By Russell Shaw

Success beyond expectations

The pope gave Americans, both Catholic and not, a simple recipe for happiness. The next move is up to us.

In the short-term, Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United States was successful beyond all expectations, probably including his own. In the long-term, who knows? Whether the pope set American Catholics on track toward solving the critical problems facing their Church -- from the continued hemorrhage of members to the continued influx of Latino Catholics needing pastoral care -- is anybody's guess.

One thing the April 15-20 trip to Washington, D.C., and New York did make clear: Despite concerns before the fact, Americans accustomed to glamour and glitz responded with huge enthusiasm to this supposedly uncharismatic, soft-spoken, 81-year-old German intellectual and his shy smile.

Cheering crowds waving yellow and white papal flags and homemade signs greeted Pope Benedict everywhere he went. Even hard-bitten media seemed charmed. Hailing the pontiff as "a man of unwavering belief," the Washington Post remarked: "His words were a reminder of our national character and its potential to do great good; they should serve as a challenge that we hope will outlast the memories of this visit."

The trip's biggest surprise was the pope's willingness -- indeed, apparent eagerness -- to face up to child sex abuse by some American priests.

Starting on the flight to the United States, when he declared himself "deeply ashamed" at what happened, and continuing throughout the visit, he addressed the abuse scandal head-on. The emotional high point of his initiative was a private meeting in Washington with five abuse victims from Boston -- a moving object lesson by Pope Benedict in the practice of reconciliation and healing that he preached.

Still another deeply emotional moment came during his Sunday morning visit to Ground Zero in Manhattan, where he offered a prayer for those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and greeted survivors. "Grant that those whose lives were spared may live so that the lives lost here may not have been lost in vain," he prayed.

Papal protocol

Typically, a papal visit follows a certain pattern. This one was no exception.

With statesmen and public officials, the visitor from Rome is formal, friendly and polite -- a good guest, as Pope Benedict was at the White House with President George W. Bush and again at the United Nations. In both places he spoke in lofty terms about natural law, calling it a necessary basis for protecting human dignity and human rights in a pluralistic nation and a pluralistic world.

With ordinary Catholics -- priests, Religious and laity -- the pontiff is pastoral and positive. Problems are viewed as challenges about which the pope offers encouragement and advice. That was Pope Benedict's approach in his homilies at the big public Masses in Washington and New York.

But when the bishop of Rome meets with the hierarchy of a country he's visiting, he takes a different tone -- fraternal, but down to brass tacks. It's the manner of the top man telling junior colleagues where things have gone wrong and what they should do about it.

That was the pope's approach when he met with the bishops of the United States at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington and delivered the most substantive policy address of his trip. Major points of the complex analysis included:

n A strongly-worded critique of pick-and-choose Catholicism. "Is it consistent," he asked, "to profess our belief in church on Sunday, and then during the week promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor or the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teachings or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?"

n Deep concern about a sharp decline in Catholic marriages in America, along with a rise in cohabitation, marrying outside the Church and divorce. "To some young Catholics, the sacramental bond of marriage seems scarcely distinguishable from a civil bond, or even a purely informal and open-ended arrangement to live with another person," Pope Benedict lamented.

n An appeal to go beyond the policies and programs already adopted by the bishops to deal with clergy sex abuse and address the "wider context" in which abuse occurred. He condemned "degrading manifestations and the crude manipulation of sexuality so prevalent today," and told the bishops to work for a society that appreciates the sacredness of sex. "What does it mean," he asked, "to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media?"

The pope also urged the bishops to cultivate better relations with priests in the wake of the abuse scandal. "Priests...need your guidance and closeness during this difficult time," he said. "They have experienced shame over what has occurred, and there are those who feel they have lost some of the trust and esteem they once enjoyed."

'Reverberating with faith'

Benedict spoke often about the good features of the United States. But he also pulled no punches in describing the dark side of America and the harm done to Catholic life by secularism, materialism and consumerism, radical individualism, freedom taken as license to do as you please, and naïve trust in the problem-solving capabilities of science and technology.

"People today need to be reminded of the ultimate purpose of their lives," he told the bishops and, through them, the Catholic community at large. "They need to recognize that implanted within them is a deep thirst for God."

Although sticking to his nonconfrontational manner, the pope also pursued a tough line with Catholic educators who met with him in Washington, including 200 Catholic college and university presidents.

Pope Benedict did not rake over the details of the ongoing debate over things like the secularization of Catholic higher education and Pope John Paul II's 1990 document Ex Corde Ecclesiae ("From the Heart of the Church") on the Catholic identity of Catholic schools, or recurring battles over Catholic campus performances of the controversial play "The Vagina Monologues." But he left no doubt where he stands on these things -- and where he thinks the college and university presidents ought to stand, too.

