Although weakened by his long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, the founder of the Peace Corps and other projects for the needy attended the first Archdiocese of Washington “White Mass” for children and adults with disabilities. One last time, he stood with those touched by the Special Olympics and the work of his wife, the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

“Sarge’s knowledge of God’s love … was the structure that supported his public life. From this faith, hope and love flowed his thirst for justice and peace and the courage to speak for those who had no voice,” said Cardinal Donald Wuerl, at Shriver’s funeral Mass last week in Potomac, Md. “He spoke not from political expediency or correctness, but from an abiding sense of conviction.”

The statesman’s life was shaped by many of the 20th century’s most powerful forces, from the Great Depression in his childhood to World War II combat at Guadalcanal. His marriage took him deep into the Kennedy family, which launched his work, yet limited his political career.

Shriver took on global poverty for his brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy, and helped lead the domestic War on Poverty for President Lyndon Johnson. Many of the projects he helped launch live on — such as Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), Legal Services, Foster Grandparents and Upward Bound.

Those who worked with Shriver, noted former President Bill Clinton at the funeral, were left asking this question: “Could anybody be as good as he seemed to be? Come on now. … Every other man in this church feels about two inches tall right now.”

Where did Shriver’s drive come from? Son Mark Shriver stressed that his father’s motivations were never strictly political, but were rooted in the first item on the daily calendar of his life. Wherever he went, whether with family or on business, the first question he asked upon arrival was the time and location of the nearest morning Mass. The Shriver patriarch was buried with his rosary in his fingers.

“Daddy was joyful ‘til the day he died and I think that joy was deeply rooted in his love affair with God,” said Mark Shriver. “Daddy loved God and God loved him right back. … Daddy let go. God was in control and, oh, what a relationship they had.”

While his Catholicism helped Shriver as an activist and volunteer, it marginalized him in some politic circles. As the years passed, son Timothy Shriver said he could see that his father’s commitments made many people uncomfortable. At times, his faith “made him an outlier. He was too public with all of that spirituality.”

In 1972, Shriver stepped in and became his party’s emergency choice as Sen. George McGovern’s running mate in a long-shot run race for the White House. It helped that Shriver was a political progressive and a traditional Catholic. Still, there hasn’t been another pro-life Democrat on the national ticket since Shriver.

During the 1992 Democratic National Convention, both Sargent and Eunice Shriver joined several other prominent Democrats in signing a public document that openly rejected their party’s stance on abortion.

“To establish justice and to promote the general welfare, America does not need the abortion license,” it stated. “What America needs are policies that responsibly protect and advance the interest of mothers AND their children, both before AND after birth. … We can choose to extend once again the mantle of protection to all members of the human family, including the unborn.”

Thus, Shriver’s human family included the unborn and the mentally handicapped, AIDS patients in Africa and the urban poor, abandoned children and the elderly who need medical care.

“No one can deny that his liberal Catholicism was a Christian politics: Admirable, comprehensive, and at the test, consistent,” noted Catholic writer Ross Douthat, an op-ed columnist and blogger for the New York Times.

“That test was abortion, where Shriver was one of the few Great Society liberals to remain a pro-life liberal as well. … Together with his wife, Eunice, he endured as the embodiment of a liberal road not taken on that issue. For that, as for everything he did in public life, he will be sorely missed.”

The unique element of these rites is that he offers his prayers for anyone he has — during his 45 years as a priest, with or without knowing it — driven away from Catholic pews and altars.

This isn’t the kind of ecclesiastical issue that makes headlines.

Nevertheless, this is a quiet kind of crisis that priests must take seriously, said O’Brien, in a Franciscan University forum that included current and potential seminarians. How many lapsed or former Catholics, he asked, slipped away because they felt “talked down to or lectured at by preachers or confessors who don’t really know them or who appreciate how difficult their struggles are just to get through life?”

How many, he added, are haunted by a clergy comment, “often at an emotional time in their lives,” that wounded them so deeply they became convinced that it justified leaving the church? How many drifted away to Protestant megachurches because of “our dull, lifeless and irrelevant homilies.”

The priesthood has faced many crises during the past generation or two and O’Brien offered no easy solutions.

Obviously, he couldn’t ignore three decades of scandals caused by the sexual abuse of thousands of children and young people by priests and bishops. O’Brien also discussed the hierarchy’s problems finding new priests, yet avoided the stark statistics that are so familiar to American Catholics. In 1965 they had 58,000 priests. Now there are about 40,000 and, if trends stay the same, there will be 31,000 in a decade, with most over 65 years of age.

