“We implore forgiveness for those who have abused in various ways,” Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, said during the rite at the Church of St. Ignatius.

“This evil is within us and severely tarnishes our testimony,” he admitted, and said church leaders have at times “become an instrument of evil” toward those they were charged to protect.

The ceremony was organized as part of a Vatican-sponsored conference at Rome’s Gregorian University to help bishops meet a May deadline to craft voluntary “guidelines” to improve the church’s handling of abuse cases.

Representatives of six groups who were in various ways involved in sexual abuse — including the head of a religious order, a teacher and a priest — apologized to Mary Collins, an abuse victim from Ireland who served as a representative of all abuse victims.

At the end of the service, Collins asked God for the “strength” to forgive, so that the church “may be healed.”

The vigil started with 15 minutes of silence as the church was shrouded in darkness, and ended with the lighting of candles held by the participants. Earlier in the day, Collins told conference participants of her personal experience of abuse.

“Those fingers that would abuse my body the night before were the next morning holding and offering me the sacred host,” she said of the priest who abused her when she was 13.

She also recalled the “collapse” of her confidence in church authorities, as the archbishop she had confided her story to focused on trying to protect the “good name” of the priest, and refused to suspend him from ministry.

During the conference, Monsignor Stephen J. Rossetti, a professor at Catholic University of America and the former director of a Maryland treatment center for troubled priests, told bishops that predator priests usually lie when confronted with an accusation.

By contrast, he said, abuse victims usually tell the truth when they recount their ordeal. Rossetti also warned that abuser priests are not easily cured and need constant monitoring, and that returning them to ministry is almost impossible.

“Once a priest has sexually molested a minor,” he said, “he forever loses his privilege of ministering as a priest.”

Given that birth control use is almost universal – even among Catholics – many wonder why the Obama administration could wind up retreating on its pledge.

Here are five reasons that may help explain the political dynamic the president is facing:

1. It’s about religious freedom, not birth control: U.S. Catholic bishops, who led the battle against the Health and Human Services Department mandate, know that they long ago lost their own flock on the contraception issue — 98 percent of Catholics use birth control, according to surveys. So they have carefully reframed the issue as a fight for religious freedom – an effort to keep the government from forcing the Catholic Church and other religious groups to subsidize something that goes against their teachings. That makes it a violation of conscience, a sacred principle that transcends any specific tenet of faith.

That argument also lends itself to the kind of heated rhetoric that plays well in today’s supercharged political atmosphere. For example, bishops and their allies are accusing the president of “anti-Catholicism” and worse: “The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To hell with you!’ ” Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik said after the HHS regulations were announced.

The bishops don’t have as much credibility with the laity as they used to, thanks to the clergy sex abuse scandal, among other things. But Catholics are still a potent tribe, and if outsiders are seen as attacking the church, Catholics can get defensive – and they can get even.

2. Obama has lost even the support of his liberal Catholic allies: Case in point: the HHS mandate has been opposed by liberal and centrist Catholics who have supported the administration on a range of other issues — including the Catholic Health Association and the NETWORK social justice lobby — and even went to bat to help pass health care reform despite threats from the bishops.

The president “utterly botched” the religious exemptions issue, wrote Washington Post columnist and liberal Catholic E.J. Dionne, and “Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus.”

“J’accuse!” Michael Sean Winters, a columnist for the liberal National Catholic Reporter, wrote in a florid column that channeled Émile Zola’s famous 1898 letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus affair. “The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again.”

3. It’s not just Catholics: Even though evangelicals and other conservative Protestants generally don’t have religious objections to contraception, they do have a big problem with “big government” and with perceived infringements on religious freedom. Evangelicals – both their leaders and their troops – have never been big Barack Obama supporters anyway, so they were happy to provide any electoral and rhetorical muscle the Catholic hierarchy could not muster.

“We do not exaggerate when we say that this is the greatest threat to religious freedom in our lifetime,” evangelical leaders Timothy George and Chuck Colson wrote in an open letter to their fellow believers on Wednesday (Feb. 8). George and Colson compared the administration mandates to policies enacted in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.

4. It gives Republicans a potent campaign wedge issue: Mitt Romney wasted no time in accusing Obama of launching an “assault on religion” by way of the contraception mandate, and he declared that his first act as president would be to overturn the HHS regulations. “Remarkably, under this president’s administration, there is an assault on religion, an assault on the conviction and the religious beliefs of members of our society,” Romney said.

Romney’s rivals, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, were not to be outdone, and ramped up their rhetoric against Obama – while also noting that Romney had accepted similar policies while he was governor of Massachusetts.