Like Pope John Paul II, he expressed support for academic freedom, but insisted that at a Catholic school it could not be used to justify "positions that contradict the faith and teaching of the Church." On the contrary, he said, "public witness to the way of Christ" as found in the Gospel in the teaching of the magisterium should shape "all aspects of an institution's life, both inside and outside the classroom." The significance for their institutions of Catholic identity, he told the educators, is that "each and every aspect of your learning communities reverberates with the ecclesial life of faith."

Pope Benedict's radically evangelical model of Catholic higher education stands in sharp contrast with the American secular model embraced by many U.S. Catholic colleges and universities over the last 40 years. There is fuel here for dialogue -- and also conflict.

The pope was similarly candid with non-Catholic interlocutors about the obstacles to fruitful ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. Beforehand, these particular encounters were expected to be merely symbolic goodwill events. But the pope's listeners got a serious analysis of why ecumenical and interreligious conversations make so little progress.

Where dialogue among Christians is concerned, Pope Benedict laid much of the blame at the feet of the tendency to take a "relativistic approach" to faith that originates in secular ideology and reduces religion to subjective feelings. Even within the ecumenical movement, the pope told representatives of Christian communities at the Church of St. Joseph in New York, participants may downplay doctrine lest it sharpen divisions.

"Yet a clear, convincing testimony to the salvation wrought for us in Christ Jesus has to be based on the notion of normative apostolic teaching," he said. "This is the message which the world is waiting to hear from us."

Meeting with non-Christian representatives in Washington, he deplored failure to discuss differences with "calmness and clarity" and urged openness in interreligious dialogue to "the voice of truth."

Facing the problems

As with Catholic college and university presidents, so also it remains to be seen how this will go down with professional ecumenists, including Catholic ones.

But that's true of the trip as a whole: How will people react and what difference will it make, especially to the critical problems facing American Catholicism?

That it will make a difference in the lives of select individuals can be assumed. Below the radar of the media and almost everybody else, there will be individual conversions, personal vocations discerned and embraced -- the effects of grace working through the medium of a public event. That's been the story of other papal visits, and it will be the story of this one, too.

Otherwise, there's no real way to know what difference Pope Benedict's visit will make to the high-visibility issues facing the Church. Although American Catholicism is widely thought to be in much better shape than Catholicism in most of Western Europe, the problems facing the Church are very real.

At the end of February, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released survey results showing that 10 percent of all American adults are ex-Catholics. Side by side with that, though, is the continuing influx of Hispanic Catholics from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Nearly half of all U.S. Catholics under the age of 30 are Latinos, pointing a time not far in the future when Hispanics will be 40-50 percent of the Catholic population.

Meanwhile, the indicators of decline are persistent and increasing: steep falloffs in priests and religious women and men; a drop in Sunday Mass attendance, from 70 percent in the 1960s to 30 percent now; dramatic declines in reception of the Sacraments of Penance and Confirmation as well as in the number of Catholics who marry in the Church; a continuing drop in Catholic elementary school enrollment; parish closings in dioceses in many parts of the country, especially the Northeast and Midwest; and the findings of opinion polls that show self-described Catholics in large numbers at odds with the Church's teaching on sex, marriage and divorce, and much else.

Secret to happiness

Against this background of trouble in the Church and in society, Pope Benedict came across as strikingly empathetic in speaking to seminarians and young people at St. Joseph's Seminary in Dunwoodie, N.Y. The message was: I understand what you're up against because things weren't so easy for me either when I was your age. But take heart and trust in Christ.

The pope said in part:

"As young Americans, you are offered many opportunities for personal development, and you are brought up with a sense of generosity, service and fairness. Yet you do not need to tell me that there are also difficulties: activities and mindsets which stifle hope, pathways which seem to lead to happiness and fulfillment but, in fact, end only in confusion and fear.

"My own years as a teenager were marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers. Its influence grew -- infiltrating schools and civic bodies, as well as politics and even religion -- before it was fully recognized for the monster it was. It banished God and thus became impervious to anything true and good....

"The power to destroy does ... remain. To pretend otherwise would be to fool ourselves. Yet, it never triumphs. It is defeated. This is the essence of the hope that defines us as Christians. ... I encourage you to invite others, especially the vulnerable and the innocent, to join you along the way of goodness and hope."

One way to explain Pope Benedict XVI's visit to America is to say he came to tell people, both Catholics and non-Catholics, how to find true happiness through faith in Christ. The next move is up to them, not him.

Russell Shaw is a contributing editor to Our Sunday Visitor.