(03:56) "A Dynamic Moment"

Since 2002, the Catholic Church has been dealing with the fallout of the clergy sex abuse scandal, which started in Boston but spread across the country. By the time Pope Benedict visited the U.S. in April 2008, more than 5,000 priests had been accused of abuse. The Church has paid more than $2 billion in settlements and legal fees. The Catholic Church in the U.S. has also had difficult time recruiting new priests for the past few decades, resulting in priest shortages around the country.

Approximately 40,000 priests are employed by the Church today; 20,000 fewer than 1967 totals. More than twice as many priests are dying or retiring every year as are being ordained. A study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life showed that "Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic."

(04:55) The Second Vatican Council

In 1962, Pope John XXIII, named Man of the Year in 1963 by Time magazine, opened the Second Vatican Council with the intention of internally renewing the global Roman Catholic church. When asked about his motivation for convening the council, Pope John XXIII moved to the window and threw open the sash — his rationale being, "I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in."

The Council published 16 documents and produced many visible changes in Catholic life and doctrine. These changes created an opening for new modes of Catholic thought and doctrine leading to a less hierarchical governance and increased roles for the laity. At Mass, liturgies could be spoken in native languages rather than intoned in Latin and priests could face the parishioners in the pews rather than his back facing them and turned toward the altar. And a renewed effort to develop relationships with other Christians and Jews developed. Pope John XXIII died before the Council was concluded. His successor, Pope Paul VI, closed the Council in 1965. The legacy of Vatican II is large, controversial, and still unfolding.

(06:54) The Sacrament of the Eucharist

The ritual of Holy Communion has been identified in many ways over the centuries. The term Eucharist (from the Greek eucharista, meaning "thanksgiving") can be found in the writings of early Church scholars such as Ignatius, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus. Other expressions include the Lord's Supper (in Latin, Coena Domini), the Table of the Lord (Mensa Domini), the Lord's Body (Corpus Domini), and the Holy of Holies (Sanctissimum). In the early days of Christianity, it was referred to as a Love Feast, or an agape meal.

The language used in many traditional Communion rituals most closely resembles the apostle Paul's account of witnessing Jesus after the resurrection. The following passage is excerpted from 1 Corinthians, chapter 11, verses 23-34 of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible:

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

We explored the history of the ritual of communion in our show "At Table: The Meaning of Communion."

(11:15) The Latino Church

According to the Pew Forum's portrait of American Catholics, appoximately one in three Catholics in the U.S. are now Latino. That number is likely to grow since Latinos account for nearly half of all Catholics under the age of 40. In our show "Latino Migrations and the Changing Face of Religion in the Americas," we dig into how religious and spiritual worldviews shape Latino cultures — and how they are reshaping North American religion and culture in fascinating ways.

(12:49) C.S. Lewis' "Meditation on a Toolshed"

Jef Murray refers to C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), the novelist and Christian apologist best known for his Chronicles of Narnia series. Lewis' short essay, "Meditation in a Toolshed," was originally published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph (1945) and was included in his book of essays God in the Dock:

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious than all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. lie is, as they say, "in love". Now comes a scientist and describes this young man's experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man's genes and a recognised biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.

(14:43) The Catholic Church's Stance on Abortion

The official Catechism of the Catholic Church states, "Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person — among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life." To support this view, the Catechism cites several passages from the Bible, including Psalm 139 (New Revised Standard Version of the Bible):

For it was you who formed my inward parts;
   you knit me together in my mother's womb. 
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
   Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well. 
   My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
   intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Despite the Catholic Church's strong opposition to abortion, the Pew Forum for Religion & Public life found that 51 percent of U.S. Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while 44 percent oppose abortion in most or all cases. However, the same study did find that 60 percent of white Catholics who attend church at least once a week and 53 percent of Latino Catholics oppose legalized abortion in most or all circumstances.

(22:16) "Traditional Things"

In 2007 Pope Benedict XVI eased restrictions on the use of the Latin Mass, which had been discouraged since the Second Vatican Council. According to The New York Times, new use of the Latin mass has drawn interest even among younger church members who don't remember the old Latin Mass. The Rev. Thomas Reece, former editor of the national Catholic weekly America Magazine, has written about why he didn't agree with the pope's decision to ease those restrictions.

(32:04) "Lay People Are Stepping Up"

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University has found that more than 3,000 Roman Catholic parishes in the U.S. are currently without a full-time priest. Some of those parishes share part-time priests with each other, some rely on deacons for their leadership, and some rely on lay people known as "parish life coordinators." In 2004, CARA conducted a study of Catholic parish life coordinators and found that almost 9 in 10 of them were women. At the time of the study, 435 parishes in the United States were led by lay people.

(32:13) "A Majority of U.S. Catholic Lay People…"

A 2005 survey of U.S. Catholics found that, when asked how to solve the current shortage of priests, 75 percent of respondents approved of the ordination of married men, 61 percent approved the ordination of celibate women, and 54 percent approved of the ordination of married women.

