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Pope Benedict's Message for America

The first thing I learned from Vatican officials during a recent trip to Rome was this: Pope Benedict XVI is not really worried about us Americans.

For a universal church, the relative contentment with American Catholicism is perfectly understandable. In Rome, they worry about China, where the clandestine Bishop Han Dingxiang died after an 8-year imprisonment by the Chinese authorities. They worry about the Islamic world in the Middle East, including Iraq, where the Chaldean Catholic Bishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was killed by jihadist kidnappers. In Africa they worry not only about poverty and disease but an encroaching jihadist fever in places such as Nigeria. They worry a lot about whether Ireland and Poland are going to follow the European model of rapid secularization -- the end of historic national faith communities.

America? The view from Rome is that, on a relative basis, we Catholics here are doing just fine.

Pope Benedict XVI's visit -- officially in honor of the 200th anniversary of the founding of the first five American dioceses: Baltimore, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Louisville, Ky. -- has at least as much to do with Pope Benedict's desire to address the family of nations at the United Nations as anything peculiarly American.

Fair enough. It's a big church for a big world. So what will he tell us Americans?

Benedict will visit Ground Zero and become the first pope ever to celebrate Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral. He will stroll down Fifth Avenue in the popemobile (added to the trip at the last minute to accommodate crowds that wish to see him). He will stop in to wish Rabbi Arthur Schneier at the Park East Synagogue and the rest of local Jewish community a "merry Passover" (OK, well, whatever). He'll speak to leaders at the United Nations, to thousands of cheering youth in Yonkers (including my son Bair), 350 bishops at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in D.C., more than 200 heads of Catholic colleges and universities at the Catholic University of America, and to the heads of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center. No doubt he'll hit a home run at Yankee Stadium, with 60,000 reverent and raucous cheering fans of the papal Mass there.

And when it's all done -- this whirlwind half a week of Benedict -- what will he want us to know?

He said the most important thing in his videotaped greeting to U.S. Catholics released on the eve of his visit:

"It is God who saves us; he saves the world and all of history. ... I am coming, sent by Jesus Christ, to bring you his word of life."

In the literary and artistic conventions of utopia there is a problem known as "the face of God" problem. This happens when a writer builds dramatic tension around a great revelation -- a utopia, a messiah figure, whom he must then reveal by the end. Say, for example, in the Narnia movies, where the biggest problem with translating the book into a movie is that in the movie Aslan is just a big old talking lion. How do you reveal the face of God?

President Bush offered one sort of answer. He explained to EWTN anchor Raymond Arroyo that he is going out to meet Pope Benedict at the airport because the Holy Father is not a politician but "a man of faith" who understands "that moral relativism has a danger of undermining the capacity to have more hopeful and free societies."

Then Arroyo asked, "You said, famously, when you looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes you saw his soul. When you look into Benedict XVI's eyes what do you see?"

"God," answered President Bush.

Pope Benedict would blush. "Christ," he told us already and no doubt will repeat again while he is here, "is the face of God present among us."

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