Can one be both Catholic and feminist? Many of us these days are asking the question, sometimes with considerable anguish. The real question, however, is why is this a question at all. Why do so many of us see the relations between Catholicism and feminists as problematic?

Philip Jenkins, the author of "The Next Christianity" in the October Atlantic, argues that most Americans and Europeans are blind to Christianity's real future.

It is a dramatic sign of the rampaging secularization of North American and European life during the past half-century that a book like "The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice" by Philip Jenkins, has come about.

The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.

This is a brief presented on April 29th, 2003 before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, Canada. Margaret Somerville is Samuel Gale Professor of Law and Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University's Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law.

Over the past twenty years, HIV/AIDS prevention programs have centered on the large-scale distribution of condoms. These have been combined with safe sex propaganda campaigns aimed at convincing the public that putting a layer of latex between sexual partners can guarantee protection against infection by the HIV/AIDS virus.

From these women and men comes the really bad news for the feminist movement: The overwhelming majority of American women perceive feminism as irrelevant. In their view, feminism is not talking about the women's issues that most concern them and it is not writing a compelling story about women's lives. Worse, it is not writing a convincing story about our world.

How times have changed. The latest Gallup poll, which measured Americans' views on "morally acceptable" and "morally wrong" conduct, indicates that support for assisted suicide is ebbing.

The American media, usually painstaking in their efforts to offend members of no racial, religious or gender category, consistently make one major exception the Roman Catholic Church. So argues Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religion at Penn State and an Episcopalian, in his new book "The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice".

Is there a priest shortage? What is being done to address shortages where they occur? What can be done to increase the number of candidates for ordination?