The pope: His challenge to American Catholics

"He came. He spoke. He conquered,” said the New York Daily News in an editorial. When Pope Benedict XVI arrived for his first U.S. visit last week, many of the nation’s 64 million Catholics were expecting a fire-breathing hard-liner whose conservative doctrines were irrelevant to their lives. Instead, said The Boston Globe, this “compassionate” leader “connected with Americans of many faiths through his simple preaching and pastoral work.” He met the church’s appalling sex-abuse scandal head-on by saying he was “ashamed” of pedophile priests and by meeting with their victims. In New York City, he became the first pope to set foot in an American synagogue. Later, he descended to the base of ground zero, where he prayed both for the victims of Sept. 11 and for an end to hatred. Through it all, Benedict “took exquisite care to uphold the dignity of every person.”

Benedict certainly wasn’t the “heartless enforcer” of popular legend, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. Nonetheless, Benedict emphasized obedience and authority, and spoke of both individuality and secular values as evils. “Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted,” he said, declaring that Christians require a faith that “permeates every aspect of their lives.” That’s a disturbing message for both conservative and liberal Catholics, who are accustomed to following their own consciences on such issues as immigration, the Iraq war, and homosexuality. “Perhaps it is the task of the leader of the church to bring discomfort to a people so thoroughly shaped by modernity as we are. If so, Benedict is succeeding.”

Let’s hope so, said David Gibson in The Wall Street Journal Online. Catholicism in America is in crisis precisely because so many “cafeteria Catholics” follow only the tenets they like, and go to Mass and confession only when it suits them. By arguing that “Catholicism is a culture as well as a religion,” Benedict hopes to restore its power and appeal to a wayward flock. Admittedly, reconciling what is sacrosanct with “what is merely convenient” isn’t easy, said Kathleen Parker in the Orlando Sentinel. But “no one has to be Catholic,” and at a time when life is cheap, sex is meaningless, and nothing is holy, “there is something comforting about a stubborn pope in a world of moral relativity.” Like any strong father, Benedict “ignores his children’s pleas for leniency, knowing that his rules, though tough, serve a higher purpose.”

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