Priests

The monks of St. Michael's Abbey lead a cloistered life. Rising early, they gather at 5:45 a.m. to sing Gregorian chants in Latin. Later they eat a modest lunch in silence. And after evening prayers, the white-robed priests observe silence until bedtime. "It's an ancient thing," says Father Vincent Gilmore, the abbey's spiritual director who, like the other priests there, lives under a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience. "We've come together to live a common religious life; it's countercultural.

KAMPALA, Uganda - He is a celebrity across eastern and central Africa, a gospel music star known to many as the "Dancing Priest. " But for years he also was a keeper of painful secrets - his own and many others'. In going public, Anthony Musaala has forced the Roman Catholic Church in Uganda to confront a problem it had insisted didn't exist. And he may stir a debate far beyond Africa's most Catholic of countries. The Ugandan priest has been suspended indefinitely by the archbishop of Kampala for exposing what he calls an open secret: Sex abuse in the Catholic Church is a problem in Africa as well as in Western Europe and North America.

A scandal-weary Catholic cleric tells me he thinks twice about going out in public wearing the black collar. A disgusted Catholic university graduate calls to say he's short-arming the donation basket on Sunday at his Northridge parish, "because I refuse to pay the cost of silence." A ticked-off Catholic school teacher e-mails me this query: "If the Los Angeles Archdiocese can afford payouts of MILLIONS of dollars to people who've been sexually abused by priests, why can't they pay me a DECENT SALARY?

Much of what we know about past civilizations in Mexico comes from the writings of colonial Europeans -- Spanish conquerors and priests -- who arrived in the Americas in the 1500s. But archaeological evidence from recent excavations at a site called El Palenque in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, shows that temple precincts similar to the ones the Europeans encountered had existed in the region some 1,500 years earlier. Married archaeologists Elsa Redmond and Charles Spencer, both of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, reported the discoveries Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .  Redmond and Spencer have been studying the remains of ancient civilizations in Oaxaca since the 1970s, when both were undergraduates at Rice University.

Father Jerome Tupa is not a missionary, but he understands the urgency of a mission. As a Benedictine monk at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., he belongs to a Catholic order that emphasizes prayer and work within a religious community. During an artistic pilgrimage to all of California's 21 missions, he began to appreciate the work of his long-ago fellow traveler, Father Junipero Serra, the Franciscan who launched the building of these churches, starting in 1769.

Dennis Mongrain swings his surfboard around in the water, points himself toward shore and starts paddling. As the wave lifts his board, he jumps to his feet and begins to skirt across its smooth, arching surface. His face brightens with a broad smile. It's a moment of joy and peace, something akin to a religious experience for Mongrain, who should know about such things because he is a Roman Catholic priest. "I really look forward to getting out there," Mongrain said at the rectory of St.

Any examination of the sexual abuse crisis afflicting the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles leads inevitably to a bell-towered campus in the rolling hills of Camarillo: St. John's Seminary. The 66-year-old institution has trained hundreds of clerics for the archdiocese and smaller jurisdictions across Southern California and beyond. It is the alma mater of Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, Diocese of Orange Bishop Tod Brown and other prominent prelates.

A framed photo of the happy couple on their wedding day stands on a living room table, the bride in a traditional white gown, the groom in a tux. They live in a cozy house with a white picket fence, flowers and a big dog. The wife serves coffee and cheerfully disappears.

The first time I arrived in Patmos, I was actually leaving. At noon, I had boarded a ferry in Piraeus for a 12-hour sail to small, hilly Patmos, one of the Dodecanese, or Greek islands. I watched from the stern as we glided away from the Athens port city across a calm sea, dodging hulks of rusty and dismantled old wrecks. I would be working on a book and staying at the Monastery of St. John the Theologian, which would later become a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On this voyage, I shared a cabin with a likable young Saudi named Shurief.

I had to look twice at the date on the newspaper to make sure I wasn't having a time-warp moment. I'd heard this before. In a way, I'd covered this before. My colleagues Ashley Powers, Victoria Kim and Harriet Ryan have dropped a doozy on Southern California with their story of memos recounting how, a decade and a half before the scandal emerged about Roman Catholic priests' sexual abuse of young people, future Cardinal Roger Mahony and an advisor planned to hide these molestations from law enforcement, going so far as to move the suspect priests out of California.

