The Pope in USA

Disquieting Words For the Faithful/By E. J. Dionne Jr.

THE WASHINGTON POST, 18/04/2008;

The most jarring word that Pope Benedict XVI is using during his visit to the United States is “countercultural.” The American sense of that term is shaped by the 1960s: free love, drugs, hippies, rock music and rebellion. Needless to say, that’s not what Benedict is preaching.
That word is the key to understanding how Benedict’s message runs crosswise to conventional liberalism and conservatism. Benedict came to the United States as a quiet but forceful critic of “an increasingly secular and materialistic culture,” as he put it during yesterday’s Mass. Almost any American who paid attention to his sermon had to be uncomfortable because all of us are shaped by the very forces he was criticizing.
Benedict directly challenged an assumption so many Americans make about religion: that it is a matter of private devotion with few public implications.
Not true, said the pope. “Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted,” he told the country’s Catholic bishops on Wednesday. “Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.”
That is a demanding and unsettling standard for the right and the left alike. Benedict asked a pointed question: “Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?”
This is the thinking of a communitarian counseling against radical individualism. “In a society which values personal freedom and autonomy,” he said, “it is easy to lose sight of our dependence on others as well as the responsibilities that we bear towards them. . . . We were created as social beings who find fulfillment only in love — for God and for our neighbor.” It is this attitude that Benedict described as “countercultural.”
There will be much pious talk among Catholics (I speak from the inside) about how marvelous Benedict’s words were, how warm and gentle he proved to be. Parodies that paint him as a heartless enforcer are, of course, false. He seemed determined to confess the church’s great sin in the sexual abuse scandal, and he asked again and again for forgiveness. He took the extra step yesterday of meeting with a group of victims of abuse. It was a good and necessary act of penance.
Yet there is a radicalism underlying Benedict’s view (he spoke yesterday of “a disturbing breakdown in the very foundations of society”) rooted in a rather different spirit from the one animating the church at the time of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
John saw it as imperative for the church to discern “the signs of the times” and was critical of excessive gloom about modernity. “Distrustful souls,” John wrote in 1961, “see only darkness burdening the face of the earth.”
Benedict is certainly not without hope. Indeed, his November encyclical on hope — to which he has made frequent references this week — is a moving and intellectually powerful argument on behalf of an often forgotten virtue. Yet Benedict is more inclined than John was to see the church as beleaguered. He is less eager to seek “the signs of the times” than to worry about Christians who “are easily tempted to conform themselves to the spirit of this age,” as he put it this week.
That’s why I suspect that American Catholics of all political hues will find themselves struggling with his message. For myself, I admire Benedict’s distinctly Catholic critique of radical individualism in both the moral and economic spheres, and his insistence that the Christian message cannot be divorced from the social and political realms.
Yet I do not see the “spirit of this age” as being quite so threatening to faith or human flourishing as Benedict seems to think. As the pope has acknowledged in the past, Catholicism has been enriched by its encounter with enlightenment thought. The church should not now close itself off to what our age has to teach about the equality of men and women or the virtues of more democratic structures in its internal life.
Perhaps it is the task of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church to bring discomfort to a people so thoroughly shaped by modernity, as we Americans are. If so, Benedict is succeeding.
Pope Benedict - no Dr Strangelove/By Gerard Baker

THE TIMES, 18/04/2008;