While these crises dominate the news, O’Brien stressed that Catholic leaders cannot overlook the personal challenge of helping potential seminarians struggle with this timeless question: Does God want me to be a priest? As a former seminary leader, in the New York archdiocese and in Rome, O’Brien said he has added a more nuanced set of follow-up questions.

“Why are you living your life here and now?”, he asked the audience at his late-2010 lecture on the Steubenville, Ohio, campus. “What is your radical motivation? Are you here on this earth to give or to get?”

The cultural changes that rocked Catholicism after the 1960s made it even more of a challenge to answer these kinds of questions. O’Brien saw this era up close, since he was ordained in 1965 and, as an Army chaplain with the rank of captain, served a tour of duty in Vietnam.

In the “heady years” after the Second Vatican Council it seemed that Catholics “saw almost everything go up for grabs” in their parishes and “in Western Culture in general.” Priests were “leaving by the droves” and at times, he noted, it seemed as if “follow your conscience” stood alone as the “only criterion for morality, heedless of any objective moral truth.” Many seminaries lowered their admissions requirements in an attempt to find more priests.

O’Brien offered a blunt analysis of that decision: “Many of the horrendous sexual scandals, I think, can be traced to the breakdown of seminary formation from 1965 to the early 1980s.”

The continuing aftershocks are familiar to priests who keep trying to defend church teachings and traditions. The archbishop noted that a recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 45 percent of Catholics didn’t know that their church believes that the bread and wine consecrated during the Mass are not mere symbols, but become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. A survey commissioned by the Knights of Columbus found that 82 percent of Catholics between the ages of 18 and 29 agreed with this statement: “Morals are relative, that is, there is no definite right and wrong for everybody.”

This is sobering, but Catholics must not lose hope, said O’Brien. God will raise up priests who are willing to wrestle with ancient and modern questions while serving in what the archbishop called a “post-Christian” culture.

A missionary bishop in an earlier era, he noted, stated the challenge this way: “The task of a missionary is to go to a place where he is not wanted to sell a pearl whose value, although of great price, is not recognized, to a people who are determined not to accept it — even as a gift.”

Still, it didn’t take long for outraged parents to leak one crucial statement — that Father Christmas, also known as Santa Claus, isn’t real — to the Italian press. Headline writers around the world immediately felt a great disturbance in the Holiday Force, as if millions of tiny nonsectarian voices had cried out in terror.

Clearly, this priest had committed blasphemy.

Now, the Catholic shepherd of Salt Lake City has bravely ventured into similar territory. Bishop John C. Wester has asked those in his flock to observe the Advent season during the four weeks before Christmas and then — readers may need to sit down — to celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25th and during the season that follows.

“Few would disagree that we live in a busy and rushed society. … You may have noticed that in our hurried society many stores have already decorated for Christmas, radio stations are sneaking in a Christmas song here and there and even some of our own parishes have begun preparing for Christmas parties for early December,” noted Wester, in a pastoral letter (.pdf) released on Nov. 24.

“What is the rush? … Advent is a season of preparation, although it has come to be neglected in many places. Too often, the season of Advent is overshadowed by the ‘holiday season’ as we move too quickly into celebrating Christmas. By the time that the actual solemnity of Christmas arrives, many of us are burned out.”

To be perfectly blunt about it, he added, the secular season called “The Holidays” has been hyped to the point that, in the end, “Christmas has become anticlimactic.”

The bishop’s letter has generated a surprising amount of buzz in a short time, said Deacon Greg Kandra, a veteran journalist who directs the online news programming (NetNY.net) for the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. In effect, Wester has issued a call for countercultural revolt against the principalities and powers that shape the American calendar, he said.

For starters, the bishop is trying “to remind people — through the pulpit and through education — that just because they are hearing Christmas music doesn’t mean that it’s really Christmas,” said Kandra, a 26-year CBS News veteran who has won two Emmys and two Peabody Awards.

“As everyone knows, most of this is rooted in commercialism. But just because we have Black Friday and people are stampeding through the malls doesn’t mean that is what Christmas is really about.”

After throwing down his gauntlet, Wester offered practical examples of what he would like to see in the parishes and schools of his diocese.

Rather than leap straight to Christmas trees early in December, the bishop urged Catholic families to embrace Advent prayer wreathes — with candles marking the Sundays leading up to Christmas. Families could have “Jesse Trees” that are decorated in Advent purple and symbols of the ancestors of Jesus, before adding Christmas decorations at the proper time.

