Religion: Religious and American

The 30 million U.S. Roman Catholics make up only 8% of the world's Catholic population, but they are the free-currency mainstay of the Vatican's finances; they also provide nearly 20% of the world membership in Catholic religious communities. Last week, on the lakeside campus of the University of Notre Dame, at South Bend, Ind., 1,978 superiors and other officials of religious orders in the U.S. gathered for four days in the largest congress of religious orders in the church's history. They represented a total of 157,000 nuns, 44,000 priests and 8,000 lay brothers....