For God's sake, let's tell the truth

Archbishop John Foley was speaking to an audience of Catholic communications officers and editors, so he made sure that he didn't bury his most important statement.

The first principle of dealing with the news media, he told a Vatican conference in 2001, was simple: "Never, never, never tell a lie." Then the president of the Pontifical Office for Social Communications offered more advice that would prove to be prophetic.

"Truth will always come out," he said. "Failure to tell the truth is a scandal, a betrayal of trust and a destroyer of credibility. ... So sacred is the responsibility to tell the truth that one must be ready to accept dismissal for refusal to tell a lie."

Principles of openness and honesty were tested as never before during 2002 as another wave of scandal hit the Catholic Church. In the end, members of the Religion Newswriters Association selected the clergy sexual abuse scandal as the year's most important news event. Four of the poll's top five stories were linked to the scandal and Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston was named newsmaker of the year.

The RNA occasionally offers a dubious prize – its "Into the Darkness Award" – to the group that has done the most to hide information from the media and the public. This year, it was awarded to the American Catholic hierarchy.

"The institutional church is slowly learning that evasion and stonewalling and spin are not in its best interests," said Father Donald Cozzens, author of "Sacred Silence: Denial and the Crisis in the Church."

"After all that has happened during this year, isn't it obvious that telling the truth is the best way to serve our people? It's the best way to protect our children. It's the best way to restore trust and regain our role as moral leaders. At some point we simply have to say, 'For God's sake, let's tell the truth.' "

Here are the top 10 stories in the RNA poll:

(1) For the third time in two decades, clergy sexual abuse shakes Catholicism. At the heart of this scandal are new revelations that many bishops have moved priests alleged to have abused minors from parish to parish without warning legal authorities and the faithful. Some bishops apparently have approved secret settlements to avoid disclosure.

(2) Cardinal Law resigns after rising protests by clergy and laity over his handling of abusive priests. Reports increase that the Boston archdiocese is considering bankruptcy, as the number of lawsuits climbs over 400. Sexual scandals claim several other bishops, including the liberal Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland.

(3) Controversy erupts as some evangelical s openly criticize Islamic doctrine, often quoting the testimonies of Muslims who have converted to Christianity. The Bush White House tries to keep its distance, as Franklin Graham says Islam is an "evil and wicked religion" and Southern Baptist leader Jerry Vines calls Muhammad a "demon-possessed pedophile."

(4) U.S. Catholic bishops listen to the stories of abuse victims and then pass a "one strike and you're out policy" against any priest who has abused a child. Five months later, the policy approved in Dallas is changed – on orders from the Vatican – to include church tribunals to hear the cases of priests who proclaim their innocence.

(5) The growing clergy sexual abuse scandal fuels the creation of new networks of Catholic laity, including the Voice of the Faithful, which draws 5,000 to a convention in Boston. The Vatican faces waves of protests from outraged Catholic conservatives as well as liberals. Support groups for victims surge with each new round of media coverage.

(6) In yet another church-state cliffhanger, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of programs that use government-funded vouchers to allow children to attend religious schools.

(7) A Circuit Court of Appeals judge in San Francisco causes a firestorm by ruling unconstitutional the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. The judge soon stays his own ruling to allow for an appeal.

(8) The National Council of Churches and other bodies on the religious left express their opposition to a U.S. invasion of Iraq. American Catholic bishops and a coalition of progressive evangelicals express similar concerns, asking if "just war theory" allows a preemptive strike.

(9) Palestinian gunmen take refuge in the Catholic and Orthodox sanctuaries of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, leading to a 39-day siege by Israeli forces. Suicide bombers and military actions continue throughout Israel and the West Bank.

(10) Scholars announce the discovery of a stone burial box bearing the words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." Is this a 2,000-year-old archaeological breakthrough or a hoax?

Merry tropical Christmas

At first light, the little ones would sneak out of bed to look for telltale signs of night visitors bearing gifts.

Cookies and milk? Most children in these Hispanic homes gathered hay or fresh grass before sundown and left it with water in clear sight. Camels get hungry and thirsty, you know, especially when traveling long distances on tropical nights.

Members of these families would have exchanged a few gifts on Dec. 25, at the Feast of the Nativity. As the decades passed in Florida, they may even have added a visit from St. Nicholas. But they would have visited neighbors for caroling and parties during the entire 12-day Christmas season.

Everyone knew that the traditional day for gift-giving was El Dia de los Reyes Magos, which marked the arrival of the three kings from the East with gold, frankincense and myrrh for the Christ child.

Christmas wasn't over until Jan. 6, when the camels ate the hay.

"There's no question that – along with the weather – religious traditions played an important role, if not the most important role, in shaping Christmas down here up until World War II," said Kevin McCarthy, an English professor at the University of Florida.