In short, this is a political fight that the White House neither wants nor needs in an already tough re-election campaign.

5. Obama needs the Catholic vote: In particular, he needs the support of white Catholics, which is the core of this large swing vote (nearly one-quarter of the electorate). They are concentrated in crucial battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and while Obama won the overall Catholic vote 54 percent to 46 percent in 2008, he lost the white Catholic vote, 47 percent to 53 percent.

“To the extent Catholic voters think of this as a religious liberty issue, it does have the potential to pull Catholic voters toward Republicans or away from Democrats,” John Green, an expert on religious voting patterns and director of the University of Akron’s Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, told Bloomberg Businessweek.

A poll on the contraception mandate released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute showed Catholics overall tended to support free contraceptive coverage, but white Catholics were evenly split on the issue. The Obama campaign can’t afford to sacrifice any of those votes, or risk watching the issue grow as a political liability when the election season heats up.

Now Warren is finding a new purpose: tackling his outsized waistline.

Warren, 58, says the revelation came about a year ago, during a marathon baptism session of about 800 people at Saddleback Church.

As he struggled to submerge members of his flock in the baptismal pool one by one, he realized his parishioners were heavy and that he, too, was fat, setting a terrible example.

Warren says his gradual weight gain — about two to three pounds a year — has added up over his 30 years as a pastor. To lose the extra pounds and inspire others to do the same, the former football player enlisted the help of three doctors.

Warren recruited a family physician, Dr. Mark Hyman; Dr. Mehmet Oz, New York Times best-selling author and host of NBC’s “The Dr. Oz Show”; and Dr. Daniel Amen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, and the lone Christian in the mix.

Together they launched “The Daniel Plan: God’s Prescription for Your Health,” named after a passage in the biblical Book of Daniel where the prophet and fellow Israelites refuse to accept “royal” food and wine from the Babylonian king, opting for water and simple vegetables instead.

The Daniel Plan encourages parishioners to link into Saddleback’s vast network of small Bible study groups as support systems to get fit. Congregants exercise together at weekly classes such as “Walk & Worship” and “Pump & Praise.” The three doctors offer tips on healthy eating and participants can create a health profile online.

Since the launch of the plan a year ago, more than 15,000 people have signed up and participants have shed a combined total of at least 250,000 pounds, according to the church. The 6-foot-3 Warren, who started the program at 295 pounds, shed 60 pounds in the first year.

Amen, a Saddleback member, said “churches are by and large a place of illness.”

“I’m tired of fat football coaches and fat pastors,” Amen said.

The advantage of losing weight in a church, he said, is the support of the built-in community. “When you’re surrounded by other people who have the same values, and they have the same health habits, you’re going to do so much better,” he said.

Tammie Allen, 41, a mother of two and a Saddleback parishioner, joined the Daniel Plan with other members of her Monday night Bible study group.

“You can’t do it alone, and you can’t do it without God’s power,” said Allen, who started exercising with other Saddleback parishioners and chose more fruits and vegetables. So far, she’s dropped 97 pounds.

“My daughter tells me all the time she loves being able to put her arms around me.”

Jim and Melanie Black, who just celebrated their 11-year anniversary, joined the program together and have dropped their taste for fast food. They say the motivation behind the change is noteworthy — it’s not for vanity’s sake.

“We’re doing it so we can serve God at a higher level,” said Jim Black.

Chiquita Seals, 45, a single mother of two, is so far the church’s biggest loser.

“In the beginning I thought, ‘This is just another diet program,’” she said. Seals said she assumed she was “going to be eating rabbit food.”

After all, Seals said, she had tried other diet programs like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, but this is the only one that stuck. When she began the Daniel Plan she weighed 267 pounds. She now weighs 135.

“All my life I thought that I could never be used by God,” Seals confessed in a video posted on the church’s website. But after losing the pounds, “I know I can be used by God.”

To be sure, the program has attracted scrutiny. The church posted an online response to those who questioned the use of non-Christian doctors to help lead the program, saying that members “will never compromise our belief that Jesus is the only way to heaven or that the Bible is the 100 percent completely infallible and perfect Word of God.”

“These doctors are helping us as friends,” the statement concludes. “But are in no way advising our church on spiritual matters.”

For his part, Warren still hopes to drop another 30 pounds. And, in typical Warren fashion, he’s spreading his message to other churches. The bottom line, Amen said, is those looking to lose weight are in luck.

“If for whatever reason your family won’t do it with you,” he said, “well, you now have the family of Saddleback.”

