David Cahoon does what Jesus did, and Jesus’ earthly father before Him.

He’s a carpenter, and like the Christian figure whose life he has sought to emulate, Cahoon embraces the task of transforming mundane pieces of wood into works of religious glory.

His latest project calls for building a semi-permanent altar for Pope Francis’s visit to the United States next month. The altar — whose design was chosen in a competition between 18 teams of Catholic University students — will be used when the pontiff celebrates a large outdoor Mass on Sept. 23 on the east portico of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Northeast Washington. Then, the altar will be installed inside the basilica.

It is one of 14 pieces Cahoon is building for the pope’s visit. Among other items, Cahoon is also overseeing construction of a papal chair, along with eight smaller matching deacons’ chairs; an ambo, which is a lectern from which the Gospel and other texts are read; and a reliquary stand to be used in a ceremony for Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Franciscan friar who founded missions in California and will be canonized as a saint.

Cahoon, 58, also built an altar for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Washington in 2008. With a little less than a month to go before Pope Francis arrives, the carpenter is on a tight deadline and is reluctant to take a break of any kind.

But Cahoon — soaked in sweat, flecked here and there with fine sawdust, his blue eyes looking a bit bloodshot near the end of the workday — paused from his labors at his workshop in Poolesville, Md., to discuss what he said was one of the most meaningful projects of his life. It is his way of paying homage to Jesus’ life, teachings and — above all — His sacrifice, Cahoon said.

“What did He do with wood, man? You think He did something fantastic with that tree?” Cahoon said, referring to the wooden cross of the crucifixion and throwing his own arms out wide in imitation of Jesus on it. “He’s the greatest of all carpenters, in that sense.”

The altar — which is being fashioned from locally sourced and recycled medium-density fiberboard — echoes the Romanesque-Byzantine style of the basilica.

The winning design for the altar and papal chair — chosen from submissions at Catholic University’s School of Architecture and Planning — was the work of three architecture students: Ariadne Cerritelli of Bethesda; Matthew Hoffman of Pittsburgh; and Joseph Taylor of Eldersburg, Md.

The altar will stand about 40 inches high with a surface made with an 8-by-4-foot stone slab that can be removed to allow the altar to be moved. (Cahoon said the archdiocese looked into the possibility of using stone for the entire altar, but it would have weighed a prohibitive 4,000 pounds.)

To get the best color match, stain will be applied to the wooden portion of the altar inside the basilica.

After the pope celebrates Mass, the altar will be moved inside the basilica’s nave.

On Wednesday, Cahoon was clamping and gluing and fretting that he had a long way to go. All finished, the altar will weigh about 900 pounds.

“I couldn’t have imagined doing anything better than building an altar for the pope,” Cahoon said. “To do it a second time? That’s like lightning striking twice.”

The pope is scheduled to arrive at Joint Base Andrews on Sept. 22. He will also make stops in New York and Philadelphia. Cahoon said he is just as excited for Pope Francis to come as he was for other papal visits; he has no favorites among the popes, he said. He says he believes that God gives the church the right person at the right time. But he also admitted that he was especially cheered by Pope Francis’s recent remarks that were interpreted as a call to fight back against global warming.

“What he was saying was that when we poison creation, we poison ourselves, spiritually. I really thought that was fantastic,” Cahoon said.

Cahoon, also known as Deacon Dave, has loved woodworking since he was a kid. His nickname then was Woody, a play on his middle name, Linwood.

He liked watching carpenters work on the homes going up near his in Rockville. He liked working with something that was once alive and then fashioning it into treehouses, forts and other items. He said he loves wood as a material, loves the way that every board is unique. In college, he studied philosophy, but his hobby snatched his heart.

“It may be a hobby that went nuts,” he said, laughing. “I think it has, at this stage in my life, become a prayer.”

In 1990, Cahoon aligned his day job with his religion. He established St. Joseph’s Carpentry Shop, a business that specializes in building and renovating religious structures. He is fixing the steeple at St. Mary’s Parish and Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Barnesville, Md., where he is assigned as a deacon. He also renovated pews at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square, across from the White House, for President Obama’s inauguration.

