening.

“No one ever has a right to the Eucharist, and the vanity or hurt feelings of an individual Catholic governor or senator or even vice president does not take priority over the faith of the believing community,” said Chaput. Thus, while journalists are under “no obligation to believe what the church teaches … they certainly do have the obligation to understand, respect and accurately recount how she understands herself, and especially how she teaches and why she teaches” these doctrines.

Too often, said the archbishop, inaccurate news reports about this controversy have left the impression that “access to Holy Communion … is like having bar privileges at the Elks Club.”

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When pollsters ask Americans the Eternal Question they almost always say, “I believe in God.”

Ask young Americans about faith and the response is something like, “I believe in God and stuff.” Finding the doctrinal meaning of “and stuff” is tricky.

“God made us and if you ask him for something I believe he gives it to you. Yeah, he hasn’t let me down yet,” said a 14-year-old Catholic from Pennsylvania, when researchers Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton asked him why religion matters. “God is a spirit that grants you anything you want, but not anything bad.”

The key is that this God — part Divine Butler, part Cosmic Therapist — watches from a safe distance.

“God’s all around you, all the time,” said conservative Protestant girl, 17, from Florida. “He believes in forgiving people and what-not, and he’s there to guide us, for somebody to talk to and help us through our problems. Of course, he doesn’t talk back.”

If grown-ups roll their eyes at litanies such as these, most teens offer a chilly response that sums up their creeds — “whatever.”

Thus it was significant, in the Josephson Institute’s latest Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth, that 48 percent of the students surveyed in 100 random public and private high schools said they had “never” violated their own “religious beliefs” during 2007. Other parts of this survey made headlines, especially its reports that a third of the students said they stole something from a store during the previous year, while 38 percent committed plagiarism, 64 percent cheated on a test and 83 percent lied to a parent about something important.

Few of these young people are “unbelievers” or, heaven forbid, “secularists,” noted Smith, director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. The overwhelming majority of them — like their parents — would insist that they are practicing Christians, Jews, Muslims or whatever.

“Plenty of religious kids do steal and cheat and whatever,” he said, responding to the Josephson survey. “They have in their heads some image of what ‘religious’ really looks like. For many — not all — young people, the meaning of that word is so vague it can mean almost anything or nothing whatsoever. The bar is set low and their take on religion certainly doesn’t include concepts such as self sacrifice, repentance or self mortification.”

These young people are religious, he stressed. They are simply practicing a new religion, one that Smith and Denton called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” When crunched to its basics, this faith teaches that:

* A God exists who “created and orders the world” and watches over our lives.

* This God wants people to be good, nice and fair to one another, as taught by most major religions.

* The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good.

* God is rarely involved in daily life, except when needed to solve a problem.

* Good people go to heaven.

This is not a faith that can stand on its own, noted Smith, in a lecture at the Princeton Theological Seminary Institute for Youth Ministry. Instead, it is a “parasitic religion” that creates weakened, less rigid versions of other faiths — such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism. There may even, he noted, be “Nonreligious Moralistic Therapeutic Deists” in modern America.

When describing their beliefs, most young people say it’s important to be kind to one another and to try to live a good life. There are few limitations on behavior, other than loose rules that say it is wrong to hurt other people, especially one’s friends. “Don’t be a jerk” is a common refrain.

Words such as “sanctification,” “Trinity,” “sin,” “holiness” and “Eucharist” have little or no meaning. Most references to “grace” refer to the television show “Will and Grace.” If teens mention being “justified,” this almost always means that they think they have a good reason to do something that others consider questionable.

This faith, Smith explained, blends well with popular culture and media.

“It’s a religion that works at the level of email and texting and long hours talking on your cellphones,” he said. “It’s all about relationships. Your religion has to work with your friends and it has to bring you happiness. That’s what really matters.”

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week off — at least when it came time to write a Scripps Howard News

Service column.

Sue me. I have missed four in 20 years and, two of those times, I was just

in or just out of the hospital.

So here is something to read, anyway. It is a recent post from my weblog —

GetReligion.org.

If you want to read the interactive version, with the links to the stories

that I mention, then just go to this URL: http://www.getreligion.org/?p=3796

***

Who gets to ?reform? what?

