Or why we need a new evangelization. A recent Pew Forum study revealed/confirmed that Catholics know less about religion, including their own, than other religious demographics in the US. I’ve heard some people argue that the methodology is skewed. But I have to say that the study confirms my experience. The solution? Better catechesis on all levels, including individual responsibility for learning our faith. After all, the study also indicated that Catholics read less about faith/religion than any other group and religious private schools had no effect on the outcome of the survey when compared with nonreligious private schools. We’ve got work to do. Here’s my take on it. (The column includes a link to the study.)

I started this week with a trip to Orlando that I tried to cancel. I’m on the board of Heartbeat International, a phenomenal group that supports a network of pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) in the United States and around the world. Every year Heartbeat hosts a conference for the directors and staff of its affiliate centers. The board takes this opportunity to have one of its regular meetings. Busy with work, weighed down by my study of the sex abuse scandals in the Church, and wanting more time with my husband, the last thing I wanted to do was to take a trip regardless of the worthy cause.

After a weather delay, I arrived Monday night for the tail end of the dinner welcoming the international attendees. Right away I had the same realization that I have when I attend most pro-life events: we may be a home-spun group, but there are a lot of good things happening. People don’t get involved in the pro-life movement because they have specific abilities and training. They get involved because they want to change lives, allow people to be born, and they’ll learn whatever they have to in order to get closer to this goal.

To me this indicates a certain humility, a willingness to be used for a greater purpose, even when one doesn’t understand how it will all happen. One pastor told the story of how he started his first PRC. In order to pay the $6/hour salary of the woman working in the center, he got a painting job that paid $15/hour. It may not have been much and it certainly made him wonder about the point of his education, but it served a purpose.

If you’ve spent any time involved with pro-life activities, you know that these stories abound. But they point to a drive and a zeal that isn’t stifled simply because people don’t readily know how they’re going to accomplish what they’re going to accomplish.

These initiatives span everything from legislative projects to activism to education to pregnancy resource centers. But I believe that the frontline of the abortion debate is the woman or girl faced with a crisis pregnancy who thinks that abortion is the only choice she has. That’s one of the reasons I am honored to serve on the board of Heartbeat and inspired by the people who carry out the day-to-day work in centers across the nation and in other parts of the world. They make the impossible possible. The centers don’t simply counsel against abortion. A client encounters people who are ready to help her with all of her needs: physical, emotional, spiritual, material, etc.

Centers help women get medical care, they help them get work and find places to live, they teach them how to parent or help them to make an adoption plan, they help the fathers of the unborn babies get jobs so that they can be more actively involved in the life of the mother and their child together. It’s no Cinderella story. It’s real life.

But if it weren’t for these centers, abortion would seem like the only answer to the challenge of a crisis pregnancy. If it weren’t for the people who serve in these centers, abortion would seem necessary. And when the bad news in the world seems overwhelming, it’s encouraging to know that there are victories in the timeless battle between good and evil.

Maybe the lesson in all this is that the work allows us to be part of something bigger than ourselves. In the end, it’s not our work. There’s a story about St. Camillus, a 16th and 17th century priest who was praying before a crucifix as he was in the process of starting a religious order dedicated to hospital care. As the story goes, he was overwhelmed by how he would be able to accomplish his work, and he poured all this out in his prayer. Christ’s body on the crucifix reached down and patted his shoulder saying, “Don’t worry. It’s not your work. It’s my work.”

I spent last week in Rome for a bi-annual conference on social communications at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, where I was asked to give a presentation on the sex abuse scandals and the communications offices of the Catholic Church.

Since I don’t work officially for any communications office in the Church, my role was akin to that of an outside consultant who’s asked to study a specific problem and come up with a solution. In the weeks leading up to the conference, I spent more time studying the sex abuse crisis than I would otherwise have wanted. Before I gave the talk, a few people asked if I was worried that I might be shut down in the midst of my presentation. I had no such concerns even though I planned to be giving a very forthright presentation.

This university is also one of my alma maters, the institution where I did my doctorate in moral theology. While the university is run by Opus Dei, there are no Dan Brown inspired albino monks working to bring about world domination. In fact, it’s one of the few institutions where I’ve experienced so much intellectual freedom.

