Trying to do the Muslim math

Researchers at Hartford Seminary's Institute for Religious Research began with seven different lists of mosques in the United States.

They eliminated all duplicates, before attempting to verify the existence of each institution. This produced a list of 1,209 mosques. Interviews at 416 found that about 340 Muslims regularly prayed in a typical mosque, but 1,629 or so might be associated in one way or another with its religious life.

Then the researchers did what researchers do -- the math. The numbers suggested that there might be 1,969,000 or so Muslims linked to U.S. mosques in 2000.

But there was a problem. Another study found 2,000 "mosques, schools and Islamic centers" and yet another 3,000, including "prayer locations." These numbers would push the population total higher. And what about all the Americanized, "cultural" Muslims who don't go to worship? What about mosques that only count the men?

"The data we have on how many people are going to mosques is actually pretty good, I believe," according to Mohamed Nimer of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "The problem is what happens when you try to postulate up from that number to some kind of estimate for the total Muslim population in this country.

"At that point, all kinds of things can happen to the numbers. No one agrees on how to make that leap."

This is serious business in the tense, highly politicized atmosphere following Sept. 11, 2001. Muslim leaders are striving to portray their community as a solidly mainstream presence in American culture. Everyone knows Islam is winning converts and becoming more visible, especially during seasons such as Ramadan, which is expected to end Dec. 6.

But how many Muslims are there in America? The Glenmary Research Center says 1.6 million, while CAIR and other Muslim advocacy groups say 7 million. Other reports jump all over the statistical map. Meanwhile, U.S. Census officials cannot ask questions about religion.

Writing in Public Opinion Quarterly, researcher Tom W. Smith is blunt: "None of the 23 specific estimates during the past five years is based on a scientifically sound or explicit methodology as far as one can tell from the published reports. All can probably be characterized as guesses or assertions." He concludes that the best estimates fall between 1.9 and 2.8 million, while most media reports continue to say 6 to 7 million.

While some researchers begin with data from mosques, others use telephone surveys. But Nimer said this fails to take into account immigrants whose English is weak. Others may hesitate to talk about their faith with strangers on the telephone. Finally, other surveys turn to immigration data focusing on ancestry and country of origin.

But immigrants are often hard to count, said journalist Joyce Davis, author of "Between Jihad and Salaam." Some are constantly moving to visit relatives in different parts of the nation, seeking the right place to settle. Some are unsure of their status with authorities. Some are trying to blend into this new culture.

"A significant number of Muslims simply do not want people to be able to trace them through a mosque," she said. "This was true before 9/11 and it certainly is true now. The assumption is that the FBI is paying close attention to those membership lists. Many Muslims -- for a variety of reasons -- may not want to join anything right now.

There are layers of other complications. Nimer is convinced only one out of three U.S. Muslims actively practices his or her faith. It's hard to know precisely how many African Americans are converting. Some surveys are notorious for missing Muslims from Southeast Asia, where Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population.

There is no clear bottom line. But Nimer said he believes conservative estimates of Muslims in America should fall between 2.5 and 4 million.

"It is crucial to realize that this is an issue that applies to all religious groups, not just Muslims," he said. "It is hard, as a rule, to count religious people. ... Are you counting people who are born into a particular faith or those who practice it? Do you want to count Arabs or do you want to count Muslims? Or do you want to count Arabs who are Muslims?"

Spirituality in the workplace?

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- Tim J. McGuire is a baseball fan, but that wasn't why he kept a framed Mickey Lolich card on his desk when he was the editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

That baseball card was a gift from a man who applied for one of the newsroom's top jobs and, here is the twist, did not get it.

"But he wrote me a beautiful letter and he remembered that Mickey Lolich was one of my favorite players," said McGuire. "Sending me that card was such a beautiful, gracious thing for him to do.

"For me that isn't just a baseball card. It's a sacred object."

McGuire mixes work and spirituality all the time, even though he knows many people think this is heresy. Still the former editor is convinced that journalists and other stressed-out professionals must find some way to stop ignoring the holes in their souls.

That's one reason the 53-year-old Catholic layman parachuted out of his newsroom last summer, weeks after finishing his term as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He wanted to be able to speak his mind even more freely than he did during his years as a journalistic gadfly known for his brash management style and profane wisecracks.

Instead of retiring, he began writing a syndicated column called "More Than Work," dedicated to values and faith in the workplace. He also is a leader in the Partners In Preaching network of Catholic speakers.

