Religious Services

A jubilant sea of captivated immigrants embraced Pope John Paul II with thunderous acclaim Wednesday as the red-robed pontiff crowned his pastoral visit to Los Angeles with the festive pageantry of a Dodger Stadium Mass.

Nearly half a century ago Time magazine famously asked: Is God Dead? The verdict is in. God is definitely not dead — the United States remains a highly religious nation — but God has diversified, and in ways the cheeky headline writers of 1966 couldn't have imagined. We're a spiritually promiscuous nation, increasingly so, and while this is, on balance, a good thing, it also poses certain dangers. It's one thing to explore different faiths, and something else entirely to hop aimlessly from one to another, bolting for the door when the going gets tough.

The prayer in Spanish sounded like one from an ordinary Catholic Mass. But the man who led it wore a coyote-skin headdress and called himself the last of 13 generations of brujos -- witch doctors -- in his family. FOR THE RECORD: Santa Muerte: An article in Monday's Section A about followers of the sect of Santa Muerte misspelled the last name of Rick Nahmias, a photographer who has documented the movement, as Nahmais. — The name the worshipers invoked was not that of the Virgin Mary but of Santa Muerte, or "Holy Death," a Mexican folk saint linked to narcotics trafficking, a kind of female grim reaper with a skull for a face.

Penny Puckett came to Slab City and fell in love. After four years of "bumming around and hopping freight trains," the 25-year-old from Kansas City arrived at this hardscrabble section of the Imperial Valley desert and immediately embraced its sense of liberation from society's rules and norms. What others might view as desolation and deprivation, Puckett saw as a way to reduce life to its essence: water, food and shelter (plus Internet and cellular phone service). PHOTOS: Slab City "Slab City people have a great need to live with just the bare necessities and are happy about it," she said.

As 500 mourners faced a row of caskets at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, seven members of a family of Armenian immigrants were buried Friday while the eighth was in a county jail cell on charges of murdering them. Six times the names of the dead were spoken in Armenian and English as a part of the funeral service. And six times a wave of sobbing rolled through the cemetery's Hall of Liberty as the roll call of grief progressed.

During a solemn 10 a.m. Mass at St. John's Cathedral on Sunday, Deacon Lester Mackenzie recited the names and ages of six Americans who had lost their lives in Iraq the previous week. Pray for them, he told the congregation, and for prisoners of war and those missing in action. Then Mackenzie, who is being ordained today as an Episcopal priest, called on parishioners "to pray for the Iraqi people who have died, whose names we do not know." St.

People of the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu and other faiths plan to pray together Dec. 1 at the Holy Family Cathedral in Orange to observe World AIDS Day. "The spiritual needs of people living with AIDS are various," said organizer George Raab of Laguna Beach. "This is the [religious] community's effort to be there for them, and people with AIDS need to know that."

Average weekly attendance at U.S. worship services has risen from 100 million to 107 million in the 12 months since a national "Invite a Friend" program was launched by Religion in American Life, the group says. Nicholas B. van Dyck, president of RIAL, said the figure represented projections of findings in Gallup polls showing weekly attendance up to 43% of the population, from 40%.

The spectacular sand dunes here at Stovepipe Wells provide Richard Beatty with a most unusual pulpit. Beatty, 51, is a student minister for A Christian Ministry in the National Parks, a chaplaincy corps that has operated in national parks for four decades. Since 1952, more than 12,000 student ministers have conducted religious services for millions of visitors to the national parks and thousands of National Park Service employees. Beatty is one of about 300 preachers expected to serve this year.

Presbyterians in Hollywood bowed their heads and prayed for peace. With hands raised to heaven, Catholics in Boyle Heights invoked God's name in fighting for the rights of imprisoned youths. And Jewish leaders in the San Fernando Valley meditated on an end to racism. From pews and pulpits across Southern California this weekend, pastors, rabbis, priests and congregations of virtually all faiths directed their prayers and sermons to Democrats in Los Angeles for their national convention.

The word "consubstantial" does not roll naturally off the modern American tongue. It's one of those $5 words with Latin roots that tend to make the speaker sound pretentious or, if he trips over it, like a pretentious idiot. Come Sunday, though, consubstantial will become part of the lexicon, at least for the tens of millions of Americans who worship in the Roman Catholic Church. For the first time since 1969, the Catholic Mass in the United States is undergoing significant change, rephrasing some of the best-known prayers in the English language.