“He’s passionate, like I am, about woodworking,” said Doug Fauth, 56, of Monrovia, Md. Fauth, who owns Carriage Hill Cabinet Co. in Frederick, is a kindred spirit: He studied chemical engineering in college but instead chose to be a cabinetmaker because of his love of woodworking. Fauth, who also is Catholic, said he jumped at the chance to work with Cahoon.

“Everybody loves him,” Fauth said. “He’s very personable. He is a deacon and he’s just plain good people. He’s always willing to help you in any kind of situation.”

Cahoon said he has long admired St. Joseph, who was described as an “honest man,” and tried to emulate him. He also liked that Jesus is traditionally cast as a carpenter, or at least a carpenter’s son, who worked with his hands before taking up his religious mission. (The reference is to a Bible passage, Mark 6:3, that calls Jesus a carpenter — and arguably in a condescending way after He astonished members of a synagogue with his teaching of Jewish law. Biblical scholars say the translation of the Greek word in the Gospel — tekton — has a broader meaning of craftsman.)

Cahoon became an ordained deacon in 1991 — a ministry position that, for some, is a stepping stone to the priesthood. Cahoon said he had no such aspirations, but he welcomed the chance to assist the priest by ministering at weddings, funerals and other functions. As he sees it, serving as a deacon is also a way of elevating ordinary duties to the realm of the divine.

“We were made to wait on tables,” Cahoon says, referring to a Bible passage, Acts 6:1-6, that describes the appointment of seven of Jesus’ followers to assist with the apostles’ ministry. “See, that’s where the connection for me is the deepest. If you look at it, they were waiting on tables, but they were waiting at the table of the eucharist, which is an altar. So whenever I get the chance to build an altar — not for the pope, but whenever you have a chance to build an altar — it’s where heaven meets earth.”

Years ago, the Rev. Richard B. Martin, who died May 3 at 74, was searching for a way to make the Lenten season more meaningful for his parishioners in Northern Virginia. Instead of calling on them to give up the simple indulgences often sacrificed during the 40 days of reflection before Easter — chocolate or television shows — he asked for their spare change.

Father Martin settled on 50 cents a day, the amount someone might have spent at that time, in 1998, on a soda or pizza topping. The 2,500 families he served as pastor of Burke’s Catholic Church of the Nativity raised $67,000 by Easter.

Father Martin had developed ties with the Florida-based humanitarian organization Food for the Poor, which sent the money to the needy in Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the developing world. In that first year after the Lenten collection, Food for the Poor built 27 houses.

Father Martin impressed on his parishioners the ongoing need in Haiti and strengthened the bond between his church and Food for the Poor’s outreach efforts there. By the time of his death, he had raised $4 million for housing and access to health care, education and clean water.

To date, the Church of the Nativity has helped finance homes for 1,300 families in eight “Nativity Villages.” The villages are developments that include community centers used for vocational training or as clinics or places of worship.


Father Martin had traveled throughout the Caribbean and Latin America during his decades as a priest and spoke in simple but harrowing ways about Cité Soleil, a slum near Port-au-Prince.


Hundreds of thousands of people there were terrorized by gangs, disease and chaos, he told his congregants. Roofs were made of cardboard, and families lacked electricity and running water.

“They use the creek to urinate and bathe in,” he said, according to a Washington Post account at the time, describing the living conditions he had witnessed.

“It got us all thinking,” parishioner Richard Miserendino told The Post in 1998. “We kept wondering what kind of house you could possibly buy for $2,500, but the fact that people [in Haiti] don’t even have that much really had an impact on our kids. . . . It’s easy to take things for granted, particularly when you live in Fairfax.”

Father Martin dubbed the effort Operation Starfish, a reference to one of his favorite parables.

In the story, a storm has thrown millions of starfish onto a beach. An old man is determined to save the delicate creatures and pitches them, one at a time, back into the sea.

“How can your effort make any difference?” asks a boy who has been watching.


The man tosses another starfish into the water and replies, “It made a difference to that one.”

Officials at Food for the Poor, which trademarked the Starfish name, said Father Martin’s work in Haiti spurred similar programs at more than 300 churches, schools and organizations across the United States.

“Many churches have done it over Easter, but none with the level of success that he inspired in his people,” said Angel Aloma, executive director of Food for the Poor.