Twenty years ago, veteran caver Chris Nicola received an offer from a Ukrainian friend to explore the well-known gypsum giant caves in the western part of the European country. Nicola quickly accepted the invitation. "My family on my mother's side had Cossack roots and they were known to come from the Ukraine," the New Yorker said over the phone this week. "I thought in the back of my mind I could do some family research. " But his main reason was to visit the 77-mile long Priest's Grotto cave, which is part of an extensive gypsum cave system.

Many American Roman Catholics would like to see their church change. In mid-March, the Pew Research Center delivered this poll : 76% of U.S. Catholics countenance birth control; 59% want women as priests; 64% think priests should be allowed to marry. We've been assured by Vatican watchers of all stripes that America's liberal Catholics are probably going to be disappointed in Pope Francis; the new pontiff, wrote John Allen in the National Catholic Reporter, is "unquestionably orthodox.

DUBLIN, Ireland - As the shopkeepers in this capital city readied for St. Patrick's Day under typically intermittent rainy skies, Father Sean McDonagh's attention was on the new pope's agenda. The Columban priest, whose order has a long tradition of missionary work, has been an outspoken critic of Vatican policies. With Pope Francis' honeymoon period underway he, like many, is waiting to see what issues will be at the center of the new papal agenda. McDonagh, 69, believes Francis needs to go green, making environmentalism the No. 1 priority for the Catholic Church.

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican on Friday denied that Pope Francis acquiesced to Argentina's brutal military regime in the 1970s and '80s, saying the accusations are part of a "defamatory” campaign. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was elected pope on Wednesday, has been accused in some quarters of failing to protect two Jesuit priests who challenged the country's regime, leading to their kidnapping and torture by military officials in 1976. Those claims were made a decade ago but have received renewed attention since Bergoglio was appointed the leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, the first Latin American to occupy St. Peter's chair.

BUENOS AIRES - The man who is now Pope Francis was a young Jesuit leader, not long out of seminary, when Argentina's military junta unleashed a reign of terror that became known as the "dirty war. " That was more than 30 years ago, but the reaction to the naming of the first Argentine pope shows that the wounds have not yet healed. Many Argentines were still stunned Thursday that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, had become the first pope from the Americas.

Roman Catholic cardinals chose Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope Wednesday, selecting the Argentine Jesuit to succeed Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned Feb. 28, and lead 1.2 billion church followers around the globe. He was chosen after five rounds of voting in the Sistine Chapel. Bergoglio, who chose the papal name Francis I, is the first Jesuit pope and has spent nearly his entire career in Argentina, overseeing churches and shoe-leather priests. The Associated Press described him as a modernizer who has lived austerely.

CHENNAI, India - Kesavan's father and grandfather were caretakers who sold candles and performed basic rituals at their local makeshift temple attended by fellow Dalits, or members of the so-called untouchable caste. In India, these structures are omnipresent around sacred trees, on sidewalks, abutting overpasses. So when the government of southern India's Tamil Nadu state offered to train Hindus as priests regardless of their caste - a calling traditionally limited to upper-caste Brahmins - he leaped at the opportunity.

In a well-lit gym, the two men in white and gold robes sat on folding chairs, struggling to control their emotions. The Catholic faithful - grandmothers, fathers, members of a youth ministry - surged forward, offering tributes. "We will never forget you," parishioner Hieu Hoang said. "To us, you are like our own father. You will always be with us. " "Please don't forget us," another added. The sudden removal of two Vietnamese American priests at the largest parish serving Little Saigon has left the congregation at St. Barbara's confused and angry.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay nearly $10 million to four men who say they were molested by one of the region's most notorious pedophile priests. The agreement brings to an end four lawsuits against the archdiocese involving Michael Baker, a charismatic parish priest accused of molesting at least 23 boys over three decades. The church has settled numerous cases brought by Baker's alleged victims in the past, but the $9.9-million settlement announced Tuesday is the first settlement since the January release of 12,000 pages of internal archdiocese records about abuse.

Re "Mahony defends action on abuse," March 6 Many religions promulgate beliefs that strain credulity. The Roman Catholic Church, however, has recently raised the bar to unbelievable heights. Accept that a merciful God would bar use of contraceptives by families whose natural fecundity condemns them to lives of crushing poverty. Deny that priests constrained by a vow of celibacy might be inclined to sexual misconduct. Deny that the church's hierarchy might not act swiftly and resolutely to protect future victims of pedophile priests.