"The crowd is much, much, much smaller than we had feared it would be," Gary Causey, principal of Santa Fe High School tells The New York Times. "In fact it's a much smaller crowd than we'd expect for an opening-night game. I think a lot of the locals stayed home because they didn't want to deal with a mess." Hordes of Christians were expected to show up at the school's opening football game to "spontaneously" recite the Lord's Prayer in protest of a Supreme Court decision barring student-led, student-initiated prayer before football games. One organizing group expected 10,000 to rally. But as The Washington Post reports, "Only a few clusters of fans joined hands and did so. They were mostly drowned out by loudspeaker announcements as the teams took the field. Outside the gate to the stadium, about 100 people gathered to pray and sing hymns amid a few signs and two 12-foot crosses dragged there by two men. See related news stories by The Dallas Morning News, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, and CNN, and opinion pieces from the Houston Chronicle, The Freedom Forum, and syndicated columnist William Raspberry.

The Vatican has just released " Dominus Iesus," a declaration reiterating Catholic teachings on the uniqueness of Christianity, and more specifically the Roman Catholic Church. The point of the document, says Roman Catholic Archbishop Cormac Murphy O'Connor, "is to warn against a tendency to regard all religions as equivalent." Though Protestant leaders might like that notion in theory, they're upset with such statements in the document as "The ecclesial communities which have ...