“He wasn’t satisfied with just building the stuff,” Aloma added. “He’d go back the next year and help the people by doing another project. If the village needed clean water, he’d help dig a well so the village would not have to send its little girls walking three hours away to find water.”


In all, Aloma said, Father Martin’s efforts benefited many thousands of Haitians.

“They no longer live on dirt floors and no longer get wet when it rains and have to sleep in the mud,” he said. “They have a home, with a door that locks with a key, so parents find it safer to leave their kids with Granny. They leave their home, with its few possessions, to go out and find work.”

Aloma added that Father Martin funded efforts to teach sewing and animal husbandry, among other skills, that would help Haitians “not only come out of poverty, but have the dignity to support themselves, to move them up in the ladder of life. That is a huge thing.”

Richard Bernard Martin was born Oct. 17, 1939, in Providence, R.I., and grew up in Warwick, R.I. He was a 1962 graduate of Providence College and attended St. Francis Seminary in Loretto, Pa., before his ordination in 1966 at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Richmond.

He worked at churches across Northern Virginia before joining Church of the Nativity in 1997. From 1977 to 1981, he was an Air Force chaplain.

Father Martin, a Burke resident, died at a hospital in Fairfax County of complications from diabetes, said Jim McDaniel, the Operation Starfish coordinator at Church of the Nativity. Survivors include a brother and a sister.

In addition to his work in Haiti, Father Martin helped the poor and the marginalized in the Washington area through Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement. His efforts were aimed at promoting affordable housing and work opportunities for immigrants.


The parish motto, Father Martin once wrote in the Church of the Nativity bulletin, was, “We reach out to those in need, across the street and around the world.”

By Michelle Boorstein and Peyton M. Craighill

Most Catholics worldwide disagree with church teachings on divorce, abortion and contraception and are split on whether women and married men should become priests, according to a large new poll released Sunday and commissioned by the U.S. Spanish-language network Univision. On the topic of gay marriage, two-thirds of Catholics polled agree with church leaders.

Overall, however, the poll of more than 12,000 Catholics in 12 countries reveals a church dramatically divided: Between the developing world in Africa and Asia, which hews closely to doctrine on these issues, and Western countries in Europe, North America and parts of Latin America, which strongly support practices that the church teaches are immoral.

The widespread disagreement with Catholic doctrine on abortion and contraception and the hemispheric chasm lay bare the challenge for Pope Francis’s year-old papacy and the unity it has engendered.

Among the findings:

●19 percent of Catholics in the European countries and 30 percent in the Latin American countries surveyed agree with church teaching that divorcees who remarry outside the church should not receive Communion, compared with 75 percent in the most Catholic African countries.

●30 percent of Catholics in the European countries and 36 percent in the United States agree with the church ban on female priests, compared with 80 percent in Africa and 76 percent in the Philippines, the country with the largest Catholic population in Asia.

●40 percent of Catholics in the United States oppose gay marriage, compared with 99 percent in Africa.

The poll, which was done by Bendixen & Amandi International for Univision, did not include Catholics everywhere. It focused on 12 countries across the continents with some of the world’s largest Catholic populations. The countries are home to more than six of 10 Catholics globally.

“This is a balancing act. They have to hold together two increasingly divergent constituencies. The church has lost its ability to dictate what people do,” said Ronald Inglehart, founding president of the World Values Survey, an ongoing global research project.

“Right now, the less-developed world is staying true to the old world values, but it’s gradually eroding even there. [Pope Francis] doesn’t want to lose the legitimacy of the more educated people,” he added.

After his election to the papacy 11 months ago, Francis seemed to immediately grasp the significance of the divisions among the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. He has chosen inclusive language, has played down the importance of following the hierarchy and has warned against the church locking itself up “in small-minded rules.” The poll reflects previous ones in finding that the vast majority of Catholics appreciate his approach.

Other faiths have seen many fissures over similar questions about doctrine, including Protestant denominations and Judaism.

Pope Francis appears particularly eager to engage with divisions around sex, marriage and gender and has called a rare “extraordinary synod” this fall on “The Pastoral Challenges of the Family.” For that, he has asked bishops to survey Catholics about their views of cohabitation, same-sex parenting and contraception, among other things.