Rather than hold premature Christmas parties, the bishop suggested that Catholic schools plan “Gaudete” parties — Latin for “rejoice” — that are linked to the third Sunday in Advent. Facilities could be decorated with simple wreaths and greenery, with the full Christmas decorations in place as students return after New Year’s Day. Full Christmas decor should remain in place in churches, schools and homes through the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord on the 9th of January.

By all means, said Wester, Catholics should hold parties throughout this entire Christmas season, which begins — following centuries of tradition — with Christmas Day.

The goal is for Advent to be a period of “waiting in joyful hope,” a time of preparation, reflection and prayer. At least, that’s what the church’s calendar says.

“It is so easy to … decorate our churches and houses for Christmas, to spend more time shopping than in prayer and to host Christmas parties before the season has arrived,” said Wester. “I know it is an enormous challenge to remain faithful to the Advent season when we are surrounded by a society which, while claiming to be Christian, does not take the time to reflect and prepare as the church calls us to do.”

However, he added, “As Catholics, we must celebrate Advent differently.”

The bishops gathered at the ancient Council of Nicea didn’t face that kind of communications challenge and, thus, produced an old-fashioned creed that in English is at least 1,161 characters long.

No wonder so many of the gray-haired administrators in black suits in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops struggle with life online. It’s hard to take seriously the frivolous-sounding words — “blog” and “tweet” leap to mind — that define reality among the natives on what Pope Benedict XVI calls the “Digital Continent.”

“In the past, the church would often build new parish structures, knowing that people would recognize the church architecture and start showing up. On the Digital Continent, ‘If you build it, they will come’ does not hold true,” said Bishop Ronald Herzog of Alexandria, La., in a report from the body’s communications committee.

“We digital immigrants need lessons on the digital culture, just as we expect missionaries to learn the cultures of the people they are evangelizing. We have to be enculturated. It’s more than just learning how to create a Facebook account.”

This is important news in an era in which recent research from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that the Catholic Church was retaining 68 percent of its members who, as children, were raised in the fold. While the church is making converts, those who have left Catholicism in recent years outnumber those who have joined by nearly a 4-to-1 ratio.

Almost half of those who left Catholicism and did not join another church exited before the age of 18, as did one-third of those who chose to join another church. Another 30 percent of young Catholics left the church by the age of 24. At that point, the departure rate slowed down.

Truth is, it is almost impossible to talk about the lives of teens and young adults without discussion the growing power of their social-media networks. For young people worldwide, social media and their mobile devices have become the “first point of reference” in daily life, warned Herzog.

“The implications of that for a church which is struggling to get those same young people to enter our churches on Sunday are staggering. If the church is not on their mobile device, it doesn’t exist.”

As recently as a similar report in 2007, it was clear the bishops were hesitant to discuss the digital world because they feared its power when used by the church’s critics, said Rocco Palmo, who produces the influential “Whispers in the Loggia” weblog about Catholic news and trends.

The Herzog report was a step forward, primarily because the bishops seem to realize this is a subject that they cannot ignore. That’s significant in an era in which many Vatican officials still cling to their fax machines and struggle to keep up with their email. During the recent Baltimore meetings, said Palmo, there were more iPads in the hands of younger bishops “than you would find at your local Apple store.”

“In the old days, that stone church on the corner was a sign of the presence of God in your community. Well, that’s what a church website is today,” he said. If bishops and priests cannot grasp “that one-dimensional reality in our culture, how are they supposed to grasp the two-dimensional, interactive world of social media?”

The theoretical stakes are high, noted Herzog, but it has also become impossible to ignore the raw numbers. For example, if the 500 million active Facebook users became their own nation, it would be the world’s third largest — behind China and India.

The bottom line: Catholicism may be “facing as great a challenge as that of the Protestant Reformation,” said the bishop.

“Anyone can create a blog. Everyone’s opinion is valid. And if a question or contradiction is posted, the digital natives expect a response and something resembling a conversation,” said Herzog. “We can choose not to enter into that cultural mindset, but we do so at great peril to the Church’s credibility and approachability in the minds of the natives. …

“This is a new form of pastoral ministry. It may not be the platform we were seeking, but it is an opportunity of such magnitude that we should consider carefully the consequences of disregarding it.”

But what was a goofy nerd doing on Comedy Central, belting out this folk song while doing a bizarre blend of Broadway shtick and liturgical dance?

“The King of glory comes, the nation rejoices! Open the gates before him, lift up your voices,” sang Stephen Colbert a decade ago, in a video that is now a YouTube classic. “Who is the King of glory; how shall we call him? He is Emmanuel, the promised of ages.”