The conference serves as case and point. Four secular journalists from The New York Times, De Telegraaf (Netherlands), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), andCorriere della Sera (Italy) were invited to be part of a panel in which they discussed, candidly and openly, the challenges of reporting on the Catholic Church and the Vatican. Many of their comments were hard hitting, most deservedly so in my opinion. But none of the speakers were limited or treated disrespectfully in any way.

I’m at a loss to come up with many other groups that would host a similar panel in which part of their identity runs the risk of being attacked. Normally, such opportunities are relegated to cable news shows or conferences organized by critical groups.

Many of us at the conference openly expressed dissatisfaction with the Church’s handling of the crisis. But as journalist and Vatican expert John Thavis notes in his article, no one named names. There were no personal critiques made of members of the hierarchy, no matter how confusing some of their actions and statements might be.

To me this suggests a unique environment. It’s an environment loyal to the Magisterium. Yet, contrary to some expectations, it does not stifle discussion. We were able to have an open conversation about an extremely sensitive topic. At the same time, the participants were focused on constructive solutions and actions, which helps to explain why the director of the Vatican Press Offices, Father Federico Lombardi, was welcomed when he met with us.

The official format allowed him to take only a few questions. But he stayed on to answer individual questions and engage in conversations when he surely could have made any excuse to get away.

There has to be space in the Church for the faithful to discuss problematic issues. As I mentioned at the conference, if we don’t provide that space for the faithful within the Church, then the Church is effectively telling the faithful to go to other sources, including those biased against the Church.

Baptism and participation in the Catholic Church doesn’t somehow mean we stop thinking, questioning, and struggling. It also doesn’t mean that we don’t share the same concerns as non-Catholics, as evidenced by the variety of participants at this conference.

This past week reinforced, for me, what it means for an institution to be faithfully Catholic. Having these difficult conversations becomes more challenging in cultures influenced by cable news sound bites and tactics. It certainly isn’t easy in the midst of a crisis like the current sex abuse scandals. But they have to take place.

It’s difficult to do communications for someone I don’t advise or even know. But over the past few weeks, I have been asked a lot of questions, on air and off, about the statements and actions made by some leaders in the Catholic Church regarding the sex abuse scandals.

Yet amid the confusion, it seems apparent to me that Pope Benedict has taken an unprecedented lead in handling the issue. He started in 2001 even before he was pope when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and he became, in essence, the Vatican point person on all sex abuse cases. In assuming this role, he was not removing the responsibility from local bishops; but rather providing for a venue or format whereby the Vatican would be aware of each case. The immediate jurisdiction was and is still the local bishop’s.

In 2005, during his homily for the College of Cardinals gathered to elect a pope after the death of John Paul II, then-Cardinal Ratzinger presented several key themes. The first was the full weight of evil and how that is countered by Christ’s love. At the time, many were struck by the fact that he would even bring up the topic of evil in such a context. To my mind, it suggests that he understood all too well the challenges facing the Church both from within and without.

He also spoke of a “dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desire.” This was first understood more in the context of intellectual matters. Nevertheless, it also speaks to the topic of evil and to the sex abuse scandals since persistent sin can also be described in the same way.

Yet, as Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out in the same homily, the remedy to both the problem of evil and the dictatorship of relativism is found in Christ, in our friendship with him and in our love for him. Not to be confused with trite sentimentalism, Ratzinger was talking about the life of every Christian: a life of going forth and bearing witness to Christ.

Make no doubt about it, this is particularly difficult given the challenges of the sex abuse scandals. But Ratzinger enunciated the Church’s vision of the priesthood: “We are priests in order to serve others. And we must bear fruit that will endure.”

Remember, this is the same man who was called the Pope’s Rottweiler, based on the assumption that his approach in matters of doctrine precluded any communication of tenderness.

But it was this man, as Pope Benedict, who in 2008 met with victims of sex abuse during his visit to the United States. In my last piece, I cited The Boston Globe’s reaction: “a dramatic move likely to alter forever the image of his pontificate.”

Despite the media’s short term memory, Benedict continued these meetings in Australia the same year, later in Rome when he met with some Canadian victims, and most recently in Malta this past weekend.

John Allen relates the reactions of two of the victims in a recent column. One said, “For a long time I haven’t gone to Mass, and I had lost the faith. Now I feel like a convinced Catholic again.” Another explained that he had now made his peace with the Catholic Church.