Areas of similarity

Of the seven questions pollsters asked about hot-button issues, there appeared to be the greatest global agreement on contraception (opposing church teachings) and gay marriage (supporting the church’s stance).

Seventy-eight percent of Catholics across all countries surveyed support the use of contraceptives, which violate the church’s teaching that sex should always be had with an openness toward procreation. The church teaches natural family planning, which Catholics can use to plan sex and attempt to avoid getting pregnant.

More than 90 percent of Catholics in Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Spain and France support the use of contraception. Those less inclined to support it were in the Philippines (68 percent), Congo (44 percent) and Uganda (43 percent). In the United States, 79 percent of Catholics support using contraception.

Debate in the church over reproductive technologies is nothing new, said Jose Casanova, a leading sociologist of religion at Georgetown University. He noted that a papal commission in the 1960s recommended approving the use of birth control pills (it was later rejected) and said dramatic recent medical advances have challenged theologians.

“If you accommodate contraception, does that mean you’d allow abortion? How do you distinguish which aspects of teaching go together? Bioethics is a new frontier that forces moral thinkers and ethicists to constantly ask: What is humanity?”

Catholics have been intensely divided over the centuries over other issues, he said, from whether it was all right to evangelize native peoples to how the church could accumulate wealth while holding up the value of poverty.

However, the disagreements around sex and pregnancy have built to “a crisis in the church with women,” Casanova said. The church can neither accept “the radical secularization of sexuality” — or the idea that sex has nothing to do with religion — nor can it continue insisting on practices that are being completely ignored. “Unless they face it, the church will be in trouble.”

The poll also showed 66 percent of Catholics opposing same-sex marriage, with majorities in eight of the 12 countries surveyed agreeing with church doctrine.

The poll suggests that in his first year, Pope Francis has proved apt at navigating this diverse flock. Eighty-seven percent of Catholics around the world said the Argentine pastor is doing an excellent (41 percent) or good (46 percent) job. Catholics in Mexico were least likely to approve of his performance, at 70 percent.

Areas of disagreement

The poll showed stark divisions among Catholics over church teachings on abortion, divorce and remarriage. Catholics who don’t get an annulment or who marry again outside a Catholic Church setting aren’t eligible for Communion and are considered not in unity with the faith.

Overall, 65 percent of Catholics said abortions should be allowed: 8 percent in all cases and 57 percent in some, such as when the mother’s life is in danger. But the highest support for abortion rights is in European countries, then in Brazil and Argentina, then in the United States, where 76 percent of Catholics said it should be allowed in some or all cases. In the Philippines, 27 percent of Catholics said abortion should be allowed under certain circumstances. In Uganda, 35 percent said so.

Catholics are most evenly split over the question of whether women and married men should be priests. The dividing line, again, falls on hemispheric lines, with those in Africa and Asia more traditional and others less so.

What’s distinctive today, Catholic theologian Lawrence Cunningham said, isn’t that there are disagreements but that they center on similar topics.

“Even if you look in the North American church of my youth, Polish Catholics and Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics weren’t focused on the same issues. They had their own views on family,” Cunningham said. “I don’t think [today] it’s an issue of disagreement. It’s more: ‘Whoa, we’re finding a lot of people from across the Catholic world talking about the same kinds of issues and we better face up to them.’ ”

U.S. and Latin America

Catholics in fast-developing Latin America fit somewhere in the middle, but not neatly. Thirty-nine percent of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America and the Caribbean, the biggest share in any region of the world. But Latin American Catholics’ relationship with the institutional church varies depending on many factors, including whether their government has been intertwined with church officials and whether evangelical Protestants have made recent inroads.

In the United States, Catholics are divided on some issues, including gay marriage (54 percent support it; 40 percent oppose it). Compared with Catholics worldwide, they are more liberal than Africa, Asia and some parts of Latin America but not as liberal as Spain. The poll mirrored ones that show U.S. Catholics support married priests, female priests, abortion and contraception.

Since the liberalizing and divisive Second Vatican Council, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II appeared to approach the gap with an explicit plan: Narrow it. They emphasized doctrine and called for institutions that wanted to call themselves Catholic to follow the rules. Benedict prompted a lot of debate by saying and writing that a period of shrinkage seemed inevitable if the church was to stick to its teachings.