Anybody who has ever had to stand at a podium after a gifted speaker knows how it might have been for Pope Benedict XVI this week as he has made the first papal visit to the United States since John Paul II.
His predecessor was the ultimate media-savvy leader. When he came to the ultimate media-fixated nation, it was a match made in Heaven. Millions of the faithful and the merely curious flocked to parks and stadiums. People at times had to be physically restrained from throwing themselves at him. Even on his last trip here in 1999, visibly deteriorating, his mere presence was enough to move the least sentimental of grizzled Midwesterners.
The man who became Benedict was never going to match that. It would be rather like asking an ageing professor of English to take over from Laurence Olivier as Hamlet. He knows all the lines but he’s not even going to try to pull off the delivery.
Of course, when he was elected three years ago, the new Pope’s personal history created its own, somewhat lowered set of expectations. His membership of the Hitler Youth (actually mandatory for all young Germans, but why spoil a good story?); his reputation as the fierce intendant of Catholic orthodoxy; the fact that he spoke English in a vaguely “Ve haf veys of making you pray!” kind of accent. It was all too delicious for the headline writers. He was instantly dubbed Panzer Cardinal and The Enforcer.
Before the incense had drifted away from his installation Mass, the world had determined that this 265th pontiff was a rather disappointing, even frightening, sort of substitute for the last one, a kind of cross between Torquemada and Dr Strangelove.
Three years have passed since the fuzzy grey smoke from the Sistine Chapel announced his elevation and it is clearer than ever on this, his most visible excursion into the limelight since then, that this is as far from the reality as it is possible to be.
The visuals of a papal trip are much the same. There are vast Masses in baseball stadiums, Popemobile-led motorcades along city streets. And though he may not be a natural, this Pope has a sure grasp of the power of the image. He speaks to the United Nations today. He extended Passover greetings to the Jewish people yesterday and met leaders of other religions. On Sunday, his last day in the US, he pays a symbolic visit to the sacred American territory of Ground Zero.
But what is most striking, as hundreds of thousands observe this Pope in person for the first time, is not the visual symbolism, the crowds or the made-for-TV events, but the imposing beauty and power of his words.
It’s already a clich in Rome that the crowds came to see John Paul but they come to hear Benedict. Among those familiar with his career, his reputation was always that of a fierce intellectual — the theologian and author of dozens of dense tracts on Christianity. But what was missing was an understanding of Benedict’s remarkable capacity to use words to speak to the emotional part of the human brain.
Of course, the Pope will already have known that the US, unlike the Europe he hopes still to convert, is a religious place. True, as in Europe, there are a growing number of so-called cafeteria Christians, those who like to choose from a menu of moral and doctrinal options, who believe religion should be essentially a kind of divine validation of their own lifestyle rather than a call to sacrifice and commitment. But America is still fundamentally receptive to the religious principle, the idea of a single truth rather than a moral chaos of equally valid beliefs.
It would be a shame, however, if his words to Americans were not heard by people — Christians and non-Christians everywhere.
He has already startled many with the intensity of his denunciations of the actions of priests who sexually abused minors — the scandal that has turned many away from the Church in America and elsewhere — as well as those in the church hierarchy who enabled them. The Church has seemed reluctant in the past to make a complete penance for this sin but Benedict’s words this week will have done much to heal the wounds and restore trust.
Less newsworthy but perhaps more powerful for most listeners has been Benedict’s eloquence on the spiritual challenges of the modern world. At the White House, with President Bush at his side, he reminded Americans about the responsibilities as well as the great opportunities of political and economic freedom. “Freedom is ever new. It is a challenge held out to each generation, and it must constantly be won over for the cause of good.”
But the Pope’s most compelling words are a constant reminder of how absurd his stereotype has been. He speaks repeatedly of the simple beauty of human love.
Shortly before he became Pope, Benedict told a congregation: “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story, an event.”
This idea of faith as a love story — God’s love for his people, and our love for Christ, the human face of God — is what Benedict seems to want us to understand as the defining theme of his papacy. His first encyclical was not on birth control or gay marriage, but on what many considered the somewhat surprising subject of the simple divinity of human love, including the sanctity of erotic love. This emphasis on the centrality of love to the human condition is so at odds with the caricature of the doctrinal vigilante, endlessly lecturing on the perils of sexual intemperance, that it requires us to think hard about the very nature of religion’s role in modern life. It is a useful counterweight to the popular secular view that religion is the root of all human discord.
Three years ago, as John Paul II was laid to rest under St Peter’s, his extraordinary and epoch-changing ministry at an end, a reporter turned to one of his colleagues and said, with evident feeling: “There goes one heck of a story.” But the story, as it happens, lives on, Benedict has opened a new chapter and if people would only listen they might find it has a surprising ending.
The Indispensable Church/By Michael Gerson