"That was before air-conditioning and mosquito control opened the state up to the whole world. Combine that with interstate highways and everything changed – forever. Christmas down here started looking like Christmas everywhere else."

Stop and think about it. Most of the world celebrates Christmas in the tropics or during what is summer in the Southern Hemisphere. But when most people dream of a "merry little Christmas" they imagine tastes, smells and sights from frosty winter festivities in Europe and North America.

So it's hard to imagine palm trees and Christmas, unless they are in sacred images of shepherds, sheep, camels and kings near Bethlehem.

But McCarthy was able to find hints of what a tropical Christmas was like before the spread of shopping malls that resemble fake versions of New England villages swaddled in blankets of snow. The result was a breezy volume of history, tales, recipes and photos entitled, logically enough, "Christmas in Florida."

For generations, the Christmas season had a uniquely Catholic flavor in the tropics. In Florida, Christmas began in 1539 when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto and his soldiers gathered with 12 priests for Mass at a site in what is now Tallahassee. These were, said McCarthy, the first Catholic Christmas rites in North America.

Meanwhile, several Southern states embraced Christmas long before the holiday was accepted up north.

"New England Protestants, especially the Puritans, had Christmas banned in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1659," McCarthy noted. "The most Southern state of all ... was Florida, a land settled by Spanish Catholics and therefore more willing to celebrate the nativity of Christ."

In addition to religious traditions, another simple reality shaped Christmas in the American tropics. Settlements were small and remote. Most early Floridians were poor and they learned to celebrate with whatever they found around them.

They didn't have fine meat so they made do with local fare, no matter how humble. In the 1870s, an early settler near Hypoluxo was forced to improvise a main course for his neighbors. He settled on a feast of possum, "which he had fattened on sweet potatoes for over a month," noted McCarthy.

Settlers in the tropics didn't have snow, so Santa Claus arrived by boat. This led to a beautiful tropical tradition – decorating boats with strings of lights and then parading them along the coast at night. A few people even decided that Christmas trees looked especially beautiful under water.

One thing led to another. Christmas was Christmas.

"They didn't have Christmas ornaments, so they used seashells, sand dollars, starfish or driftwood," said McCarthy. "They used native scrub pines, since that was all they had. They couldn't have a Christmas that looked like New England, so they improvised. They came up with Christmas traditions that made sense where they were. ...

"But the forces of homogenization have been a work for a long time now – TV, movies, advertising. A lot of beautiful things, a lot of beautiful traditions have been lost down here."

Tolkien, creation & sin

NEW YORK – Screenwriter Philippa Boyens gets a tired look in her eyes when she recalls the surgery required to turn "The Lord of the Rings" into a movie, even a sprawling trilogy of three-hour movies.

"It's so hard," she said. "It's hard, it's hard, oh God, it's hard."

One agonizing cut in the screenplay removed a glimpse of the myth behind J.R.R. Tolkien's 500,000-word epic. In this lost scene, the traitor Saruman is torturing the noble Gandalf. "What," asks the evil wizard, "is the greatest power?" Gandalf replies, "Life."

"You fool," says Saruman. "Life can be destroyed. Did I teach you nothing?"

Trying again, Gandalf says, "Creation."

"Yes," answers Saruman, "the power to create life."

Millions of readers and now moviegoers have seen "The Lord of the Rings" as an epic tale of good versus evil.

Many have tried to pin labels on each side. The dark lord Sauron and his minions represent Nazi Germany and the armies of Middle Earth are England and its allies. Wait, said scribes in the 1960s. The forces of evil were industrialists who wanted to enslave Tolkien's peaceful, tree-hugging elves and Hobbits. The dark lord's "One Ring to rule them all" was the atomic bomb, or nuclear power, or something else nasty and modern.

The reality is more complex than that, said Boyens, after a press screening of "The Two Towers." Director Peter Jackson's second "Lord of the Rings" reaches theaters on Dec. 18.

"This is not a story about good versus evil," she said. "It's about that goodness and that evilness that is in all of us."

Anyone who studies Tolkien, she said, quickly learns that the Oxford don rejected allegorical interpretations of his work.

Nevertheless, Tolkien was a devout Catholic and his goal was to create a true myth that offered the modern world another chance to understand the timeless roots of sin. Thus, even his darkest characters have mixed motives or have been shaped by past choices between good and evil. Even his virtuous heroes wrestle with temptations to do evil or to do good for the wrong reasons.

The dark lord Sauron, noted Boyens, "was your basic fallen angel. If you go back even further within this mythology, you have a world that begins with Iluvatar, who is the One, who is basically God."