Francis seeks feedback

So what is Pope Francis’s plan, if he has one?

Critics say his solicitation of opinions wrongly gives the appearance that Catholicism is a democracy. Others — including the authors of this poll — say there’s no evidence that he would touch doctrine and is seeking a deeper understanding of why so many Catholics reject church teachings so as to better market them.

Casanova said it’s not clear what Francis plans to do with the research, but the approach “fits with his idea of the church going out into the world and encountering the world as it is, not expecting the world to come to it.”

Any change would be a complex undertaking, as Catholics are going in many directions, he said. He noted that Catholics in Brazil, the most populous Catholic country, widely reject some core church teachings but are seeing a surge in men becoming priests for the first time in decades. Filipino Catholics, he said, support church teachings on some social issues but have a powerfully charismatic faith that isn’t focused on being in step with church leaders.

The church “may be in a period of moral evolution,” he said. “It’s not about seeing where the wind blows, but which are signs of God and which are simply fashion? This is a very difficult theological enterprise, kind of a new way of trying to understand the situation of the church in the world.”

It's been over a year since the Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, submitted his resignation letter—mandatory when princes of the Catholic Church turn 75—to then- Pope Benedict XVI. In a highly unusual turn of events, Benedict was the one who resigned. That left Cardinal George—whose intellectual vigor is matched by a forceful defense of the church—still on the job.

Some wish he weren't. In late July, eight Illinois state lawmakers signed an open letter criticizing Cardinal George, among others, for threatening to end the church's financial support for a rights group. The church had cited the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, because the group came out for the legalization of same-sex marriage in May. The politicians—all Catholic Democrats—said the threat of a funding withdrawal was "not worthy of the church we know, love and respect." They said Cardinal George and others were using "immigrants and those who seek to help them as pawns in a political battle."

But the decision had nothing to do with politics. The church doles out money to organizations on the assumption that they will not violate church teachings. If a church-funded environmental group announced its support for abortion, for instance, it could lose funding. In supporting marriage equality for immigrants, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights clearly broke an orthodoxy compact with the church.

In response to the politicians and other critics, Cardinal George—never one to mince words—took to the pages of the archdiocese's newspaper, the Catholic New World, to respond. "It is intellectually and morally dishonest to use the witness of the church's concern for the poor as an excuse to attack the church's teaching on the nature of marriage," he wrote in an August column. He reminded the politicians that "the church is no one's private club," adding that in a few years they would "stand before this same Christ to give an account of their stewardship.

"Jesus is merciful," the cardinal warned. "But he is not stupid."

This isn't the first time Cardinal George's gloves have come off. In the church's ongoing battle with the administration over part of ObamaCare, Cardinal Timothy Dolan has been among the most visible critics. As president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, he has articulated the religious-freedom issue raised by the insistence of the Department of Health and Human Services that the church provide insurance that covers contraception for all its employees, in violation of church teachings.

But it was Cardinal George who was the most blunt. In a February video interview with the Catholic News Service, he criticized the Obama administration for behaving "as if a right to free contraception were now a constitutional right" that presumes to supersede "the genuinely constitutional right of freedom of religion." In this, Cardinal George announced, the church "will simply not cooperate." In the same vein, he predicted in the Catholic New World in November 2012 that "the greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making 'laws' beyond its competence."

The issue of competence came up in a different way when I interviewed the cardinal in 2011 and asked whether bishops are the best authority on policy issues. I pointed out that he has urged his flock to "support and promote the passage of the Dream Act and the eventual goal of the passage of compassionate comprehensive immigration reform legislation." When I asked him whether he ought to be so vocal about these things, the cardinal smiled. "The bishop has authority to teach," he said, lowering his head to peer directly at me over his eyeglasses: "And he has authority to teach you."

Cardinal George's newspaper column often reads now like a battle plan against government overreach. He recently decried how "this tendency for the government to claim for itself authority over all areas of human experience flows from the secularization of our culture. If God cannot be part of public life, then the state itself plays God."

The cardinal takes a particularly grim view of what this intrusion by government could mean for church and state relations. More than once he has warned for dramatic effect that, "I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square."

Death is an important motivator for Cardinal George's thinking these days—and not just because of his age. He is also recovering from a second bout with cancer.

