Leonard Swidler, 77, is a professor of Catholic thought and inter-religious dialogue at Temple University. He once trained for the priesthood and served on the faculty of the University of Tübingen, Germany, with Joseph Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI.

Swidler considers himself a good Catholic. But he does not often go to Mass, he said, because "services around here make me angry," and he has not been to confession in decades.

Among the many traditional sacraments that developed in the Middle Ages, confession had a "sort of semi-magical" status, he said, "where a person would confess his sins to a priest and receive absolution if he performed a prescribed ritual. We don't think that way anymore. ... We don't need to go to a priest to get this quasi-magical spiritual guidance."

Attending Mass every Sunday also used to be seen as a requirement based on fear of eternal damnation, but that fear is largely gone, Swidler said.

"If you didn't go to church on Sunday and you got hit by a truck, you'd go to hell. But that's gone for most Catholics in the Western world.

"What kind of image of God did that give us? If we don't go celebrate him every week, we get thrown in jail? That's a hell of a vision of God; it makes God out to be not much better than Saddam Hussein."

Since Vatican II, he said, "more and more Catholics go to church because it nurtures them. ... They go for positive reasons instead of negative reasons. If the celebration of the Eucharist is relatively lifeless, though, those positive reasons for going shrivel up... . I hear that from the undergraduates I teach. They find going to Catholic Mass pretty much Dullsville."

Paul Nussbaum