Work is the last place most people think about spirituality, said McGuire, speaking during a seminar on "Faith, Religion & Values" at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Instead of being the place where they express the values that are most precious to them, work becomes the place where these values are irrelevant.

"Work is brutal. Work is a four-letter word," said McGuire. "Most people don't think that work could possibly have anything to do with spirituality. ... They assume that these two worlds cannot mesh. But if we bring our souls to work, then we can transform our work. That is when our work can begin to transform us.

"The problem for most people is that their work transforms them into something bad, something bitter and tired and broken."

McGuire saw this happen day after day, but he doesn't think journalists are more "soul sick" than other people. All kinds of people struggle to find ways to cope with pain, confusion and anger. Some purchase mountains of possessions and others keep trading in one romantic relationship for another. Some turn to drugs and alcohol. Some literally worship their work, even though they may hate the work that they do.

This struggle is spiritual, whether people want to admit it or not. Finding a way to sleep at night is a spiritual process.

"Everybody has to have a spirituality and everybody does have one," said McGuire. "What we do with that personal madness that makes us who we are is our spirituality. ... Spirituality is about how we try to fill that hole in our souls."

Welcoming spirituality into the workplace doesn't mean holding revival meetings and letting people speak in tongues at their desks, he said. Proselytizing is wrong and there are settings in which it would be wrong for believers to display the symbols of their faith. The key is to make personal changes and vows that help "bring Sunday on over into Monday," he said.

That's why McGuire treasured that Mickey Lolich baseball card. That's why he uses computer passwords such as "blessed" that make him stop and think. A glass eagle sculpture on his desk is a reminder to treat his staff like eagles, not chickens.

Believers can find way to seek holiness, without being "holier than thou," he said. Take office gossip, for example.

"What are you supposed to do about that? You should not participate in the sin. You have to walk away," he said. "So far, so good. But what you can't do is point at those people and say, 'You're sinning! You're sinning! You've got to stop gossiping!' ...

"No, the way you cut down on the gossiping is that you stop gossiping yourself. But that's the hard part anyway, isn't it?"

Goodbye, Democrats. Hello, what?

It was sometime during the hearings into whether Judge Priscilla Owen was fit to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals that Father John F. Kavanaugh faced a hard question.

All 10 Democrats on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted against her and killed her recent nomination, even though the Texas Supreme Court Justice received the American Bar Association's highest ranking. The problem was that she favored restraints on abortion rights, including parental-notification laws.

"This was the first time in history that someone with her qualifications had been rejected in committee," said the nationally known Jesuit writer. "I couldn't believe it. ... That was when I had to ask: Why am I still a registered Democrat?"

Kavanaugh poured his feelings into a column in which he argued that it's time for Catholics to cut the political ties that bind and register as independent voters. While the priest stressed that he believes Catholic Republicans may also need to declare their freedom, he entitled his provocative piece "Goodbye, Democrats."

It helps to know that Kavanaugh is an old-school progressive, the author of books with titles such as "Following Christ in a Consumer Culture," "Faces of Poverty, Faces of Christ" and "Who Counts as Persons? Human Identity and the Ethics of Killing." This is one Jesuit who would never "wrap a rosary" around a conservative agenda.

Kavanaugh said he remains firmly opposed GOP doctrine on tax cuts, labor laws, welfare reform, the death penalty and a host of other issues. In the past decade, he noted, Democrats have compromised on all of those issues. But there is one issue on which his old party has steadfastly refused any compromise.

"One thing the Democrats really stand for, however, is abortion -- abortion on demand, abortion without restraint, abortion paid for by all of us, abortion for the poor of the earth," wrote Kavanaugh. "I am not a one-issue voter, but they have become a one-issue party. ... If traditional Democrats who are disillusioned with the selling out of the working poor and the unborn simply became registered Independent voters, would not more attention be paid?"

In recent national elections, researchers have been watching for any signs that America's 60 million Catholics are changing their voting habits.

For generations, Frost Belt Catholics have been a crucial part of all Democratic coalitions. Today, Catholic trends are crucial in an era when Hispanic voters are gaining clout in Sunbelt politics. Thus, it matters that nearly three-fifths of the Catholics who said they frequently went to Mass voted for George W. Bush in 2000.