THE WASHINGTON POST, 18/04/08):
The occasion of a papal visit is a chance to take stock of the health of the Roman Catholic Church in America, which, like any church, reflects the flaws of its very human members. Many Catholics worry about the shortage of priests, nuns and vocational enthusiasm, complain about empty pews — about one in 10 Americans is a former Catholic — and anguish over sexual scandals in which clergy have, at times, appeared more interested in protecting the church than in demonstrating its ideals.
But members of a church older than any nation tend to take the long view. In the 10th century, Pope Sergius III grabbed the keys to the kingdom in an armed coup and promptly had two of his imprisoned predecessors strangled. His son, by his 15-year-old mistress, Marozia, eventually became Pope John XI. Marozia’s grandson, Pope John XII, stood accused of great crimes as well. According to one account, he “mutilated a priest . . . violated virgins and widows high and low, lived with his father’s mistress, [and]converted the pontifical palace into a brothel.” Those were the days to be a reporter covering the Vatican.
Catholics generally regard the survival and success of such a flawed institution as evidence of divine favor. The church has managed to outlive all of its scandals — and all of its critics.
But the Catholic Church has more than endurance on its side. It remains an indispensable institution, for several reasons:
First, despite charges of dogmatism, the church is the main defender of reason in the modern world. It teaches the possibility that moral truth can be known through reflection and argument. It criticizes what Pope Benedict XVI has called the “dictatorship of relativism” — a belief “that does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” “Being an adult,” says Benedict, “means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today’s fashions or the latest novelties.”
Secularism has traditionally taught that human beings will eventually outgrow religious conviction and moral absolutism — that skepticism is evidence of maturity. Benedict contends that modern men and women, unguided by reasoned moral beliefs, turn toward adolescent self-involvement. Their intellectual growth is stunted. In a world where all moral claims are seen as equally true and equally false — the world, for example, of the modern university — human conscience is reduced to biology or prejudice. Moral behavior may continue to ride in grooves of socialization or genetics, but moral assertions are fundamentally arbitrary — always trumped by a two-word response: “Says you.”
By asserting that the human mind can grasp moral truth, Catholicism also defends the reliability of reason against the superstitions of our time.
And this is important for a very practical reason: because a belief in human rights is also a moral conviction. Catholicism teaches that relativism and a purely material view of man have disturbing social consequences. “The criterion of personal dignity,” wrote Pope John Paul II, “which demands respect, generosity and service — is replaced by the criterion of efficiency, functionality and usefulness: others are considered not for what they ‘are,’ but for what they ‘have, do and produce.’ This is the supremacy of the strong over the weak.”
The point here is simple and radical: As the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton argued, men and women are either created in “the image of God” or they are “a disease of the dust.” If human beings are merely the sum of their physical attributes — the meat and bones of materiality — they are easier to treat as objects of exploitation.
So Catholicism offers a second contribution: It is the main defender of human dignity against a utilitarian view of human worth. And the church has applied this high view of man with remarkable consistency — to the unborn and the elderly, the immigrant and the disabled. Individual views on issues of life and death vary widely, even within the Catholic Church. But it is a good thing to have at least one global institution firmly dedicated to the proposition that every growing child, every person living in squalor or in prison, every man or woman approaching death or contemplating suicide or trapped in profound mental disability, every apparently worthless life is not really worthless at all.
An institution accused of superstition is now the world’s most steadfast defender of rationality and human rights. It has not always lived up to its own standards, but where would those standards come from without it?
Our Neighbor, the Pope/By Alessandro Piperno, the author of The Worst Intentions, a novel. This essay was translated by Ann Goldstein from the Italian

THE NEW YORK TIMES, 18/04/08;

