Catholicism

In a surprise move, Pope Benedict XVI met with a group of victims of sexual abuse behind closed doors in Washington D.C.

It was a small but important step. Pope John Paul II was famous for his public-relations savvy, his ability to turn the media's fascination with the papal office to his advantage, but in the sexual abuse scandal his successor has shown the defter touch. In his waning years, the previous Pope seemed to lack an appreciation for how deep the rot and outrage went, and the Vatican behaved as though the scandal had more to do with American media sensationalism than with the Catholic hierarchy's own sins. Whereas both as Cardinal and now as Pope, the soft-spoken German-born Joseph Ratzinger has been more forthright than his predecessor about the "filth" in the priesthood and more active in response -- and now, in his first trip to the United States since being elevated to the See of Peter, more willing to make the scandal a touchstone for his ministry, both in public and in private.

The United House of Prayer for All People (TUHOPFAP) interred its charismatic leader, "Precious Daddy" Samuel C. Madison, today in Washington, D.C.

In Washington, this is a week of two Christian passages: Pope Benedict XVI's celebration of his 81st birthday, and the burial of Bishop S. C. Madison, leader of TUHOPFAP for seventeen years. One of the largest and most powerful of the "black holiness churches," TUHOPFAP is known for its street brass bands, cheap and delicious soul food, and mass outdoor baptisms, which involve fire-hoses and huge tanks of water imported from the River Jordan. This morning, members packed TUHOPFAP's D.C. church, known as "God's White House," to bury Bishop Madison and mourn his passing. Many of the women wore white -- a sign, perhaps, of the celebratory mood that the church seems incapable of casting off, even at the somber farewell to its beloved leader. In the cafeteria, Saint's Paradise ("Where our Main Ingredient is Love"), no one cried into his grits, and the church's signature brass piped its music, major-key, in over the intercom. But a question remains: Who will lead the Church next?

Newspapers reported that Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, an official in the Vatican office that oversees confession and conscience, had listed seven new "social sins" of the modern world.

Now that the very idea of sin and penitence seems hopelessly Old Europe, the earnest moral language of Catholicism -- sin, virtue, evil, salvation -- lends itself easily to caricature. The bishop gave an interview early this month, and by Monday, journalists had distilled his thoughts into tabloid headlines: "Seven new deadly sins: are you guilty?" and "Pope Identifies Seven New Sins!" The articles claimed Girotti's ad-hoc list expanded or even (in more grievous misinterpretations) replaced the familiar litany of deadly sins -- pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth -- codified by Pope Gregory the Great in the late 6th Century, fine-tuned by Aquinas in the 13th, and popularized by Dante in the 14th. But even those seven were less "sins" than categories of impropriety, attitudes that could lead to spiritually destructive personal behavior. MORE

The Pew Forum released its "Religious Landscape Survey," which offers a detailed look at the way we worship -- or don't -- at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

By law, the U.S. census doesn't ask about religious belief. Fortunately, the Pew Forum has stepped into the breach.

The survey depicts a nation where Christianity still dominates, but is in decline. Only fifty-one percent of Americans identify themselves with Protestantism, long the nation's dominant creed. Roman Catholicism's share is holding steady (at around twenty percent of the population), but the Catholic numbers are kept afloat by immigration rather than institutional strength; the report notes that the Catholic Church "has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes" over the last twenty years.

Catholic and Protestant decline has coincided with the rise of the religiously unaffiliated, whose numbers have more than doubled in a decade-and-a-half. Being unaffiliated isn't necessarily the same as being an unbeliever. Many Americans who don't identify with any particular faith presumably retain spiritual beliefs of one sort or another. But what's long made America exceptional among developed nations is the strength of organized religion, and it appears that strength is weakening -- perhaps because religion is increasingly identified with politics, or perhaps for some more mysterious reason known to God alone.