The question is whether this change is part of a fundamental realignment in the role that faith plays in American politics, according to two political scientists at Baruch College in the City University of New York.

Once, Southern evangelicals and northern Catholics were loyal Democrats. Once, the mainline Protestant churches were the heart of the Republican Party. But everything has changed. Today, liberal Protestants have joined a rising tide of "secularists" and "anti-fundamentalists" as the most loyal members of the Democratic establishment.

"The importance of evangelicals to the ascendancy of the Republican Party since the 1980s has been pointed out ad nauseam," noted Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio, in a paper presented to the Southern Political Science Association. "But if the GOP can be labeled the party of religious conservatives, the Democrats, with equal validity, can be called the secularist party."

And, they added, any list of nonnegotiable issues for secularists and leaders of the religious left would begin with abortion rights.

At some point, said Kavanaugh, Catholics must find a way to be active in politics without writing off the poor, the weak, the defenseless and the unborn. This is what their faith teaches. Right now, he believes that this means letting the political world see visible evidence that Catholics are no longer tied to one party.

"It's not just the unfettered worship of 'choice' that we see in the Democratic Party today, which some would even call a form of libertarianism," he said. "There has also been a capitulation to the power of money. ... It's painful to say this, but right now I see as much hard-heartedness in the Democrats as I do in the Republicans."

Worship for sale, worship for sale

In the beginning, there were the Jesus People.

They had long hair and short memories and they emerged from the 1960s with a unique fusion of evangelical faith and pop culture. They loved fellowship, but didn't like frumpy churches. They trusted their feelings, not traditions. They loved the Bible, but not those old hymnals.

So they started writing, performing, recording and selling songs. The Contemporary Christian Music industry was born.

And, lo, the counterculture became a corporate culture, one that was increasingly competitive and relentlessly contemporary, constantly striving to photocopy cultural trends. Out in the mega-churches, the definition of "worship" changed and then kept changing -- Sunday after Sunday.

Even though this industry "makes claims for musical diversity among its ranks, it is primarily a reflection of current folk, pop and rock styles," noted veteran pop musician Charlie Peacock, speaking at a recent conference on "Music and the Church" at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. "Even today's successful modern worship music is composed of these and does not have a distinct style of its own."

The "bandwidth" of worship music today is actually quite narrow, he said, even if black gospel and "urban" music is included. This reality is especially obvious if the industry's products are contrasted with the dizzying array of church music found around the world and across two millennia of history.

Today, the bottom line is almost always the financial bottom line.

While believers lead the companies that dominate Christian music, secular corporations now own these smaller companies, noted Peacock. Clearly this is shaping the "Christian" music sold in religious bookstores and mainstream malls. But this corporate culture is also affecting worship and the heart of church life.

"The industry cannot be expected to always have the best interests of the church in mind," Peacock told nearly 500 scholars, musicians, entrepreneurs and clergy. "Christians within the companies may. But the overriding ideology of the system is to serve the shareholder first."

Serving the shareholders means an endless stream of new products, fads and artists -- just like in the secular world. The new always vetoes the old and the saints don't use credit cards or own stock. Thus, CCM is dominated by pop, rock, urban and new worship music. Classical Christian music is below 1 percent on the charts.

Most worship leaders are trying to blend these radically different musical elements, reported pollster George Barna, describing a survey of Protestant worshippers, pastors and "worship leaders." Sometimes the easiest solution is to have different services for different audiences -- a strategy the Barna Research Group found in three out of four churches.

Thus, the GI Generation attends a different service than the upbeat Baby Boomers or the mysterious young faithful of generations X and Y. The result looks something like an FM radio dial.

"What we know about Americans is that we view ourselves first and foremost as consumers," said Barna. "Even when we walk in the doors of our churches what we tend to do is to wonder how can I get a good transaction out of this experience. ... So, what we know from our research is that Americans have made worship something that primarily that we do for ourselves. When is it successful? When we feel good."

And sometimes people feel bad. According to the pastors, only 9 percent of the surveyed churches were experiencing conflict over music. But it's possible to turn those statistics around and note that 90 percent of all church conflicts reported in this study centered on musical issues.

Is peace possible? Peacock concluded that it will be up to ministers and educators to argue that there is more to worship than the niches on a CCM sales charts.

The industry can play a valid role in shaping the content of Christian music, he said, even in "contributing to the congregational music of the church. Still, the industry is at the mercy of a consumer with narrow tastes. Until this changes, it can't possibly function as a definitive caretaker and should not be asked to.