Inquiring minds wanted to know: Was this painfully ironic comedian mocking trendy Catholics or saluting them? Was he outing himself as a Christian? Was he praising Jesus or risking a lightning bolt?

Legions of 40-something Catholics have strong memories of the first time they saw this clip, said Diane Houdek, managing editor of AmericaCatholics.org. Something in Colbert’s performance told them that this was not a random gag.

“Stephen walks this thin line,” said Houdek, who runs “The Word: A Colbert Blog for Catholic It-Getters” in her spare time. “He isn’t afraid to be critical when it comes to matters of faith, but when he does it’s always clear that his critique is from the inside. … He’ll push things pretty far. He’ll dance right up to that line, but he will not cross it. He will not compromise what he believes as a Catholic.”

Colbert, of course, became the star of The Colbert Report, the fake news show in which he plays a right-wing egotist (think Bill O’Reilly of Fox News) named “Stephen Colbert.” Religion plays a major role in the show and there are moments when he speaks sincerely in his own voice.

That’s what happened last week when his alter ego came to Washington, D.C., at the invitation of Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security. His testimony mixed satire (“I don’t want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, sliced by a Guatemalan and served by a Venezuelan in a spa where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian”) with serious information about the plight of farm workers.

Colbert lowered his mask when asked why this issue mattered to him, slipping in a reference to a Gospel of Matthew parable in which eternal judgment awaits those who deny compassion to the poor and defenseless.

Some of America’s least powerful people, he said, are “migrant workers who come in and do our work, but don’t have any rights as a result. And yet, we still ask them to come here, and at the same time, ask them to leave. … You know, ‘Whatsoever you did for the least of my brothers,’ and these seemed like the least of my brothers, right now.”

It helps to know that Colbert was raised as the youngest of 11 children in a devout Irish-Catholic family in Charleston, S.C. Then his physician father and two brothers died in a plane crash and their joyful home plunged into grief. Colbert soon lost his faith.

Years later, a sidewalk volunteer in Chicago handed the young actor a Gideon Bible and something clicked. Today, he lives a private life with his wife and three children, but he never hides the fact that he teaches children’s Sunday school.

As he told Rolling Stone last year: “From a doctrinal point of view or a dogmatic point of view or a strictly Catholic adherent point of view, I’m the first to say that I talk a good game, but I don’t know how good I am about it in practice. I saw how my mother’s faith was very valuable to her and valuable to my brothers and sisters, and I’m moved by the words of Christ, and I’ll leave it at that.”

But there is more to Colbert’s faith, and his theology, than that, said Houdek. For starters, a Jesuit serves as the show’s chaplain.

“There is evidence of his faith all through his work, if you know what to look for,” she said. “This is what makes him so unique, in the extremely secular world in which he is working — Comedy Central. Yet he keeps doing what he does night after night, because he never comes off as preachy.”

While her marriage to British writer Roald Dahl, the author of children’s classics such as “James and Giant Peach,” had long been troubled, Neal was shattered when she learned he was having an affair with one of her friends. They divorced in1983.

In her 1988 memoir, “As I Am,” Neal admitted: “Frequently my life has been likened to a Greek tragedy, and the actress in me cannot deny that comparison.”

That quotation captured the tone of the tributes published after Neal passed away on Aug. 8 at the age of 84. Broadway theaters dimmed their lights in honor of the Tony Award winner and critics sang the praises of one of Hollywood’s ultimate survivors, an actress who literally learned to walk and talk again before returning to the screen to earn another Oscar nomination.

But Neal’s story contained angels as well as demons. This is obvious in the overlooked passages in “As I Am” that described her conversion to Catholicism and her visits to the cloister of Regina Laudis (Queen of Praise) Abbey in Bethlehem, Conn., where the sisters helped her confess her sorrows and rage.

Finally, the abbess suggested that Neal move into the abbey for a month.

“Lady Abbess,” said Neal, “I don’t want to join up, you understand?”

The abbess sighed and said, “Believe me, we don’t want you to, either. I don’t think we could take it for more than a month.”

As she arrived, Neal stubbed out the “last cigarette I would ever smoke.”

A priest gave her a blessing and, she recalled, “I felt his cross blaze into my forehead. … I traded my street clothes for the black dress of the postulant and scrubbed off my makeup. I removed the rings from my fingers and covered my hair with a black scarf. I looked at the bare wooden walls of my cell. … I did not live the exact life of a postulant, but I did my best.”

Neal went to church on time, followed the abbey’s prayer regime, baked bread, remained silent during meals and, with the help of a spiritual director, began writing the journal that evolved into “As I Am.”