Iluvatar created the world through music, noted Boyens. But one angel, Melkor, was "jealous of the power of creation" and struck a note of discord, shattering the harmony. Yet Iluvatar did not destroy his creation. Instead, he gave his creatures the freedom to make choices between darkness and light, between evil and mercy.

It is hard to put this level of complexity on a movie screen. Nevertheless, Boyens and Jackson stressed that the "Lord of the Rings" team tried to leave the foundations of Tolkien's myth intact. The ultimate war between good and evil is inside the human heart.

"We didn't make it as a spiritual film, but here is what we did do," said Jackson, who is a co-writer and co-producer as well as the director of the project. "Tolkien was a very religious man. But we made a decision a long time ago that we would never knowingly put any of our own baggage into these films. ...

"What we tried to do was honor the things that were important to Tolkien, but without really emphasizing one thing over another. We didn't want to make it a religious film. But he was very religious and some of the messages and some of the themes are based on his beliefs."

The goal is to retain the timeless quality of the books, said Jackson.

Most of the filming for this three-movie project was done before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, he noted. The director had no way to know his movies would reach theaters during such tense times. Once again, many want to match headlines with events in Tolkien's masterwork.

"You sort of get the impression – which can be depressing – that Tolkien's themes really resonate today and that they're probably going to resonate in 50 years and then in 100 years," said Jackson. "I don't think humans are capable of actually pulling themselves out of these basic ruts."

A priest keeps his collar

Father Mark Pearson can see trouble coming as he walks the sidewalks of Boston.

He can see some faces harden after people make eye contact and then see his clerical collar. Some look away in disgust. A few men deliberately switch to a collision course. Pearson said one or two angry pedestrians have spat on him.

"If someone is upset, they may find a way to bump into you or give you a shove," he said. "Then they say sometime like, 'Oh excuse me, FATHER. Hey, did you molest anybody today, FATHER.' ...

"I try to just say something simple like, 'God bless you anyway, my friend.' "

Pearson is not a Roman Catholic priest, but other Bostonians don't know that. He is a veteran Anglican renewal leader who is now a canon theologian in a global body called the Charismatic Episcopal Church. Nevertheless, he still wears clerical clothing as he goes about his life and work. He also encourages other clergy in his church – many of whom are former evangelical or Pentecostal pastors – to do the same.

This latest round of Catholic sex-abuse scandals have caused Pearson to reflect on what it means to be visually labeled as a priest.

The tensions in his hometown are unbelievable, he said. Ordinarily, Boston is the kind of place where police may call for priests to help break up fights. Now the mighty Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston is considering filing for bankruptcy due to its mounting legal woes. And in the pews, devout Catholics are experiencing shock and grief. Others have crossed over into fury.

Pearson tries to remember this when hit with an icy stare or a sharp elbow.

"Some people are jerks," he said. "Right now they're being a jerk about this. Next week they'll be a jerk about something else. But you never know when you are dealing with someone who is truly in spiritual pain, someone who has experienced abuse or who has a loved one who was abused."

Innocent priests are in pain, too. They feel like they have targets pinned on their black jackets. Some priests – in Boston and elsewhere – have reportedly stopped wearing their distinctive clerical garb much of the time.

Pearson is convinced this is a tragic loss, both for the priests and the communities they serve. A clerical collar is more than a symbol, he said. It is a sign that God is present in the gritty and numbing realities of daily life.

"There are still many people who need to see someone is available and 'on duty' for them," wrote Pearson, in a Charismatic Episcopal Church newsletter. "While the general mood ... has changed, there are still people who come up to me for a word of comfort or for prayer.

"I'll risk the abuse of some in order to be available to people in need."

The Protestant pastor Pearson knew as a child always blended into a crowd, with his standardized "brown suit, white shirt and brown tie with blue blobs on it." This pastor was dressed for work, but only the members of his flock knew who he was.

Wearing a clerical collar is different, for better and for worse.

Some people are offended and some are encouraged. But everyone knows a priest is in their midst, said Pearson. It is sad that some Catholic priests are even considering leaving their clerical clothing at home. They are hiding from the needy.

A few months ago, Pearson said he visited a "very Italian Catholic parish" in Boston's north end. In the foyer, a troubled man rushed up and asked when was the next time for confessions. Pearson looked around and did not see a priest in the empty sanctuary. So he borrowed a confession booth.

Afterwards, the parish priest approached – wearing a simple blue sports shirt – and thanked Pearson for hearing the man's confession.

"That troubled soul didn't know to approach this other priest, because he couldn't see that he was a priest," said Pearson. "But I was wearing a uniform that said, 'I am a priest. Approach me. That is what I am here for. Approach me.' That is what wearing that clerical collar is all about."