"This means that the stewardship of Christian music from the Psalms, to Ambrose, to Bach, to Wesley, to the Fisk Jubilee Singers and more, belongs to the church and the academy."

Truckers, snipers & prayer

There are still churches left in this land where folks gather every Wednesday night for "prayer meeting," since they're convinced God doesn't just listen on Sundays.

Central Church of the Nazarene in Fort Wright, Ky., is that kind of church. Last week, the Rev. Larry Dillon told his mid-week faithful that he felt God wanted them to spend some extra time praying about the sniper attacks near Washington, D.C.

"We prayed for the victims and their families," he said. "We prayed for the police. We also prayed that somebody out there would find the killers. ... Our people just kept praying, 'Please Lord, let this end.' "

One layman who couldn't be there was trucker Ron Lantz. Normally, he drove his 18-wheeler back and forth to Wilmington, Del., on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But he'd been called in special and had to be on the road Wednesday night and into the morning.

This is, of course, where this prayer story turns into a news story.

Christian truck drivers often like to take their breaks far from the temptations and noise of giant truck stops. The Myersville rest area near Frederick, Md., is one safe refuge where Lantz regularly pulls over and parks.

This time, it was a few minutes before 1 a.m. and, as usual, the 61-year-old Lantz was listening to the national Truckin' Bozo Radio Show. The host was urging truckers to look for a 1990 blue Chevy Caprice with New Jersey license plate NDA21Z. Lantz pulled into the rest area and there was the car. He was one of the first callers to get through and alert the police.

"I called 911," Lantz told CNN. "They told me, 'We'll be there as soon as possible. We'll be there right away.' He didn't say how long. He said, 'You stay right where you're at.' I said, 'OK.' "

Lantz and another driver blocked the rest area's entrance and the exit and, about 20 minutes later, swarms of officers arrived. After a cautious stakeout around the car, the police awoke John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo and put them under arrest.

The next day, Lantz enjoyed a few sheepish moments in the media spotlight.

That was the end of that story. But what few journalists noted was that the folksy trucker was telling them that his story had a beginning, as well as an ending. Finding that deadly sniper-mobile followed some serious prayer, he said.

A week earlier, lots of truckers were talking on their CB radios about the sniper case. Finally, Lantz and several others told everybody to pull off the road. It was time for a prayer meeting. According to Lantz, at least 50 truckers and a slew of other drivers got together -- a mere 20 miles from that Myersville rest area.

Lantz is on the road again this week, far from reporters. But he told the whole story in church last Sunday, said Dillon.

"That truckers' prayer meeting is a big part of all this, the way I see it," said the preacher. "Ron said they all knew that the sniper was probably driving on the same roads that they were. So they prayed that the truckers out there would be able to help stop him, somehow. ...

"Ron's testimony is that he was just in the right place at the right time. But Ron doesn't think any of this was a coincidence and I don't think it was a coincidence, either."

It's probably hard for journalists to figure out where prayer fits into this kind of news story, said Dillon. But millions of people sincerely believe prayer makes a difference. So they keep praying. It's part of the story of their lives.

"I know people ask, 'If prayer matters, then why didn't God stop the killing earlier?' Well, God gives people choices. They can choose good or they can choose evil," said Dillon. "So we don't know why those men chose to do what they did and we don't know why God didn't stop them sooner.

"Those are tough questions. But we know that we're supposed to choose what's good and keep doing what God wants us to do. We'll have to get to heaven before we truly understand how all of this works."

Neo-traditional born-again dads

They show up for dinner, help with homework, lead the rituals of bedtime and park their butts in the bleachers when their kids are in action.

They are heavy on discipline, but also eager to praise. They have been known to spank their children, but they are also more likely to hug them. They certainly take their families to church -- early and often.

They are totally off the radar screens in Hollywood and elite academia.

They are ordinary, faithful, evangelical and Catholic men and University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has survey data showing that they appear to be more involved, more dedicated fathers than their secular counterparts, or even those who worship in more "progressive" pews.

"Conservative Protestant Churches and parachurch ministries have stressed values such as traditional gender attitudes, strict discipline, expressive parenting and parental involvement," noted Wilcox, in the Journal of Marriage and Family. "Moreover, because of their pietist tradition of worship and increasingly therapeutic approach to relationships, conservative Protestant churches have an expressive ethos that may carry over into family life."