Behind closed doors, she unleashed her fury. At one point she screamed so many curses at her counselor that the sister finally cursed right back, urging Neal to be honest about her own faults and mistakes.

The actress finally voiced her secret pain. Monsignor Jim Lisante of Diocese of Rockville Centre (New York) later discussed with Neal the tragedies of her life and asked if there was any one event that she would change.

“She said, ‘Forty years ago I became involved with the actor Gary Cooper, and by him I became pregnant. As he was a married man and I was young in Hollywood and not wanting to ruin my career, we chose to have the baby aborted,’ ” wrote Lisante, at the Creative Minority Report website. “She said, ‘Father, alone in the night for over 40 years, I have cried for my child. And if there is one thing I wish I had the courage to do over in my life, I wish I had the courage to have that baby.’ “

Several of the obituaries for Neal — including the New York Times feature — mentioned this episode in the context of her pain and regret. The Washington Post noted that late in life “she suffered periods of depression and suicidal thoughts before finding peace as a Catholic convert.”

In the end, Neal decided that, “God was using my life far beyond any merit of my own making” allowing her to reach out to those who were suffering. “I learned that my damaged brain cannot reclaim what is dead. It has to create totally new pathways that allowed me to make choices I would never have made had I not suffered that stroke — choices that an infallible voice assures me will be blessed.”

One final lesson from the abbess, wrote Neal, stood out: “There is a way to love that remains after everything else is taken from us.”

***

Two weeks ago, the Sunday Boston Globe magazine ran an essay — not a news story, I admit — that I have been thinking about ever since. It was called “What I Believe” and it was written by Charles Pierce, a staff writer at the publication.

This long essay covers a lot of territory and it’s possible to criticize it — either positive criticism or negative criticism — in several different ways. Most of all, it is a stunningly American look at the earthquakes that have rocked the Catholic Church in the decades after Vatican II and Woodstock.

The key is that Pierce believes that the Catholic hierarchy’s claims to unique religious authority are gone. Period. Thus, consider these two important passages in the piece, as he explains that the Catholic Church in which he worships is his alone. He has a personal church and, he states clearly, he does not need a personal Savior:

In the church of my youth, with the priests reciting incomprehensible Latin, their backs to the people, walled off by an altar rail and two millenniums’ worth of imperial design, the purple always came out at Advent and at Lent. It was the color of penance, we were told. And so it is, and penitence begins within, in one mind and one soul and in what the nuns used to call an informed conscience. That’s where my Catholicism is now. It is a penitential faith. That’s where you can look for it. It is possible, I have come to realize, that I’ve grown up to become an anti-Catholic Catholic.

And then the passage that is being quoted most often:

The Vatican can beg. It can plead. But it can no longer demand.

Which brings me to the most fundamental rule of my Catholicism — nobody gets to tell me that I’m not a Catholic.

Those of my fellow Catholics who remain loyal to the institutional structure of the Church don’t get to do so. People who talk glibly of “cafeteria Catholicism” don’t get to do so. People who seek to coin Catholic doctrine into political advantage — be they left or right — don’t get to do so. No priest gets to do so, and no bishop, either, and that especially means the bishop of Rome himself. No pope can tell me I’m not a Catholic.

Now, it is possible to see this article only through the lens of Catholic faith, practice and doctrine. If you want to see critiques of that kind, they are easy to find. You can start by clicking here and heading over to the conservative site CatholicCulture.org, where you can find this quick and easy linkage between Pierce’s faith and, surprise, his employer:

… (For) decades the Globe has operated on the assumption that the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic. At the opening of his article, Pierce cheerfully identifies himself as an “anti-Catholic Catholic.” Thus he qualifies perfectly as the man who will tell Globe readers what they should believe. …

Nobody can tell Charles Pierce that he’s not a Catholic. Nor can anyone tell him what the Catholic Church teaches. The Church teaches what Pierce wants it to teach. And he believes it all.

Or you can read a blunt post on this topic by Rod Dreher, who, it must be noted, made the difficult and painful choice to leave the Catholic Church in a crisis of conscience. If one does not believe all the claims of the Catholic Church, Dreher would say, one should have the integrity not take its vows and not to receive its Sacraments.