Every priest, whether a pastor, bishop, or pope, should have as his primary concern the salvation of souls. Pope Benedict’s actions show that he is working to bear the fruit he referenced in his homily for the cardinals: “[L]ove, knowledge, a gesture capable of touching hearts, words that open the soul to joy in the Lord.”

In his coverage of the Malta visit John Allen commented that the Vatican’s approach seemed to be “let Benedict be Benedict.” I couldn’t agree more.

In the past few years, I’ve heard some ideas about the sacrament of penance that continue to bother me. The latest resurfacing of the sex abuse scandals within the Church brings to mind these concerns.

When it comes to marital infidelities, many confessors recommend not telling the betrayed spouse. There might be some room for this advice if the spouse is somehow unwell or if the offense is a one-time lapse. But it begs the question of forgiveness and, perhaps more importantly, betrays the marital union with a flawed metaphysics of sin.

Typically, the reasoning goes something along the lines of not wanting to hurt the spouse. But if that were the primary concern, the sin never would have happened in the first place. Arguably, such reasoning simply provides a convenient excuse for impeding transparency.

Our notions of penance and sin have been greatly influenced by the modern notion of privacy. We talk of “private” and “public” sins. When the sin is the bookkeeping at Enron, we consider it public. When it’s sexual, we consider it private because it occurs in the figurative bedroom.

But as Catholics we believe that we are all one in the mystical body of Christ. This union means that all are affected by the actions of a part of the body. Just as an entire human body suffers when part of it is diseased or sick, so too the mystical body of Christ suffers when one member sins.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (n. 1459) reinforces this, explaining that while absolution takes away sin, it does not remedy the disorders caused by the sin.

Sure, the members of the body of Christ may not know the individual sins of one another, but our individual sinfulness impedes our ability to be united in love with God. All sin subtracts from the common good and affects the entire Body of Christ. The sex scandals of the clergy bear this out all too well. Offences that were conducted in secrecy and later confessed in secrecy continue to assail the faithful and undermine the faith of many.

Similarly, marriage requires the mutual gift of self on the part of both spouses. While we certainly are not required to confess to our spouses, there’s an aspect of the union which requires transparency if we really want it to deepen and become more intimate like the marriage between Christ and his Church. None of us is perfect; so the mutual gift of self includes our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, another aspect of “for better or for worse.”

In the case of infidelity, God is offended and so is the spouse. The sacrament of penance covers the relationship between God and the penitent. God forgives in the confessional. But the spouse cannot forgive if never told. Similarly, in the case of sexual abuse, more than the sacrament is needed to right the wrong committed against the victim.

At a penitential liturgy last week, Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn spoke to the harm done by the sex abuse scandals. Condemning the silence imposed by some members of the Church, he thanked the abuse victims for breaking the silence because they are speaking truth, the truth of the harm done to them. He went so far as to say, “When the victims talk, God speaks to us.” While it may be painful for the Church to hear this, the cardinal reminds us that the pain of the victims is far greater.

To my mind, the same flawed understanding of sin and penance that can violate the marital union paves the way for the climate of secrecy that has enabled the abusers of numerous victims of sex abuse within the Church. Simply because a sin occurs secretly and is confessed in private does not mean that it will not have extremely wounding public effects.

Just as a spouse can be publicly humiliated by the other spouse’s infidelity, so the Church continues to be humiliated by the infidelities of some, even a relative few, of her clerics and religious. In both situations, it would have been better to know about offenses sooner rather than later. Trust betrayed has a way of eventually being discovered.

Cardinal Ratzinger took the lead in handling the cases of sex abuse when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, years before he became Pope Benedict. His hard line approach stemmed from his belief that there is no room for such abuse in the Church and that the victims deserve justice. In 2008, during his trip to the U.S., he met privately with a small group of victims. At the time, The Boston Globe, the paper that broke the story on the 2002 sex abuse scandals, described the meeting as “a dramatic move likely to alter forever the image of his pontificate.”

The challenge to the Church is not unlike the challenge to the repentant spouse: now that the sin has been acknowledged, do we honestly want to correct its effects and even strengthen our unity by admitting our flaws and weaknesses? Pope Benedict has given the Church an effective example to follow: one of justice and healing. While the Church in the United States has addressed this issue, the Church as a whole must now face the effects of these particular sins, no matter where and when they occurred.