It would be wrong, Wilcox explained, to call these fathers old-fashioned traditionalists who rule their homes with an iron hand and a stiff upper lip. Instead, Wilcox called them "neo-traditionalists" who are trying to blend discipline and doctrine with a new style of parenting that is also heavy on "affection and sensitivity."

The result is not "some kind of flashback to the 1950s," said Wilcox. "I think what we are seeing is evidence that there are lots of evangelical and Catholic fathers who are truly changing their lives to try to spend more time with their children. The evidence is that they are doing this because they believe God wants them to."

This survey will certainly be seen as a paradox, if not a threat, by other researchers, noted theologian Russell D. Moore of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

"After all," he said, "wouldn't one expect that conservative evangelical dads would dismiss childrearing as 'women's work,' while they attend Billy Graham crusades or uproot South American rain forests, or do, well, whatever it is that evangelical men do?" But perhaps, he added, "evangelical fathers are more committed to their children, not in spite of their biblical understanding of the family, but because of it."

The national study of 1,000 fathers who live at home focused on several practical questions about daily life. Wilcox found that evangelicals were more likely to spend one-on-one time with their children and to take part in family meals and church activities. Catholic fathers had similar high scores, but tended to favor non-religious activities with their children.

Evangelical and Catholic fathers consistently scored higher than those from the denominations that researchers have long considered "mainline" and progressive. In his study, Wilcox included Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, United Methodists and Congregationalists in this "mainline" camp. Meanwhile, the evangelicals included participants from Southern Baptist, the Assembly of God, Christian Reformed, Pentecostal and other conservative churches.

Yet Wilcox understood that the "mainline" world is not monolithic, since he was raised as an Episcopalian before converting to Roman Catholicism. While the mainline denominations lean left on moral and cultural issues, they also include many individual congregations that are quite conservative.

Thus, Wilcox was able to dig into his data and test his thesis that beliefs make a difference. He discovered that about 30 percent of the "mainline" men identified themselves as conservatives on issues of biblical authority and whether the Bible was their final guide on "practical issues they face in daily life." Sure enough, he said, these conservative men were more child and family oriented than the typical fathers in the "mainline" denominations.

There was no way to avoid this theme in the data, he said.

"There is no doubt in my mind," said Wilcox, "that part of what is going on here is that these fathers have a strong belief that there is such a thing as a biblical worldview, one that stresses that God wants to play a vital, active role in their lives. They also believe God wants them to pass this belief on to their children, right there in their homes. So that's what they're trying to do."

Krispy Kreme Catholics & the Baptist Vatican

NASHVILLE -- As a boy in upstate New York, Father Bob Dalton learned how to talk to Italians, Poles, Ukrainians and various other kinds of neighbors.

"My Irish mother was always saying, 'They're just not our kind of people,' " said the 68-year-old priest, hinting at her accent. "But, you know, we learned to get along. ... It helped that almost everybody was Catholic."

Before long, Dalton became a priest in the Glenmary Home Mission Society, which works across the rural South. This meant learning a whole different cultural vocabulary. It meant learning how to talk to Southern Baptists.

By the early 1980s, Dalton was representing the Church of Rome at Southern Baptist Convention's annual meetings and in the hallways of the giant "Baptist Vatican" in downtown Nashville. He has talked to Southern Baptists in state conventions and regional associations, too. He has talked to Southern Baptists at the all-important level of the local church.

And this is what he has learned.

"Catholics and Baptists have a lot in common," said Dalton, who recently returned to his SBC liaison role. "But we're still looking at each other and saying, 'They're just not our kind of people.' ... We're two massive groups of people who still don't know each other."

Recent statistics gathered by the Glenmary Research Center found 62 million U.S. Catholics and 20 million Southern Baptists -- the nation's two largest flocks. These two culturally conservative giants continue to grow, but they are not growing closer together.

Official dialogues began three decades ago, with key leadership coming from "moderate" Baptists who were willing to risk being called "ecumenists." Progressive Baptists huddled with progressive Catholics, while Baptist conservatives seethed.

Then conservatives seized control of the SBC and, to the surprise of many experts, this soon led to an intense, but radically different, era of Catholic-Baptist work. Liberals howled about right-wing politics, while "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" and similar efforts found common ground on issues such as abortion, sexual abstinence and human rights.