But Pope Francis has so far not replaced him, leaving the Archbishop of Chicago to lead his fractious flock in this world while he considers the mystery of what comes next. Clearly, he has decided not to leave important things left unsaid.

Mr. Hahn is the editor of RealClearReligion.org.

Catholics Need a Pope for the 'New Evangelization'

The next pontiff must nurture Catholicism where it is growing and revive it where it is not.

By GEORGE WEIGEL

The challenges facing the successor of Pope Benedict XVI come into sharper focus when we widen the historical lens through which we view this papal transition. Benedict XVI will be the last pope to have participated in the Second Vatican Council, the most important Catholic event since the 16th century. An ecclesiastical era is ending. What was its character, and to what future has Benedict XVI led Catholicism?

Vatican II, which met from 1962 to 1965, accelerated a process of deep reform in the Catholic Church that began in 1878 when the newly elected Pope Leo XIII made the historic decision to quietly bury the rejectionist stand his predecessors had adopted toward cultural and political modernity and to explore the possibilities of a critical Catholic engagement with the contemporary world. That reform process, which was not without difficulties, reached a high point of ecclesiastical drama at Vatican II, which has now been given an authoritative interpretation by two men of genius, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both influential figures at the Council. According to that interpretation, the church must rediscover and embrace its vocation as a missionary enterprise.

Evangelical Catholicism—or what John Paul II and Benedict XVI dubbed the "New Evangelization"—is the new form of the Catholic Church being born today. The church is now being challenged to understand that it doesn't just have a mission, as if "mission" were one of a dozen things the church does. The church is a mission. At the center of that mission is the proclamation of the Gospel and the offer of friendship with Jesus Christ. Everyone and everything in the church must be measured by mission-effectiveness. And at the forefront of that mission—which now takes place in increasingly hostile cultural circumstances—is the pope, who embodies the Catholic proposal to the world in a unique way.

So at this hinge moment, when the door is closing on the Counter-Reformation church in which every Catholic over 50 was raised, and as the door opens to the evangelical Catholicism of the future, what are the challenges facing the new pope?

Catholicism is dying in its historic heartland, Europe. The new pope must fan the frail flames of renewal that are present in European Catholicism. But he must also challenge Euro-Catholics to understand that only a robust, unapologetic proclamation of the Gospel can meet the challenge of a Christophobic public culture that increasingly regards biblical morality as irrational bigotry.

The new pope must be a vigorous defender of religious freedom throughout the world. Catholicism is under assault by the forces of jihadist Islam in a band of confrontation that runs across the globe from the west coast of Senegal to the eastern islands of Indonesia.

Christian communities in the Holy Land are under constant, often violent, pressure. In the West, religious freedom is being reduced to a mere "freedom of worship," with results like the ObamaCare Health and Human Services contraceptive mandate.

Thus the new pope must be a champion of religious freedom for all, insisting with John Paul II and Benedict XVI that there can be neither true freedom nor true democracy without religious freedom in full. That means the right of both individuals of conscience and religious communities to live their lives according to their most deeply held convictions, and the right to bring those convictions into public life without civil penalty or cultural ostracism.

This defense of religious freedom will be one string in the bow of the new pope's responsibility to nurture the rapidly growing Catholic communities in Africa, calling them to a new maturity of faith. It should also frame the new pope's approach to the People's Republic of China, where persecution of Christians is widespread. When China finally opens itself fully to the world, it will be the greatest field of Christian mission since the Europeans came to the Western Hemisphere. Like his two immediate predecessors, the new pope should recognize that the church's future mission in China will be imperiled by any premature deal-making with the Chinese Communist regime, which would also involve an evangelical betrayal of those Chinese Christians who are making daily sacrifices for fidelity to Jesus Christ.

The ambient public culture of the West will demand that the new pope embrace some form of Catholic Lite. But that counsel of cultural conformism will have to reckon with two hard facts: Wherever Catholic Lite has been embraced in the past 40 years, as in Western Europe, the church has withered and is now dying. The liveliest parts of the Catholic world, within the United States and elsewhere, are those that have embraced the Catholic symphony of truth in full. In responding to demands that he change the unchangeable, however, the new pope will have to demonstrate that every time the Catholic Church says "No" to something—such as abortion or same-sex marriage—that "No" is based on a prior "Yes" to the truths about human dignity the church learns from the Gospel and from reason.