One should, in other words, make a serious, informed decision and then hit the exit door. Thus, Dreher writes:

Hey Charles — you’re not a Catholic! Man up and admit it. You are a Catholic by birth and cultural identification, but you have ceased to believe as Catholicism teaches. Why do you lack the courage to be what you are: a non-Catholic Christian? … A Catholicism in which you have no obligation at all to believe what the Church authoritatively teaches, or to act as it prescribes, is not Catholicism at all. At all. It’s one thing to say that you struggle to accept this teaching of the church intellectually, or have trouble living that teaching out. Everyone does, even the saints. But it’s entirely another thing to say you don’t have to try, and that that’s okay, because you are your own pope. If you don’t believe this stuff, but like to come by the church for the music, or the camaraderie, okay, fine — that’s between you and your priest, and God. But to reject the Church’s authority entirely, as Pierce does, but to still call yourself a Catholic in good standing, is either hypocrisy, or insanity — the insanity of the solipsist.

In other words, Pierce is a congregationalist in a one-man congregation, which is a very American thing to be.

There are plenty of Baptists like that and, obviously, scores of Unitarians. This was the stance of a devout Episcopalian I once interviewed — head of the vestry at the church right behind the U.S. Supreme Court — who was also an atheist. He took his confirmation vows with his intellectual fingers crossed and, Sunday after Sunday, said the creed while redefining the words inside his head. People do things like that and, in his parish, that was what being an Episcopalian was all about.

But the Globe essay would not have stuck in my head like a bad disco tune (and I would not be writing this post) if I didn’t think there was a religion-news angle to this, something linked to what GetReligion is all about.

You see, elsewhere in his essay, Piece writes about some of the details of the current crisis in Catholic sanctuaries in this land and elsewhere and then he says:

Church attendance in the United States is down.

A survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, released in April 2009, found that one in 10 US adults has left the Catholic Church after having been raised Catholic — with Catholicism having had the largest net loss in members of all the major religious groups in the United States. About half of those who departed and now identify themselves as “unaffiliated” left the church because of its views on abortion, homosexuality, and birth control. (In 2009, the American Religious Identification Survey by Hartford’s Trinity College found that, between 1990 and 2008, the percentage of people in Massachusetts who identified themselves as Catholic dropped to 39 percent from 54 percent.) The sexual-abuse scandal, then, erupted within a church that already was struggling with serious demographic pressures.

The implication is that if the Catholic Church would only modernize on these kinds of social issues, these people would not leave and, thus, the church would enter a new era growth and prosperity. New, progressive Christians and young people would flock into the pews.

Right. Right. I hear the voices of the traditional Catholics out there who have a quick response to that argument: “Yeah, just like the Episcopal Church is growing (surf in this file) and all of the other liberal Protestant churches.”

Many traditional Catholics are just as sure that their pews would be full, once again, if only the Pierces of this world would pack up and leave. They note the vitality and growth of a few conservative Catholic orders and the number of men seeking the priesthood in zip codes served by more traditional seminaries and bishops.

But, you see, that’s only half the story, too. Neither side of that debate seems to want to talk about all of the facts. There are ghosts and skeletons in Catholic closets on the left and the right. This era of sweeping changes — think birthrates, the rise of the Sunbelt, suburbanization, immigration and a host of other factual changes — is more complex than that.

At the same time, however, I worry that many journalists think that Pierce’s view is accurate in terms of history, that many journalists truly believe that Catholics — to name one example — truly do not need to go to confession and struggle to live out the teachings of their faith in order to remain practicing Catholics in the sacramental meaning of that word. In other words, the Catholic Church gets to define the borders of the Catholic Church (ditto for the Unitarians, Baptists, Episcopalians and others).

Thus, it would help if the Globe ran another piece by another Catholic in the newsroom — the same placement, the same length — entitled, “What My Church Teaches and Why I Believe It.”

Surely there are Catholics in that newsroom who would welcome the chance to write that essay?

Surely the Globe newsroom is diverse enough for that to happen? Or was Pierce actually speaking for his newspaper, as well as for himself?

“All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven,” the text states. “The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification. … The tradition of the Church, by reference to certain texts of Scripture, speaks of a cleansing fire.”

Alas, any distressed “Lost” viewers who rushed to the Vatican website after the show’s finale found no insights about the smoke monster, the Dharma Initiative, that mysterious “4 8 15 16 23 42” sequence or why the fate of the world depended on a pool of light on one very strange island.

At least one member of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy has owned up to being tuned into the “Lost” phenomenon from the beginning. At the end, all Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark could do was understate the obvious.

“I’ve enjoyed the series, considering it to be akin to science fiction,” he noted, reacting to the raging debates about the religious symbols and language that dominated the final moments. “While the Catholic Church does believe in Purgatory, I’m not sure that the series presents an accurate understanding of our beliefs.”