Prop 8 supporters immediately announced plans to appeal Tuesday’s (Feb. 7) 2-1 ruling to a larger panel of the 9th Circuit and, ultimately, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“No court should presume to redefine marriage. No court should undercut the democratic process by taking the power to preserve marriage out of the hands of the people,” said Brian Raum, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing an umbrella group of Prop 8 supporters known as ProtectMarriage.com.

The appeals court’s decision upheld a 2010 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, saying that “although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently.

“There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted.”

The Prop 8 amendment to the state Constitution was approved by 52 percent of California voters in 2008, just five months after the state Supreme Court ruled that a state ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.  An estimated 18,000 same-sex couples tied the knot before Prop 8 was passed.

The court also found no evidence that Walker was biased in his initial ruling because he was gay and in a committed relationship. The court did, however, side with Walker in maintaining a stay on all same-sex marriage ceremonies until the case is decided.

Prop 8 supporters, led by the National Organization for Marriage, immediately tried to use the decision as a plea for fresh funding.

“This sets up an all-or-nothing showdown at the United States Supreme Court,” NOM said in an email blast just minutes after the decision was announced.

“But the costs of litigating a Supreme Court case will run into the millions of dollars over the next year. We must have the resources to put on the best possible defense.”

Prop 8 opponents, however, including the Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said “no American’s right to marry should be subjected to a veto from aggressive and well-funded religious groups. Our nation is a democracy, not a theocracy.”

Cardinal William J. Levada, a former archbishop of San Francisco who now heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with jurisdiction over abuse cases, stopped short, however, of requiring bishops to report abuse cases to prosecutors or police.

Speaking to a Vatican-sponsored conference on the church’s response to the scandal at Rome’s Gregorian University, Levada admitted that the church’s relations with civil authorities “may be different from one nation to another,” but stressed that this must not affect the basic principle of cooperation.

He also urged bishops to be “more proactive” in their response to the crisis, rather than wait for the scandal to erupt in the media.

Last May, the Vatican gave all bishops conferences around the world one year to draft voluntary “guidelines” on preventing abuse, caring for victims, disciplining abusive priests, and reporting suspected abuse to local police.

An estimated 4,000 cases of sexual abuse by clergy have been reported to Levada’s Vatican department during the last 10 years, he said.

Levada also highlighted the importance of listening to victims’ grievances, accompanying them “on the often long path of healing,” and encouraging them to follow the example of Pope Benedict XVI in meeting with victims.

In a message sent to the conference participants, Benedict wrote that victims healing must be of “paramount concern” for the church. The Chicago-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests dismissed the conference as “window dressing” that will not result in real reform.

“We have two sets of Indians. One section of the people is racing ahead while the majority are limping,” Gracias said. Meeting in Bangalore, the assembly runs from 1-8 February and is being attended by 170 bishops.

Gracias, who is also archbishop of Mumbai, said the challenge before the Indian church is to be “conscience keepers to the nation,” quoting American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. and he urged his colleagues to “make a difference in the life of the marginalized.”

Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, reiterated the concern over the wealth gap in India in an address on 2 February.

Quoting U.N. figures, Turkson pointed out that despite India emerging as the fourth largest economy in the world, nearly 35 per cent of the Indian population lives on less than US$1.00 a day.

Turkson, who is from Ghana, noted that 80 percent of the Indian population, more than 800 million people, are surviving on less than US$2.00 a day.

“Our ability to transcend ourselves and to anchor onto Christian values of love and service of our neighbours is the pre-eminent way to social development in India,” recommended the Vatican official.

T. K. Oommen, a prominent sociologist in India, challenged the gathering to examine “on whose sides are we — on the side of the flourishing few or the sinking many?”

Though churches in India are known for their dedicated service in the field of education and healthcare, Oommen said they should also conduct a critical assessment of the number of poor students and beneficiaries in some of the elite Christian institutions.

A statement issued on Saturday (Feb. 4) by the current and past leaders of the Vatican’s Governorate, which oversees the management of Vatican City, has dismissed claims made by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano as “erroneous,” “unfounded” and “based on groundless fears.”

Vigano, who had been secretary general of the Governorate from 2009 until his appointment as papal nuncio to Washington last October, expressed his worries directly to Pope Benedict XVI in two letters unearthed by an Italian TV program in January.

Vigano told the pope that Vatican City’s management was “disastrous,” and asked Benedict to not transfer him to Washington. The move, he said, would cause “disarray and discouragement” among those who worked against “numerous situations of corruption and waste.”

The Vatican’s top spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, had initially threatened to sue the TV program that revealed the letters and dismissed its coverage as “biased.” Lombardi also reaffirmed the pope’s “unquestionable respect and trust” towards Vigano.