A Sunday service at a historic church in eastern Turkey underscored both the desire for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and the hurdles that remain nearly a century after a violent massacre of Armenians. It was the first service held in the 1,100-year-old Armenian Church of the Holy Cross since 1915, when a wave of violence nearly destroyed one of the largest Christian communities in the Middle East. Many Armenians in the diaspora and the neighboring republic of Armenia boycotted and denounced Sunday's service on Akdamar Island after Turkish authorities did not allow a cross to be raised on the dome of the church.

The idyllic sounds of rustling leaves and cascading snowmelt mixed with Scripture readings Saturday morning during a pre-Easter service held in a shady Angeles National Forest glen overlooking the east fork of the San Gabriel River. About 35 worshipers from throughout Southern California had gathered by the river to break bread, pray and show support for an ongoing campaign to bolster federal protections for the San Gabriel Mountains. The service was organized by San Gabriel Mountains Forever, a coalition of environmental and community groups including the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club and Friends of the River.

The recession and a lack of adequate donor support have led to this year's cancellation of the popular Hollywood Bowl Easter Sunrise Service, organizers said Thursday. "It's terribly heartbreaking," said Trina Herrmann-Boychenko, president of the group that organizes the annual service. "It's the economy, and our donors are unable to . . . contribute as before." The Hollywood Bowl Easter Sunrise Service, which presents the nondenominational Easter celebration, is a nonprofit group that relies on financial assistance from corporations and the public.

Thousands of years after Moses led his people out of Egypt, the Passover story is going digital. At Monday's Seder meal, dozens of families will be reading the traditional tableside ceremony from a Haggadah, a text guiding the Seder, that they have personalized by uploading family photos to replace stock illustrations of Pharaoh and the slaves. Behrman House, a Jewish educational publisher in Springfield, N.J., has sold more than 100 sets of the cyber-assisted version of its Family Haggadah.

The Rev. Mary E. Haddad found it bizarre one recent Sunday to be telling the congregation at All Saints' Church in Beverly Hills to not bother showing up the morning of March 21. "Remember the Sabbath and keep it aerobic," the interim rector said. Officials of the Episcopal church had decided to cancel all four morning services on the day of the Los Angeles Marathon and hold one 6 p.m. service instead. "In 18 years of professional church work, I've never known anything to close church on a Sunday morning," Haddad said, adding that the decision speaks to L.A.'s automobile culture.

It was a Passover Seder with a difference. There was the usual array of matzo, hard-boiled eggs and horseradish. Several times during the service, the celebrants, mostly children and their parents, rose and sat in accordance with custom. And, as always, they sang song after song about freedom. Yet there was something unusual about this recent gathering at a clubhouse in early observance of the 3,000-year-old holiday commemorating events surrounding the Jewish exodus from Egypt.

About 2,000 people in a half-empty church Sunday applauded Jimmy Swaggart's scheduled return to the pulpit next month despite the defrocked evangelist being without ministerial credentials. Swaggart, banished from the Assemblies of God on Friday for refusing to abide by a yearlong suspension because of his "moral failure" involving a prostitute, did not address the congregants. He instead led them in a rousing gospel song, "Hallelujah, I'm Walking With the King." A visiting minister, the Rev.

Pope Benedict XVI tumbled to the marble floor of St. Peter's Basilica on Thursday night after a woman tackled him on his way to preside over Christmas Eve Mass. Benedict lost his gold-trimmed miter and staff when the woman grabbed the front of his robe and pulled him to the floor. He was not harmed, quickly recovered and was able to go ahead with the Mass. Spectators and the pope's security personnel, however, were startled, with gasps audible as black-suited guards shoved aside acolytes to reach the fallen pontiff.

The prayer in Spanish sounded like one from an ordinary Catholic Mass. But the man who led it wore a coyote-skin headdress and called himself the last of 13 generations of brujos -- witch doctors -- in his family. FOR THE RECORD: Santa Muerte: An article in Monday's Section A about followers of the sect of Santa Muerte misspelled the last name of Rick Nahmias, a photographer who has documented the movement, as Nahmais. — The name the worshipers invoked was not that of the Virgin Mary but of Santa Muerte, or "Holy Death," a Mexican folk saint linked to narcotics trafficking, a kind of female grim reaper with a skull for a face.