Before the finale, the scribes who had been running “Lost” — Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse — said their creation would end by focusing on how the Oceanic Flight 815 survivors answered ultimate questions about the wounds, conflicts and sins in their pasts. The key word, they agreed, was “redemption.” All of that pain and suffering had a purpose.

The final episode blended together lots of vague theology, philosophy, pop psychology, religious symbols and references to popular books and movies. Think of it as “Our Town” meets “The Sixth Sense,” with dashes of “Ghost,” “Field of Dreams,” “It’s a Wonderful Life” and, at the last minute, a comforting nod to “All Dogs Go to Heaven.”

After years of flashing back and forth in time, the final year’s action centered on events in two parallel time sequences — the climactic battle to determine the island’s fate and a purgatorial “sideways” timeline in which the characters gained insights into their troubled lives, before and after the fateful crash.

At the end, the castaways gathered in a church sanctuary for one last group hug before entering eternity — an ocean of bright light outside the exit doors. The big chat explaining these final events — reuniting the show’s Christ figure, Jack Shephard, with his father, Christian Shephard — was lit by a stained-glass window containing symbols of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

But was the show, as some had theorized all along, actually built on the concept of purgatory? Hadn’t Lindelof told the New York Times in 2006: “People who believe that they’re in purgatory or that they’re subjects of an experiment are going to start reassessing those theories. …” The creator of “Lost,” J.J. Abrams, had denied the purgatory theory, too.

The finale’s spirituality shocked many critics, including one or two who were so upset that they retroactively (flash backward) dismissed “Lost” as a whole. But veteran Washington Post writer Hank Stuever, drawing on his Catholic school past, said it’s time to admit the obvious.

In the final five minutes, “I realized that the purgatory camp had been right all along, that Occam’s razor (the simplest solution is usually the correct one) had worked,” he argued. “Oceanic 815 crashed. Some of its souls awoke in a realm that is neither heaven nor hell. It’s limbo. … Jack Shephard and his fellow travelers were brought there to resolve a number of problems between heaven and hell.”

But some Catholic viewers struggled to reconcile their church’s teachings with the limitations of a product created in Hollywood, a place that has its own definitions of terms such as “sin,” “repentance,” “redemption” and “savior.”

Now, the creators of “Lost” have offered a glimpse of purgatory — lite.

“From a theological point of view — well, you can’t have ‘purgatory’ per se without God, without Christ,” said Amy Welborn, a popular online Catholic commentator. “But given a vague, non-specific Christ-less spirituality, I really don’t see an argument that the sideways realities in the final episode, at least, weren’t meant to be purgatory.”

Some religion-beat jobs have been killed, while others have been downsized, out-sourced, frozen or chopped up and given to reluctant general-assignment reporters.

Gentle readers, please rise for a moment of silence.

The Orlando Sentinel. The Dallas Morning News. Time. The Chicago Sun-Times. The Rocky Mountain News. U.S. News & World Report. The list goes on, especially if you include smaller newsrooms that have always struggled to support Godbeat jobs.

At least 16 major news outlets abandoned or reduced commitment to religion news as a specialty beat in recent years, according to the Religion Newswriters Association. Two of those empty desks — at the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe — were recently filled.

“In the 1990s and early 2000s, the largest papers often had multiple religion reporters. That has disappeared, for sure. That is where the biggest cut for religion has occurred,” said RNA director Debra Mason, who teaches at the University of Missouri.

“We suffer in the meantime, and one possible casualty is all our experienced, better writers. I do worry that the next generation of religion writers don’t have any mentors or internships, etc., to gain experience.”

Mason stressed that the religion beat is not being singled out. Sweeping changes in the industry, coupled with hard economic times, have been especially destructive in big-city newspapers that once had the resources to fund a variety of specialty beats — from the arts to fashion, from science to religion. Also, high profits in the 1980s and into the ’90s had inflated some newsroom staffs.

At the same time, Mason said she sees another trend. New forms of religion news and opinion can be found in a variety of settings online, including sites such as Politics Daily, The Huffington Post, Creedible.com, Read the Spirit, Immanent Frame, Religion Dispatches and the powerful Catholic weblog, Whispers in the Loggia. CNN leaders recently announced the creation of several specialty news sites, including a religion weblog. Beliefnet.com continues to evolve.

Dedicated readers have never had greater access to the work of journalists and public-relations professionals employed by major denominations and religious groups of all kind — from Baptist Press to the Episcopal News Service and everyone in between. Alternative news sources have sprung up in cyberspace, such as the Stand Firm network for Anglican conservatives, The Wild Hunt for modern pagans, Orthodox Christians for Accountability and flocks of Baptist blogs — from BaptistLife.com to SBCvoices.com — representing establishment and independent writers.