Saturday’s statement strikes a different chord, however, saying that Vigano’s assertions portray the Vatican’s Governorate as an “untrustworthy entity, controlled by dark forces.”

The statement was signed by Vigano’s former superior, Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, and by Giovanni’s deputy, Bishop Giorgio Corbellini, and by the Governorate’s current president and secretary general.

The Advertising Standards Authority, the independent regulator of advertising in all British media, ruled that the ads generated by the group Healing on the Streets are irresponsible and misleading.

The ASA, whose tight rules are considered among the world’s most stringent, cites a leaflet produced by the group from its center in the spa town of Bath, England, claiming that God “can heal you from any sickness.”

Among illnesses that can be cured with divine help, it said, are “ulcers, depression, allergies, fibromyalgia, asthma, paralysis, phobias, sleeping disorders or any other sickness.”

The ASA told the BBC that someone had complained about the group’s leaflets and website, and the panel had “concluded that (the ads) could encourage false hope and were irresponsible.”

In a statement, the healing group said “it seems very odd to us that the ASA wants to prevent us from stating on our website the basic Christian belief that God can heal illness.”

The group added that it had tried to reach a compromise with the advertising panel, “but there are certain things that we cannot agree to, including a ban on expressing our beliefs.”

For more information, the group said, “see the Bible.”

According to the BBC, the Healing the Streets ministry was launched seven years ago in Northern Ireland and its tenets have been taken up by scores of churches throughout Britain.

Now those deviations have led to his resignation in an incident that may be tied to global changes to the Catholic liturgy.

On Jan. 29, instead of saying “Lord our God that we may honor you with all our mind and love everyone in truth of heart,” during the opening prayer, he altered the phrasing to better reflect the day’s Gospel message, in which Jesus heals a man with a troubled spirit.

“We thank you, God, for giving us Jesus who helped us to be healed in mind and heart and proclaim his love to others,” the 72-year-old priest prayed instead.

Three days later, Rowe received a letter from Bishop Edward Braxton of Belleville, Ill., accepting his resignation.

“The problem is that when I pray at Mass, I tend to change the words that are written in the book to match what I was talking about, or what a song is about,” Rowe said in an interview.

The book in question is the Roman Missal, a book of prayers, chants and responses used during the Mass. Rowe has been saying some of those prayers in his own words for years.

But last December, the Vatican-mandated adoption of a new English-language translation of the missal may have given bishops an opportunity to rein in freewheeling priests who have been praying in their own words for decades.

“Since December when the new translation came out, no one has said what would happen to you if you changed stuff,” said the Rev. John Foley, director of the Center for Liturgy at St. Louis University.

“But I find it hard to believe a priest in Illinois would be forced to resign because he wasn’t using the exact words from the translation. It’s not a strong enough offense for that.”

In the wake of sweeping changes in the church as a result of the Second Vatican Council, some priests in the 1970s began using their own words and phrasing in place of the verbatim translations of the original Latin liturgy in the missal, Foley said. He said there has never been an established penalty for improvising nonalterable prayers, and bishops have traditionally looked past an individual priest’s extemporizing.

Monsignor Kevin Irwin, professor of liturgical studies at the Catholic University of America, said there are some prayers said by a priest at Mass in which he is “beholden to the structure, not to the words.”

But there are also prayers that priests are “duty-bound to say,” said the Rev. John Baldovin, professor of historical and liturgical theology at Boston College. Most of the prayers in the missal, in fact, are not optional, he said.

Rowe said his previous bishop, Wilton Gregory, had discussed his off-the-cuff prayer habit with him, referring to the practice as “pushing the envelope.” He said five years ago, Braxton also discussed the matter with him, and asked him to read directly from the missal.

“I told him I couldn’t do that,” Rowe said. “That’s how I pray.”

Last summer, Rowe said, the bishop made it clear to his priests that “no priest may deviate from any wording in the official missal.”

Braxton did not respond to a request for an interview with the Post-Dispatch.

In October, two months ahead of the introduction of the new missal translation, Braxton said he couldn’t permit Rowe to continue improvising, according to Rowe. The priest offered his resignation but didn’t receive a response.

On Monday, Braxton wrote Rowe a letter informing him that he’d accepted his resignation.

The action did not sit well with the nearly 500 families at St. Mary’s.

“The ways Father changed the Mass ritual with his words have only made it more meaningful to us as opposed to distancing us from the church,” said Alice Wirth, principal at St. Mary’s School.

“Everything he does is based on our faith; it’s not just a whim. There’s a reason for every word he prays.”

(Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in St. Louis.)