A key 1994 document made news by affirming that Catholics and evangelicals are "brothers and sisters in Christ" and that both streams of tradition represent "authentic forms of discipleship." Before long, powerful SBC voices -- especially in regions heavy in ex-Catholics -- began saying that enough is enough. Southern Baptist leaders recently shut down the formal dialogue.

What happens next? The bottom line is that many Southern Baptists do not believe that years of dialogue have produced consensus on issues of salvation and biblical authority. A growing awareness of the Vatican II statement that salvation can be found through faith in non-Christian religions has only widened the gap.

One of the SBC's most outspoken scholars did not mince words on CNN's Larry King Show.

"I believe the Roman Church is a false church and teaches a false gospel," said R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. "Indeed, I believe the pope himself holds a false and unbiblical office."

Clearly, SBC leaders realize "that those are fighting words," said Dalton.

The irony, said the priest, is that the lives of most Roman Catholics today are not radically different from those of Southern Baptists.

The Glenmary statistics show that waves of Catholics have moved to the Sunbelt, far from the northern ethnic enclaves of the past. They live in sprawling suburbs and eat Krispy Kremes at church coffee hour like everybody else. They live next door to Southern Baptists, who long ago shed their rural roots and went suburban.

But many Catholics and Baptists have not realized how much times have changed, said Dalton. They still do not know how to talk to their neighbors.

"Maybe the formal dialogue did its thing," said Dalton. "It got us talking to the Baptist left and then we learned to talk to the Baptist right. But the next level of dialogue will not occur with our leaders sitting in conference rooms. It's going to have to happen between ordinary people over their backyard fences and down at the local Home Depot.

"We're living next door to each other. The question is whether we can learn to trust each other. Can we ever learn to see that we are one in Jesus Christ?"

MIA -- Spiritual fathers for spiritual sons

Sometimes the bishop calls the priest and sometimes the priest calls the bishop.

But one way or another, bishops and priests make appointments to meet over two cups of coffee. On one level, it is a meeting between employer and employee. On another, it's supposed to be an encounter between a father and a son.

These days, the atmosphere can get tense. There are questions that must be asked and a bishop has to ask them.

"Like any good father, the bishop must ask his spiritual sons specific, concrete, detailed questions about the manner in which they are living their vocations," noted scholar George Weigel, who is best known as the author of "Witness to Hope," a 992-page biography of Pope John Paul II.

"How often do you pray? Do you have a spiritual director whom you see regularly? Are you sleeping alone? Is Internet pornography a troublesome temptation? Is your recreation appropriate for a priest? Are your friendships, with both priests and laity, morally blameworthy? Do you have problems with alcohol? Is your celibacy fulfilling or burdensome, and are you living it faithfully and peacefully?"

A good bishop isn't trying to force a confession. The bishop also needs to avoid the role of therapist or attorney. But a bishop has to ask tough questions, according to Weigel, in order to rise above the role of "ecclesiastical executive" and assume the role of "genuine spiritual fatherhood."

That sounds obvious. But there are few safe, innocent questions right now, as Weigel makes clear in his new book, "The Courage to be Catholic: Crisis, Reform and the Future of the Church."

It's hard to be a spiritual father when there are legions of lawyers and journalists camped at the chancellery doors. Ask Bishop Edward Egan, once bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., and now archbishop of New York. In an attempt to fend off liability lawyers, he once referred to his Bridgeport priests as mere "independent contractors." It's hard to imagine Cyril, Ambrose and Augustine using this kind of language.

At some point, said Weigel, bishops need to "stop whining" and risk reclaiming their role as spiritual leaders.

"The failures of episcopal leadership that turned a significant and urgent problem of clerical sex abuse into a full-blown crisis touched all three of the bishop's classic roles, that is, as men who are to teach, govern and sanctify," noted Weigel. The bottom line is that far too many bishops reacted to "the meltdown of priestly discipline ... as managers, not as apostles."

Many bishops stopped daring to ask the tough questions and embraced a "don't ask, don't tell" approach to a host of issues.

But someone has to ask a priest if he is lonely and, if so, what he is doing about it. Weigel noted that, "One of the most serious problems Catholic priests in the United States face today is loneliness, as more and more parishes become 'one-priest' parishes. Loneliness, in turn, is a breeding ground for temptation."