The harsh reality today, according to Rocco Palmo, the man behind Whispers in the Loggia, is that all too often readers who care about religion face tough choices. Will they place their trust in traditional news reports that are, these days, often written by journalists who have little training to prepare them for the rigors of the religion beat or the opinion-based work of experienced insiders and scholars who may have ideological axes to grind?

“There are fabulous religion reporters who are still out there grinding away in the mainstream media, but they are an endangered species for sure,” said Palmo. “I still think that basic, hard-news reporting is the gold standard and we need more of it. … But most of what you see when you go online is commentary and criticism. You don’t see that much original reporting being done. …

“If anything, people like me are just trying to step in and fill the void.”

Someone will have to do that because, year after year, religion keeps playing a vital role in shaping many of the world’s biggest stories, from the streets of Iran to voting booths in America, from scandals shaking Catholic sanctuaries to mysteries unfolding in genetics research laboratories.

It’s impossible to tell these complex stories accurately without grasping the role that faith plays in the lives of millions and millions of people around the world.

“Religion stories are the most exquisite stories to tell,” stressed Mason. “I believe that we’ll figure out how to effectively and efficiently tell stories about faith and values once this media transition is sorted out. The question is not whether or not we’ll have religion news, but whether or not there will be anyone left who knows how to cover it.”

What they saw was worshippers singing hymns and waving palm fronds as they marched in Palm Sunday processions at these churches. Similar sights will be common during Holy Week rites this week and then on Easter Sunday.

There is nothing unusual about various churches celebrating these holy days in their own ways. What is rare is for the churches of the East and West to be celebrating Easter (“Pascha” in the East) on the same day. This will happen again next year, as well as in 2014 and 2017.

This remains one of the most painful symbols of division in global Christianity. While Easter is the most important day on the Christian calendar, millions of Christians celebrate this feast on different days because they have — for centuries — used different calendars. The Orthodox follow the ancient Julian calendar when observing Pascha, while others use the Gregorian calendar introduced in 1582, during the reign of Pope Gregory XIII.

“It was a calendar issue then and it’s a calendar issue now,” said Antonios Kireopoulos, an Orthodox theologian who is a leader in interfaith relations work at the National Council of Churches of Christ. “This is about calendars, but it’s much more than that.”

This clash between liturgical calendars in the East and West, he said, also affects how churches pursue their missions. “We are talking about the central event of our faith, yet we remain so divided about it. … That has to raise questions for those outside the faith. If the resurrection is so important, why can’t we find a way to celebrate this together?”

Seizing the temporary unity represented by the shared Easter dates this year and next, Kireopoulos and National Council of Churches General Secretary Michael Kinnamon recently renewed an earlier call that challenged leaders on both sides to pursue a permanent solution to this clash of the calendars.

Their letter restates three recommendations from the 1997 Aleppo Conference, which was hosted by the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch. That gathering called for Christians worldwide to:

* Honor the first ecumenical council of Nicea by celebrating Easter on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox, which would maintain the biblical ties between the Jewish Passover, Holy Week and Easter.

* Agree to calculate astronomical data by using the best available scientific methods, which was a principle established in Nicea to settle an early controversy about the date of Easter.

* Use the meridian line for Jerusalem as the reference point for all calculations, once again honoring the biblical narratives about the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The problem, of course, is that making a change of this magnitude would require a broad spectrum of Christian leaders — including the pope and numerous Orthodox patriarchs — to agree on something that stirs deep emotions among the faithful. Orthodox leaders continue to wrestle with splits linked to a 1923 decision to celebrate Christmas according to the Gregorian calendar.

The final Aleppo document recognized that it would be especially hard for Eastern believers to change their traditions.

“In some countries in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, where the Christian churches have lived with the challenge of other religions or materialistic ideologies, loyalty to the ‘old calendar’ has been a symbol of the churches’ desire to maintain their integrity and their freedom from the hostile forces of this world,” it said. “Clearly in such situations implementation of any change in the calculation of Easter/Pascha will have to proceed carefully and with great pastoral sensitivity.”

Orthodox leaders know that the Easter gap will keep getting wider — with Pascha creeping into the summer in about a century.

But change is hard. As old joke says, “How many Orthodox Christians does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer: “Change? What is this ‘change’?”

“This is not a matter of one side finally giving in and the other winning,” stressed Kireopoulos. “This is a matter of finding a way to proclaim — together — what we all believe about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. … What we hope is that, once again, we can follow the principles of Nicea and find a way to move forward.”