And that suggests a final challenge for Gregory XVII, Leo XIV, John XXIV, Clement XV, or whoever the new pope turns out to be: He must help an increasingly deracinated world—in which there may be your truth and my truth, but nothing recognizable as the truth—rediscover the linkage between faith and reason, between Jerusalem and Athens, two of the pillars of Western civilization. When those two pillars crumble, the third pillar—Rome, the Western commitment to the rule of law—crumbles as well. And the result is what Benedict XVI aptly styled the dictatorship of relativism.

What kind of man can meet these challenges? A radically converted Christian disciple who believes that Jesus Christ really is the answer to the question that is every human life. An experienced pastor with the courage to be Catholic and the winsomeness to make robust orthodoxy exciting. A leader who is not afraid to straighten out the disastrous condition of the Roman Curia, so that the Vatican bureaucracy becomes an instrument of the New Evangelization, not an impediment to it.

The shoes of the fisherman are large shoes to fill.

Mr. Weigel is the author of "Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church," just published by Basic Books.

A version of this article appeared February 13, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Catholics Need a Pope for the 'New Evangelization'.

The Cleric Behind 'Les Mis' Author Victor Hugo was anticlerical, yet his tale's hero is set on course by a Catholic bishop.

By DORIS DONNELLY

Fans of "Les Misérables" on film or stage may be surprised to know that not everyone in France was of good cheer when Victor Hugo published the book in 1862. The anticlerical set was especially offended by the pivotal role of the Bishop of Digne, who helped determine the course of the novel by resuscitating the soul of Jean Valjean.

As Hugo worked on the novel, his son Charles, then in his 20s, objected to the reverential treatment of the bishop. He argued to his father that the portrayal gave undeserved respect to a corrupt clergy, bestowing credibility on a Roman Catholic Church opposed to the democratic ideals that he and his father held. Charles instead proposed that the catalyst for Jean Valjean's transformation be a lawyer or doctor or anyone else from a secular profession.

The pushback didn't work. Not only did Hugo hold his ground, but he amplified the importance of Charles-François Bienvenue Myriel, affectionately known in the novel as Monseigneur Bienvenue (Bishop Welcome). The book's first hundred pages or so are a detailed chronicle of Myriel's exemplary life, showing that his intervention on behalf of Jean Valjean was part of a long track record and not a singular aberration. Apparently Hugo recognized no contradiction between his anticlericalism and the possibility—or certainty—that grace could be mediated by a just priest who was transparent to the divine and never betrayed the human.

  Thirty years earlier, Hugo had solidified his anticlerical credentials by crafting the repulsive, licentious Archdeacon Claude Frollo in "Notre Dame de Paris." It was time to try a new approach in "Les Misérables," so he rendered an ideal priest against whom clergy could measure their fidelity to tenderness and mercy. His expectation—as we know from the contemporaneous diary of his wife, Adele—was that corrupt priests would be shamed and indicted by comparison with a good one.

With Bienvenue, Hugo created a no-frills bishop who lived in a modest cottage, having surrendered his episcopal palace to the hospital next door. There were no locks on the doors; a simple push of the latch allowed entry.

The bishop subsisted on less than one-tenth of his state entitlements, with the remaining funds dispensed to provide for the release of fathers in debtors' prisons, meat for the soup of people in the hospital, and other unpopular charities. He had a sliding scale to officiate at marriages and preside at funerals. From the rich he exacted more, from the poor nothing at all.

Fearless, Bienvenue rode into territories overrun by bandits to visit his people. Without complaint, he assumed responsibilities that lazy curates chose not to. He agonized over the guillotine, and having accompanied a prisoner to his execution he was certain—as was Hugo himself—that anyone witnessing the death penalty would declare it a barbaric act unworthy of a civilized society.

The cleric in Hugo's novel was without the entourage nurtured by other bishops. There were no opportunistic seminarians eager to latch onto his coattails and ride into the corridors of power. It was clear to everyone that his star wasn't in ascendance. Bienvenue mused about seminaries that bred sycophants, where ambition was mistaken for vocation and upward mobility—from a modest biretta to a bishop's mitre to a pope's tiara—was the prized trajectory.