Someone has to ask a priest if his parish is growing or shrinking. Someone has to ask if he has preached any sermons lately on the tough parts of Catholic doctrine and how his people responded. Someone has to ask: How many in your flock have been inspired to become priests and nuns?

"To ask a young man to throw his life away for Christ requires a man asking the question to reflect on the radical quality of his own discipleship," said Weigel. "Putting hard questions to others requires a priest to first put hard questions to himself."

This means that bishops need to answer all of the same questions. This may not be what the lawyers advise, but bishops are not called to be lawyers.

"It sounds like the bishops have been operating with a different software than the Catholic software," said Weigel. "If a bishop has lawyers who tell him that he cannot act pastorally when dealing with a victim of abuse, or that he cannot address this in the church's primary language of repentance and forgiveness ... because of legal liabilities, then he needs to find new lawyers.

"He needs to find lawyers who will let him be what he needs to be -- which is a Catholic bishop."

Veggies attack the funny gap

While flipping through TV channels the other night, VeggieTales writer Mike Nawrocki discovered an absolutely hilarious preacher. We're not talking about the big hair, molasses and glitz humor that makes so many televangelists laugh-to-keep-from-crying funny. No, this preacher was using humor to communicate. He knew his people and he knew how to make them laugh.

"It was very, very funny. But he was doing this in his own pulpit for his own people," said Nawrocki, who is "Larry the Cucumber" for 25 million Veggie video buyers. "I don't know if this preacher would have felt free to be that funny anywhere else. I don't know if he could have been funny outside his church."

Making ordinary people laugh is serious business to Nawrocki and his colleagues at Big Idea Productions, an independent company near Chicago built on the silly idea of vegetables acting out Bible stories. The twist in this tale is that the VeggieTales people have created a brand of humor that sells in mainstream superstores as well as in small Christian outlets. They don't just joke with the choir.

Now Larry the Cucumber, Bob the Tomato, Junior Asparagus and the virtual vegetables have jumped to the big screen, where they face the long knives of secular critics and consumers. "Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie" opens this weekend in 1,100 theaters nationwide. Once again, the Big Idea team is chasing kids 8-years-old and younger, while wooing parents with in-jokes about Monty Python, "Jaws," "Lawrence of Arabia," "The Blues Brothers" and pop culture.

Industry experts are watching to see if the VeggieTales are truly funny -- not church sanctuary funny, but suburban multiplex funny.

"We all know that Christians have trouble with humor," said Nawrocki. "Part of the problem is that all humor is irreverent, in one way or another. But the biggest problem Christians have with comedy is that they're afraid of offending other Christians. So much of humor is rooted in hard truths and Christians are not fond of hard truths, especially if they're about the church itself."

Nawrocki and Phil "Bob the Tomato" Vischer have wrestled with these issues ever since they were tossed out of Bible college in the mid-1980s. Soon, they were combining their puppetry and comedy skills with computer animation and dreaming about taking on Mickey Mouse.

Meanwhile, they watched their hip friends turn into pastors and youth ministers.

"The implicit message I received growing up was that full-time ministry was the only valid Christian service," said Vischer, the founder of Big Idea. "Young Christians were to aspire to be either ministers or missionaries. ... But I wanted to make movies. And from the movies and TV shows I watched growing up and the influence they had on me, I figured God could use a filmmaker or two, regardless of what anyone else said."

The key, said Vischer, is that he was raised in a culture in which everybody went to church. Then he ventured into the harsh world of advertising and corporate media and he had to reach people who never went to church. When he created Big Idea, Vischer was determined to create humor that blended both cultures.

Vischer and Nawrocki wanted to make videos, and now movies, that were openly religious, but not aimed at pews. They did not, in other words, want to settle for making "Christian movies." As another Christian in the entertainment industry, David McFadzean of the sitcom "Home Improvement," once quipped, the typical "Christian movie" is very similar to a porno movie. " It has terrible acting. It has a tiny budget. And you know exactly how it's going to end."

That quote is funny, yet painfully true, said Vischer.

"We seem to think every artistic expression by a Christian artist, to be valid, must end with an 'altar call.' It's the equivalent of saying every valid football play must end in the end zone," he said. Thus, "many of our efforts are so philosophically aggressive that they read more like war propaganda than entertainment, effectively limiting our audience to only the most committed faithful.

"The end result is that our work and our worldview have little or no impact on the broader culture. We've effectively taken ourselves out of the game."