Posted by tmatt

As any regular GetReligion.org reader would know, we go out of our way to

note the exceptionally good work that many religion reporters do on this

very complex and difficult beat. A quick glance in the archives will also

tell you that, more often than not, we are fans of the work of Tim

Townsend of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

This brings me to Townsend?s latest piece on one of the most complex

ongoing stories in American religion right now — the battle for control

of the historic St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish in St. Louis. Normally you

would add the word ?Catholic? to that title, but, you see, the status of

that term is what the battle is all about.

The battle for control of this parish is unfolding on several levels and

Townsend does a great job of explaining the background.

Basically, this is a showdown between St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke

and the powers that be in this massive Polish parish. The archbishop tried

to establish control by refusing to send another priest to the parish,

thus denying the people the sacraments. But the parish, toward the end of

2005, found a priest who was willing to serve at their altar without

permission and, thus, thumb his nose — that?s what Townsend writes — at

the Catholic hierarchy.

Now, that priest — Father Marek Bozek — is in the middle of a new round

of controversy that has divided the parish itself. The bottom line: It

turns out that a priest who is willing to monkey with Catholic doctrines

about episcopal authority may, in the end, be willing to be more than

flexible about other doctrines, too (which is bad news for many Polish

Catholics, who tend to be rather traditional at heart). Here is the key

section of Townsend?s long and detailed report:

“… Bozek has reshaped the church into a community that would be

unrecognizable to those 19th-century founders. His vision for a

reformed Roman Catholic faith calls for supporting female ordination,

allowing priests to get married and accepting gay relationships.

Bozek?s stands have attracted hundreds of new St. Stanislaus

parishioners who share the priest?s reform-minded vision.

“But they have also divided the church, pitting newer members against

traditional parishioners unhappy with how far the priest has gone in

condemning the Roman Catholic church. There have also been questions

about the priest?s trappings. He has negotiated a 143 percent salary

hike, moved into a $157,000 Washington Avenue loft and leased a 2008

BMW for $450 per month.

“Some parishioners point to another sign that alarmed them: Bozek,

while in Poland last year, bought a silver ring custom-made for a

bishop there. When he returned, he showed the ring to his parish at a

Sunday Mass and spoke about it from the pulpit. Because it?s a

bishop?s ring and he is only a priest, Bozek says, he has not worn it.

But he won?t say he never will ? he does not rule out the possibility

of becoming the leader of what he calls an ?underground Roman

Catholic? movement.”

All kinds of people are involved in this story, literally from the Rev.

Sun Myung Moon to the Womenpriests network that causes earthquakes in the

GetReligion comments pages whenever its name is mentioned.

Like I said, this is a very complicated story. Read it all.

But here is my question. Let?s back up to that crucial paragraph in which

Townsend has to describe what Bozek is up to at the parish. The story, you

see, is about the priest?s ?vision for a reformed Roman Catholic faith?

and his ?reform-minded vision.?

You see, ?reform? is one of those loaded religion beat words. If you look

that term up online you see a number of definitions, but you?ll get the

drift. To ?reform? something means to:

* make changes for improvement in order to remove abuse and

injustices; ?reform a political system?

* bring, lead, or force to abandon a wrong or evil course of life,

conduct, and adopt a right one; ?The Church reformed me?; ?reform your

conduct? …

* a change for the better as a result of correcting abuses; ?justice

was for sale before the reform of the law courts? …

* improve by alteration or correction of errors or defects and put

into a better condition; ?reform the health system in this country?

* a campaign aimed to correct abuses or malpractices.

I think you get the point. When traditional Catholics read that kind of

language, this is what they see. They see a newspaper saying that the

liberal priest is trying to reform the abuses and injustices of the

Catholic Church. So there.

Why doesn?t the story say that the archbishop is trying to reform the

priest and the parish? Who is reforming what? In other words, who is

guilty of corruption and abuses?

However, please note that Townsend has tried to attach the word ?reform?

directly to the views of the priest. This is his vision of reform. It is

what he considers reform.

My question is simple: Does this work? Is there a wording that would be

fair to both the priest and to the archbishop? Is it any better to say

that the parish is attracting Catholics who share Bozek?s ?progressive?

vision? That share his desire to ?innovate,? when it comes to crucial

doctrines in Catholic moral theology? Is there a better way to say this,

one that is both accurate and fair to partisans on both sides?