The greatest fear of young priest recruits, Hugo explains, was that merely associating with the virtuous Bienvenue could unwittingly cause one to convert to his lifestyle. It was widely known that virtue was contagious and no inoculation against it existed.

The trade-off for Bienvenue was that he was loved by his people. They had a bishop whose center of gravity was a compassionate God attuned to the sound of suffering, never repelled by deformities of body or soul, who occupied himself by dispensing balm and dressing wounds wherever he found them.

He found them in a town called Digne, a name conveniently derived from the Latin dignus, the root of the word we know in English as "dignity." Bishop Bienvenue conferred dignity with abandon on those whose dignity was robbed by others. He had an endless supply of his own to share and a lot of practice when Jean Valjean knocked on his door.

During the night he spent at the bishop's home, mere days after his release from serving 19 years as galley prisoner 24601, Jean Valjean stole six silver place settings, was apprehended, and returned the next morning under police guard to face the consequences of his crime. Unruffled, the bishop brushed off the police, added valuable silver candlesticks to the bundle, "bought" Jean Valjean's soul from evil and claimed it for God. He redirected the life of a man chained to hatred, mistrust and anger, and he enabled Jean Valjean to emerge as one of the noblest characters in literature.

Ms. Donnelly is professor of theology and director of the Cardinal Suenens Center at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

A version of this article appeared January 4, 2013, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Cleric Behind 'Les Mis'.

By Hamil R. Harris

For nearly 50 years, Robert B. Grogan has ignored howling winds and frigid temperatures to climb hundreds of steps up into the tower of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and manually play, with his fists and his feet, 56 carillon bells, as he will do after Tuesday’s noon choral Mass for Christmas.

Whether it has been to celebrate the arrivals of Pope John Paul or Pope Benedict, or to remember the 26 children and adults who died Dec. 14 in the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., or to entertain the faithful arriving Monday on Christmas Eve for midnight Mass, Grogan has never missed a major event as the basilica’s carillonneur.

There are other bells in the tower that can be played electronically from below, but not the bronze carillons.

“You can’t play with your fingers on the carillon keyboard because the bell action is too heavy,” said Grogan, 73, a resident of Silver Spring, who donned an overcoat Monday as he climbed 208 steps up a spiral staircase to the “playing cabin.” He’s been making the winding ascent since 1964.

For 34 years, he was also the organist at the basilica, but he retired from that post in 2008. (He still plays organ at Masses during the week and teaches organ in the music department at Catholic University.)

“What I do is rather unique, and I enjoy it for its musical and spiritual interest,” said Grogan, explaining that an hour of “really athletic” music on the carillons can be draining.

“When I say I am a carillonneur, most people might think that it is an electronic instrument with loudspeakers in the tower, but what you have here is very physical,” Grogan said. “To chime the bells requires sounds made from a wooden keyboard with levers for the hands and feet, and the loudest of the sound depends on how hard I strike the lever.”

There are two chambers for the carillons, one at 172 feet and the other at 223 feet above the ground. Grogan’s frigid playing cabin sits at 200 feet. To get there, he must take an elevator to the sixth floor of the bell tower, walk up a ladder and climb through a trap door before he even reaches the spiral staircase.

The largest of the carillons, called the Virgin Mary, weighs 31 / 2 tons. The basilica’s carillons were cast in Annecy, France, shortly before they were installed in 1963. For carillon aficionados, the basilica’s French bells sound different from the National Cathedral’s English carillons and Arlington National Cemetery’s Dutch set.

Grogan, who learned how to play the bells as a music major at the University of Kansas, can certainly hear the difference. He’s stayed at the basilica all these years because he loves the bells, and he enjoys the variety of his other musical vocations, be it playing organ now for weekday Masses or teaching organ at the university.

There’s a familiarity to the Christmas season, and yet there are events he can never anticipate. Grogan fought back tears last week after he sounded the 31 / 2-ton Virgin Mary 26 times for the children and adults killed in Newtown. “As a grandfather with seven grandchildren,” Grogan said, “I thought about what an ordeal these people went through, and this horrible event.”

Tuesday’s Christmas carols will be joyous — and not too difficult. With his overcoat on, he’ll hardly break a sweat.