Catholics in America is a new four-hour series for national public television that explores both the history and contemporary experience of America through the eyes of its largest faith group, an ethnically and politically diverse people who call themselves Catholic .

Produced in high definition television format, the series offers the best in contemporary scholarship with a narrative storytelling style that is objective, balanced and highly entertaining.

Catholics in America is a story of a people who for centuries have felt pulled between faithfulness to Rome and allegiance to the great experiment called the United States. The tension is as strong today as it was when the first Catholics arrived from Europe. And yet a distinctive kind of American Catholicism has taken root here.

"There are 60 million Catholics in America today," says Newsweek religion editor Ken Woodward, "and the notion that they all think the same or act the same is pretty much gone."

Catholics in America has all the elements of the American epic. It is the story of the California missions, Ellis Island and Notre Dame football. It's Mother Jones and the American labor movement; President Kennedy and Camelot; and the thousands of religious women who dedicated their lives to building the largest private school system the world has ever seen. It's Bing Crosby's Going My Way on the silver screen and Bishop Sheen's Life is Worth Living competing with "Uncle Miltie" on prime time television. It's the Alamo, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. It's Babe Ruth, The Godfather and the cultural backdrop exploited by Madonna, the Material Girl. It's civil rights marches in Selma, "Catholics Need Not Apply" and Why Do Catholics Do That?

Those 60 million Catholics in America today are a diverse and highly individualistic group for which the word "Catholic" itself can have different meanings. For some, being Catholic is what defines them and gives meaning to their lives. For others, it merely recalls nostalgic images of school children in uniforms and nuns in habits. For still others, it recalls deep hurt, even anger, over their personal experiences with the church.

On the conservative side there are Catholics United for the Faith and, for those who feel mistreated by the media, The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. In the more liberal realms, gay Catholics are joining Dignity while those who want to see women priests have formed the Women's Ordination Conference. Even the issue of abortion divides many Catholics. All of this is part of the story of Catholics in America.

While the history of the American Catholic experience is filled with real-life drama, the story today is no less compelling. Century-old churches in inner city Detroit are being closed, while in Los Angeles Sunday Mass is celebrated in 38 different languages. Some local parishes, once run exclusively by male priests, today find women at the helm. And parochial schools, once providing education exclusively to Catholic students, today often find the majority of their students are non-Catholic. A Black Catholic tradition that began long before emancipation is thriving today, while Native Americans converted centuries ago by Catholic missionaries perform contemporary liturgical rites that blend Roman tradition with indigenous cultures.

Catholics in America is an important page in the American family album. It is a rare opportunity for America to see its Catholic citizens in a new light, to take stock of their contributions to the American experience. It also offers a chance for each viewer to grapple with the fundamental questions of religion and citizenship that face him or her as a participant in a democracy.

Archival footage and photos show us the men and women who braved the Atlantic and Pacific crossing to find religious freedom and tolerance in a New World, as well as the French and Spanish missionaries driven to convert the Native Americans, sometimes exacting a terrible human toll in the process. We hear the stories of Europe's hungry, tired and poor who came flooding into America, most of them Catholic, speaking foreign languages and bringing strange ideas about neighborhood life, often seeking nothing more than to be left alone. Yet from this crucible there formed a uniquely American version of Catholicism that fascinates and sometimes puzzles the rest of the nation.

The series traces the growing and changing Catholic involvement in American community life, and the profound influence the American experience has had on their beliefs. At the same time it charts the changing face of Catholics in an America where new sources of immigration bring new traditions, new cultures and new expressions to an ancient yet evolving religion.

Catholics in America is not the kind of slow, lugubrious, overly-reverent documentary that some producers seem to feel America deserves. The series will move at a pace that is upbeat, with imagery that is visually gripping, while the narrative will be accurate, even brutally honest, and at times self-deprecating. We hear the one about St. Peter asking the new arrival at the Pearly Gates to slip off his shoes and tiptoe in front of the first door he passes. "It's where we put the Catholics," he explains, "and they think they're the only ones here."

For the one in five Americans who call themselves Catholics the series evokes memories of a Golden Age, a time of praying the family rosary after dinner, a time when the parish priest held authoritative sway over many of life's major decisions. This is their own story, a kind of "Roots" experience that helps explain a significant part of who they are. True to that story, we meet former Catholics who have "fallen away" from a church they found compassionless, and "cafeteria Catholics" who accommodate themselves to uncompromising doctrine by accepting it only on a piecemeal basis.

For Americans who aren't Catholic the program helps lift the veil of mystery that shrouds a sometimes foreign world whose people not long ago spoke in Latin and ate fish on Friday. It looks at why, in spite of a modernized church where "nuns" (the widely and often misused term for religious sisters) don't even look like "nuns" anymore, these people still hold to a unique set of beliefs, still seem to react to things differently.

For every viewer Catholics in America is a reality check on what American Catholics are and are not. It offers history, a contemporary look at diverse and colorful traditions, humor, personal stories and a little forecasting of what American Catholics can expect to weather in the 21st Century.


More than a television series

All these threads, and more, come together at the heart of the story. Catholics in America is intended to be shown as two two-hour broadcasts. It is also a two-part videocassette with study guide, and a DVD that offers extra footage and interviews to supplement the broadcast program. The study guide is intended to encourage the series' inclusion in Catholic and ecumenical secondary, university and adult education courses. The fullest coordination possible will take place with the considerable industry that has been built up to supply these institutions.

A companion "coffee-table book" will be offered, too, to preserve both the story and the new and archival images featured in the program and to encourage further study and enjoyment for years to come. Conversations are underway with a major commercial publisher with a proven track record in companion-book publishing.

Extensive pre-production consultation and planning ensures that the program will find a receptive audience among the more than 19,000 individual Catholic parishes in America. Specially targeted promotions to these parishes will raise awareness about the broadcast and the companion materials. Like the phenomenally successful Catechism of the Catholic Church, which sold over two million copies in its first six months' release in the U.S., the video, DVD and companion book will be merchandised as the uniquely appropriate acquisitions they are for every Catholic household.

In short, Catholics in America is poised to become a significant national cultural event.