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Thus, the pope traditionally baptizes several new Catholics during this rite in St. Peter’s Basilica. This year, one of the converts was Magdi Allam, a high-profile journalist and, perhaps, Italy’s most famous “moderate” Muslim.

This caused a firestorm. One Muslim scholar active in interfaith talks condemned the “Vatican’s deliberate and provocative act of baptizing Allam … in such a spectacular way.” Aref Ali Nayed, director of the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center in Jordan, wrote: “It is sad that the intimate and personal act of a religious conversion is made into a triumphalist tool for scoring points.”

This dramatic scene caught Vatican watchers by surprise.

When experts compare Pope Benedict XVI with his predecessor, one common observation is that Pope John Paul II was, because of his background as an actor, the master of grand gestures that soared above the usual dense papal prose. Meanwhile, the current pope — a former professor who has written shelves of theological works — has a reputation for being rather dry.

“If John Paul weren?t a pope, he would have been a movie star,” said John L. Allen, Jr., the National Catholic Reporter’s veteran Vatican correspondent and author of two books on the current pope. “If Benedict weren?t a pope, he would have been a university professor.”

Nevertheless, it would “be a mistake to believe that Benedict is simply incapable of talking in pictures when he has a point he wants to make or that kind of flair for the just right dramatic gesture,” said Allen, speaking at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The question, of course, is whether Benedict will make any dramatic gestures during his upcoming visit to the Washington, D.C., and New York City. While politicos will insist on sifting his texts for any sound bites that might affect the White House race, Allen and another Vatican expert said it would be wiser to focus on Benedict’s April 18 speech at the United Nations.

This is, after all, the official reason that he is coming to America. And, after that symbolic Easter baptism, the pope may choose to underline a passage in the UN’s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” states Article 18. “This right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private. …”

Benedict knows that the UN is, throughout 2008, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, said George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who is best known for writing “Witness to Hope,” a 992-page biography of John Paul II. For the pope and Vatican diplomats, this document represents “a kind of moral constitution for the world,” built on a “common moral consensus” that is under attack.

Any defense of human rights, stressed Weigel, requires the use of a “word that Benedict XVI has brought into the Vatican’s inter-religious dialogue in a powerful way — reciprocity. If there is a great mosque in Rome welcomed by the leadership of the Catholic Church, why not a church in Saudi Arabia? If we recognize the freedom of others to change their religious location as conscience dictates, that needs to be recognized by dialogue partners as well.”

Or to cite another example, a Christian who converts to Islam in Italy doesn’t need to hire armed bodyguards. But this isn’t true for Muslims who choose to convert to another faith while living in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and other parts of the world — even in some corners of Europe.

The key, said Allen, is that Benedict XVI isn’t trying — here’s a sound bite — to “launch a new crusade.” Instead, the pope wants to encourage more Muslims to defend religious liberty, while continuing to reject any brand of secularism that denies the existence of universal, eternal, truths.

“In that struggle,” said Allen, “Benedict believes that a more moderate, reformed form of Islam ought to be Christianity?s natural ally.” In the pope’s worldview, the “serious religious believers in the world ought to be the ones who hold the line against the dictatorship of relativism.”

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“Every university or college is qualified by a specific mode of being,” said Pope John Paul II, who was only 57 on that day in 1979. “Yours is the qualification of being Catholic, of affirming God, his revelation and the Catholic Church as the guardian and interpreter of that revelation. The term ‘Catholic’ will never be a mere label, either added or dropped according to the pressures of varying factors.”

It is especially crucial, he said, for theologians to realize that they do not teach in isolation, but are part of a body stretching from the local pews to the Vatican. Working with their bishops, theologians are charged with preserving the “unity of the faith,” said John Paul, sending a shock wave through many Catholic schools that lingers to this day.

“True theological scholarship, and by the same token theological training, cannot exist and be fruitful without seeking its inspiration and its source in the word of God as contained in Sacred Scripture and in the Sacred Tradition of the Church, as interpreted by the authentic Magisterium throughout history,” said John Paul.