(32:34) Call to Action

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI wrote in an apostolic letter:

"It is to all Christians that we address a fresh and insistent call to action. In our encyclical on the Development of Peoples we urged that all should set themselves to the task: 'Laymen should take up as their own proper task the renewal of the temporal order. If the role of the hierarchy is to teach and to interpret authentically the norms of morality to be followed in this matter, it belongs to the laity, without waiting passively for orders and directives, to take the initiatives freely and to infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws and structures of the community in which they live.'"

As a result, the U.S. bishops held a series of hearings with Catholic lay people over the course of two years, asking for their input on the state of the church. These hearings culminated in the "Call to Action Conference" in Detroit in 1976. A majority of delegates expressed their views that the church must reevaluate its positions on celibacy for priests, the male-only clergy, homosexuality, birth control, and the role of lay people in the church's decision-making process.

These views were never adopted by the hierarchy of the Church, so the lay group Call to Action was formed in 1978 in Chicago to advocate for them. In 1990, Call to Action published its Call for Reform in a full page ad in The New York Times. By the end of the year the document had 25,000 signatures, launching the group as a national organization.

In 1996, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz excommunicated members of the group from his diocese in Lincoln, Nebraska, along with members of several other groups, including Planned Parenthood. Call to Action - Nebraska appealed to the Vatican, and in 2006 the Vatican announced that it would not overturn the excommunication.

(35:56) Catholic Church's View of Homosexuality

The official Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered." They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

Before becoming pope, Cardinal Ratzinger also authored a document instructing bishops to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage. In a 2005 survey of U.S. Catholics, only 47 percent of respondents said that the Church's teaching against same-sex marriage was "very important" to them. The Pew Forum has found that a greater percentage of U.S. Catholics (42 percent) favor gay marriage than the American public as a whole (36 percent), though white Catholics who attend church at least once a week opposed gay marriage by a greater margin (59 percent).

(38:20) "Eucharist Is a Dividing Point Between Christians"

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops provides a succinct overview of why non-Catholics cannot take part in sacramental communion.

(38:45) Gay Men Excluded from Ordination

On November 29, 2005, the Vatican officially released a document banning the ordination of men who are "actively homosexual, have deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called gay culture." Some critics interpreted the document to ban all gay men from the seminary, even if they took a faithful vow of celibacy. But some within the Church argued that this was not the case. In the National Catholic Reporter, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of Westminster, England, argued the opposite, "The instruction is not saying that men of homosexual orientation are not welcome in the priesthood. But it is making clear that they must be capable of affective maturity, have a capacity for celibacy and not share the values of eroticized gay culture."

(40:52) Reference to Pope John Paul II

Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) served as head of the Roman Catholic Church from 1978 to 2005. For an in-depth exploration of his life and influence, Krista spoke with NPR's Sylvia Poggioli, Father Donald Cozzens, and Margaret Farley in our special "The Religious Legacy of John Paul II" that was produced shortly after his death.

(41:14) "Something Beautiful about the Human Being"

While working on these particulars, we asked Oilibhéar if there were any writings in the Catholic canon that expressed for him what the Catholic Church has grasped about the human being. He pointed to the following passage from Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), the first document from the Second Vatican Council:

God, Who has fatherly concern for everyone, has willed that all men should constitute one family and treat one another in a spirit of brotherhood. For having been created in the image of God, Who "from one man has created the whole human race and made them live all over the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26), all men are called to one and the same goal, namely God Himself.

For this reason, love for God and neighbor is the first and greatest commandment. Sacred Scripture, however, teaches us that the love of God cannot be separated from love of neighbor: "If there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.... Love therefore is the fulfillment of the Law" (Rom. 13:9-10; cf. 1 John 4:20). To men growing daily more dependent on one another, and to a world becoming more unified every day, this truth proves to be of paramount importance.

Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, "that all may be one ... as we are one" (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.

(48:02) Ecumenism

Ecumenism is generally defined as the movement to unify all churches, especially Christian churches. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "the word ecumenism is derived from the Greek words oikoumene ('the inhabited world') and oikos ('house') and can be traced from the commands, promises, and prayers of Jesus. After the International Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in 1910, Protestants began to use the term ecumenism to describe the gathering of missionary, evangelistic, service, and unitive forces. During and after the second Vatican Council (1962-65), Roman Catholics used ecumenism to refer to the renewal of the whole life of the church, undertaken to make it more responsive to 'separated churches' and to the needs of the world."

(48:11) The Gloria

The Gloria is a hymn sung every Sunday at Catholic Masses except during the weeks leading up to Christmas and Easter:

Glory to God in the highest,
and peace to his people on earth.
Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father,
we worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory.
Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father,
Lord God, Lamb of God,
you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us;
you are seated at the right hand of the Father: receive our prayer.
For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord,
You alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ,
with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.

(48:17) Agnes Dei

The Latin phrase agnes dei means "lamb of God" and is a reference to Jesus that comes from the New Testament passage John 1:29 (New Revised Standard Version of the Bible): "The next day [John the Baptist] saw Jesus coming towards him and declared, 'Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!'" The Agnes Dei prayer Bonnie Amesquita refers to comes at a point in the Catholic Mass just before the congregation takes communion. Upon the breaking of the bread, the congregation sings:

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world: grant us peace.