In class once, I made a disrespectful comment about the pope at the time, John Paul II. I was the only Jewish boy in a Catholic school, and I was sure I’d be given an exemplary punishment.
I was wrong. We were in Rome, the most tolerant place in the world for irreverence toward popes.
Catholics in New York, waiting for Benedict XVI to arrive today in their city, may find this attitude puzzling. But there’s a sonnet by Gioacchino Belli, on the death of Pope Leo XII, that nicely illustrates the Roman’s ambiguous feelings toward His Holiness:
You see the pope’s funeral carriage, he says, weighed down by the magnificence of papal pomp, pass through the city’s narrow streets for the last time. You look at it with a mixture of affection and hostility. You make fun of that grandiose way of dressing, even in death, but at the same time you feel a surge of emotion for that part of you that is vanishing. You then console yourself with the most Roman of sayings: “One pope dies, another is made” — sanctioning the eternity of an institution despite the transience of a single individual, the immortality of a city despite the impermanence of its citizens.
Today the elections and deaths of popes continue to mark our inner calendars. It’s unlikely that a Roman of my generation doesn’t recall exactly where he was when Paul VI died or when John Paul II was shot. And yet we’re aware of the pope’s existence only around Easter, when traffic is brought to a halt by convoys of buses filled with foreign pilgrims going to Vatican City, that tiny state embedded in the heart of an ancient metropolis. And then we wonder, not without irritation, who, between us and the pope, is held hostage by the other.
But apart from such logistical inconveniences it’s unlikely that a Roman thinks about the pope’s presence in the city. In a certain sense, he’s always there; in another, he never is.
Once I happened to be in Rio when John Paul II was visiting. (It was in 1980, the time he appeared like a soccer hero in the Maracana Stadium before a crowd of jubilant Brazilians.) I was bewildered by the mixture of anxiety and emotion, tinged with idolatry, that had infected the population, not to mention by the impressive security measures. An entire army, I thought with amusement, to protect this man who lives a few blocks from my house.
Then I realized that for a Roman the pope is a figure who is above all familiar, a kind of eccentric and capricious parent. Say one night you happen to be driving along Via della Conciliazione, and you see that the lights are still on in the windows of the papal apartments. You say to yourself: “How about that? The Old Man is up late tonight.”
Yet Rome is also deeply conservative, which explains the distrust with which the election of a Polish pope was received here. Rome’s most aristocratic families — the Farnese, the Borghese, the Barberini — have fought over the papal throne forever. Imagine, then, a Polish pope! I recall the dismay, not unmixed with disapproval, with which certain (very reactionary) friends of my Catholic mother judged John Paul II’s constant travels to the ends of the earth. Yes, his work of international proselytizing offended those ladies. A pope stays home; a pope is in Rome. It’s not proper for a pope to board a plane too often or speak to crowds that sing and sway like so many little devils.
Nor was John Paul II forgiven for his athletic appearance, so undignified, and his love of sports. How can a pope wear a ski outfit? Climb mountains? Cavort in Olympic pools? So they began calling him “the Pole” — in the same tone of good-humored derision with which Benedict is called “the German shepherd.”
But it was the first step in learning to accept the man who became one of the most beloved popes in history. When he died, the Romans bestowed on him the majestic farewell that is due a saint. I watched the images of his funeral on TV uneasily, sometimes with irritation, until I said to myself: What’s so surprising? This is Rome.
When you think back to the tribal majesty of that funeral ceremony you can understand how hard it is for Benedict XVI to hold his own against his predecessor. Then you see what impelled him to invent for himself a completely different image: if John Paul was energy, spontaneity, impulsiveness, charisma, his successor would claim the icy elegance of tradition.
So Benedict, having been adored in Washington and New York, will return home, to Rome.
Will the Romans someday take to him, as we did John Paul? Ah, well, the pope is the pope. The pope is Roman even if he’s Polish, German, Australian — that is to say, in Rome, one pope is like another.