While embracing “true academic freedom,” he stressed that the work of truly Catholic theologians must take into “account the proper function of the bishops and the rights of the faithful. ? It behooves the theologian to be free, but with the freedom that is openness to the truth and the light comes from faith and from fidelity to the Church.”

It was a word of encouragement and warning. A few years later, the Vatican revoked Father Charles E. Curran’s authorization to teach theology at Catholic University, after public debates about his views on birth control, abortion and homosexuality. The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith noted that this censure was the result of his “repeated refusal to accept what the church teaches.”

That public letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a theology professor from Germany who, nearly two decades later, would become Pope Benedict XVI. And now, Benedict has called the leaders of more than 200 Catholic institutions of higher learning back to the Catholic University of America to hear another address about the state of Catholic education.

The pope will almost certainly use this forum next month in Washington, D.C., to discuss the further implementation of “Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church),” John Paul II’s urgent 1990 call for reform in Catholic colleges and universities. It took the U.S. bishops nine years — amid fierce protests by many academics — to approve any guidelines seeking to enforce this Vatican document.

“To understand what all of this means, you have to look at the whole sequence of what has happened in the past few decades,” said Patrick Reilly of the Cardinal Newman Society, a pro-Vatican think tank on education. When John Paul II made his 1979 visit, “Catholic University was known as a center of dissent. Now, we see Pope Benedict coming to a campus that — from the viewpoint of Rome and the bishops — has completely turned around. Catholic University will greet him with open arms.”

Meanwhile, many Catholic campuses keep making headlines.

There was, for example, that University of Notre Dame performance of “The Vagina Monologues” and the teen pregnancy conference at the College of the Holy Cross featuring speakers from Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League. On some campuses it’s easier to find free condoms these days than it is to obtain guidance on how to become a nun or a priest.

During a recent meeting of the Congregation for Catholic Education in Rome, Pope Benedict included five clear references to current and future educational reforms in his speech — making it clear these issues are on his mind.

“Today, the ecclesiastical disciplines, especially theology, are subjected to new questions in a world tempted on the one hand by rationalism which follows a falsely free rationality disconnected from any religious reference, and on the other, by fundamentalisms that falsify the true essence of religion with their incitement to violence and fanaticism,” he said. “Schools should also question themselves on the role they must fulfill in the contemporary social context, marked by an evident educational crisis.”

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It’s Ramadan. Will your devout Muslim parents smile if you serve dinner several hours before sundown?

It’s Good Friday. Will the Catholic college cafeteria serve hamburgers?

It’s Thanksgiving. Can you predict the foods that will be on your mother’s table? Will the German grandmothers bake Christmas cookies at the Lutheran church? Is the tuna casserole served at potluck dinners at rural Minnesota churches truly a sacrament?

When it comes to the rhythms and symbols of faith, it’s easy to see the role that food plays, especially in the intense and emotional final months of the religious calendar.

“Food is all about the stories that define our lives,” said Daniel Sack of the University of Chicago Divinity School, author of the book “Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture.”

“I’m not just talking about religious rituals that involve food. ? For many church people, what happens in the social hall week after week is more important than what happens in the sanctuary. They come for Communion, but also for community.”

Sack said food traditions — with a big “T,” as well as with a small “t” — demonstrate why it’s almost impossible to draw a line showing where religion ends and culture begins. Food is one of the basic building blocks of life and, thus, is one of the “passions” that religious believers have always struggled to keep under control.

Change what people eat and you change their lives. However, there are times when the religious significance of food is obvious and there are times when it is not. While studying this subject, Sack said he began sorting the different kinds of food traditions into four groups.

* Sometimes, the food becomes a holy object in and of itself. One example is when a Buddhist takes a food offering to a temple. In other cases, ordinary food becomes sacred as part of an intricate ritual that is defined by prayers and scripture — such as the bread and wine in a Catholic Mass.

“What is crucial is that this sacramental understanding of food seeps into other parts of life,” said Sack. “And we’re not just talking about Christianity. If you start talking about bread and wine, it’s hard to take that symbolism out of there.”

* Most religious traditions, to varying degrees, claim some right to control the role that food plays in daily life. This is most obvious in faiths such as Judaism, with its “kosher” traditions, and in Islamic laws to establish what is and what is not “halal.” In other faiths, believers fast from eating certain foods at different times of the week or year.

