for his first trip to rome, he learned a gregorian chant written around the 10th century. [ gregorianrter: how does the gregorian chant go? >> gregorian chant is a very linear thing where you often will sing a lot of notes for one syllable. for instance -- would you object if i sang? >> reporter: absolutely not. >> so just to say a simple "lord have mercy" would be "kyrie eleison, christe eleison," ♪ [ music ]♪ >> it's almost as though our prayers are singing themselves. >> reporter: what is the feeling when you see your choir, hear your choir in st. peter's basilica? >> there's no way to believe that i'm here in st. peter's with the people i have known so long. it's an out-of0body experience, out of time, out of space, because we are just ourselves as a group; but we have been transported to this place. ♪ [ music ]♪ >> we're singing the same music we sing for the community of saint anne's on a sunday, and yet we're doing it in this incredible space with all of these people here with all of the hierarchy and in front of this altar, the altar of the chair. ♪ amen >> reporter: and that'

[gregorian chanting] simpler music, gregorian chant for instance, the intervals are small.wo notes adjacent, the interval is a second, of course, between the same note and itself, the interval is in unison. a second, a third, a fourth, et cetera. [doleful violin music] melodies are very meaningful. to people, melody is often the most meaningful aspect of a piece of music. it's what we remember, it's what we relate to, and those melodies come from the intervals between the notes as we play them. [piano plays classical music] (woman) melody is the tune-- the singable part of a piece of music. it's the part that our ear naturally gravitate towards. technically, melody is a succession of pitches coming one after another, that together form a complete thought or a phrase; that's what we call it in music. just like sentences have words, and we don't hear the individual words in the sentence we hear how those words join together to form a sentence, the same goes with music. there are many notes, but those notes we don't hear really individually. we hear them as a long line, and it

if you've heard the chanting, the gregorian chants in latin, there is something that's more, mysterious in that way. i think you're really right, because it comes out of that ancient format. yeah, janet? >> i attended a ritual over the weekend. i was with a kidney operation survivor's group, and one of their members had passed away, so they had a spiritual - it was a nondenominational kind of thing. she had one big candle and she had five little candles, a candle for memory and a candle for joy and a candle for suffering, a candle for all these things. each of the five people who knew this woman who had died lit one of the little candles from the big candle, and then they all shared stories about this woman, and so that's how they kind of did a little ritual of remembrance. >> and the light is so beautiful, the taking of a candle - one light spreading into another light. that works its way into a number of different traditions, that's really quite true. sure, barb. >> i heard a speaker on wbez public radio the other day. she's from the university of chicago, you might know her - wendy d

female advice would help the church steer its way through troubled waters, says professor of the gr gregoriane. >> when you listen to women especially and listen to their perspective and i think, you know, a lot of the ways that this crisis was handled in the church, you know to have had more women's input in dealing with it would have been a better thing. >> reporter: but for now, women have, at best, an indirect influence as the cardinal of portugal explains it. certainly the church is not a democratic society in the way civil society understands, he says. it's a hierarchy church, therefore, not everyone is equal. women's voices may be louder than before, but for now, the doors to this men's club reman firmly shut. ben wedeman, cnn, rome. >>> more american troops may stay in afghanistan, perhaps longer than we originally thought. we'll be bringing you the latest from the pentagon, next. i have low testosterone. there, i said it. how did i know? well, i didn't really. see, i figured low testosterone would decrease my sex drive... but when i started losing energy and became moody... that's wh