* In many cases, these sacred laws and traditions then begin to shape the festivals and the cuisine of a particular culture or ethnic group. At this point the line between Greek cooking and Greek Orthodox cooking starts to blur. What role does faith play in the menus of Ethiopian, Italian, Lebanese, Indian or Swedish restaurants?

* Food also reflects what people believe about family and community life. It would be strange to see conservative Evangelical leaders serve the same food at a men’s dinner that they serve a luncheon for the women’s group. Foods reflect social roles, too.

Sack said that every community, every family, cannot help but develop informal rituals linked to meals, because meals are such symbolic times of fellowship. And when the times change, so do the meals.

Consider the food served at youth-group meetings. Once, parents organized these meetings and prepared the food, helping to maintain a sense of watch-care and protection from the outside world. Today, most churches hire professional youth pastors who plan multi-media programs and — naturally — send out for pizza.

“When we assimilate at the level of the table, we have truly assimilated to the world around us,” said Sack. “When you take this view of life, those parents are not just sending out for pizza — they are sending a symbolic signal of acceptance of the surrounding youth culture. ?

“You see the same thing happening when people start lining up those fast-food boxes at church potluck dinners. Some megachurches even have food courts, these days. Who has the time to prepare those special dishes that people used to take to church?”

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We’re not talking about Mitt Romney’s recent trip to Virginia Beach to deliver the commencement address at Regent University. For political insiders, the only controversy in that speech was when he said, “I want to offer my sincere thanks to Dr. Pat Robertson for extending me the honor of addressing you today.”

No, the daring campaign address that politicos are still discussing was the one John F. Kennedy delivered in 1960 to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, the speech in which he erected a high wall of separation between his public political life and his private Catholic faith.

“I believe in an America,” said Kennedy, “that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

“For, while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew — or a Quaker — or a Unitarian — or a Baptist.”

Or a Mormon? That’s the question facing legions of evangelicals as they gird their loins for battle in the Bible Belt political primaries. They are waiting to see if Romney will publicly address their concerns about his deep Mormon faith.

That didn’t happen at Regent, where the candidate stuck to marriage, parenting, public service and positive thinking. There was one clear religious reference, when he referred to the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech.

“We’re shocked by the evil of the Virginia Tech shooting,” said Romney. “I opened my Bible shortly after I heard of the tragedy. Only a few verses, it seems, after the Fall, we read that Adam and Eve’s oldest son killed his younger brother. From the beginning, there has been evil in the world.”

Regent was a signpost in Romney’s quest to calm evangelical fears, in part because the campus contains the headquarters of Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network — which addresses Mormonism in its “How Do I Recognize a Cult?” website page. It states, for example, that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a “prosperous, growing organization that has produced many people of exemplary character. But when it comes to spiritual matters, the Mormons are far from the truth.”

That passage is mild compared to the incendiary language common among many Christian conservatives. Bill Keller of LivePrayer.com, for example, bluntly states that the teachings of the “Mormon cult are doctrinally and theologically in complete opposition to the Absolute Truth of God’s Word. There is no common ground. If Mormonism is true, then the Christian faith is a complete lie.”

Mormons do believe that the Old and New Testaments — as read by traditional Christians — are packed with errors and that Mormonism is the one true faith. Mormons believe that their president is a living prophet and that faithful mortals, in the next life, can achieve godhood. Thus, Mormons reject or redefine the Trinity, teaching that this world’s Father God has both a literal body and a literal wife.

These are not the issues that obsess typical voters, but they are important to many Christian leaders who wield great influence in the public square. The Vatican, for example, refuses to recognize the validity of Mormon baptisms.

“There are valid questions that Romney will have to answer,” said veteran religion writer Richard Ostling, co-author of “Mormon America: The Power and the Promise.”

“People need to know, ‘Is this man going to take orders from Salt Lake City? Are there elements of Mormon theology that will affect public policy?’ … But before he gets to those questions, Romney may have to say, ‘We have different doctrines. We have different scriptures. … We even have different concepts of God.’ He has to know that he can’t just say, ‘We all have the same faith.’ That is not going to work.”

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