REMEMBERING JOHN PAUL THE GREAT








John Paul II had
'supernatural qualities'


VATICAN CITY, April 2 (UPI) -- Speculation regarding the sainthood of the Pope John Paul II escalated Wednesday as Pope Benedict XVI attributed the late Pontiff with "supernatural qualities."

Eulogizing at a mass commemorating the third anniversary of John Paul's death, Benedict said ''among his many human and supernatural qualities, (John Paul) also had an exceptional spiritual and humanistic sensibility,'' the Italian news agency, ANSA, said.

The head of the Roman Catholic diocese in Rome, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, closed the first steps of the beatification process at a similar Mass last year.

Beatification is a phase on the way to full sainthood. Full sainthood requires evidence of a variety of theological qualifications, including evidence of miracles.

A French nun says she recovered from Parkinson's disease when she prayed for John Paul's intercession and claims of miracles attributed to the late Pope arrive in Rome every week, Vatican officials said.

Vatican watchers expect a quick sainthood for John Paul II and some speculate the beatification date will be Oct. 16, the 30th anniversary of his election as Pope, ANSA said. After that, if a second miracle it attributed to the beatified, that person would be canonized as a saint.





Pope remembers John Paul
as sainthood pleas grow
By Philip Pullella



VATICAN CITY, April 2 (Reuters) - Catholics around the world on Wednesday marked the third anniversary of Pope John Paul's death and Vatican officials said they were receiving a steady stream of pleas from the faithful convinced he was a saint.

Pope Benedict, John Paul's successor, presided at a solemn Mass before tens of thousands of people in St Peter's Square, from the same spot on the steps of the basilica where John Paul's simple wooden coffin lay three years ago.

"For many days, the Vatican basilica and this very square were really the heart of the world," Benedict said in his sermon as members in the crowd waved flags of the late Pope's Polish homeland and banners bearing his image.

Benedict did not use the word "saint" in his sermon but said John Paul had "many human and supernatural qualities" and was a mystic endowed with exceptional spiritual sensitivities.

Crowds at John Paul's funeral on April 8, 2005 chanted "Santo Subito" ("Make him a saint now").

In May, 2005, Benedict put John Paul on the fast track by dispensing with Church rules that normally impose a five-year waiting period after a candidate's death before the procedure that leads to sainthood can even start.

The first phase of the process for his beatification, the last step before sainthood, is now nearly complete. Church officials say they have found a miracle attributed to the intercession of the late pope with God.

Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, a 47-year-old French nun who had been diagnosed with Parkinson's -- the same disease that the late Pope had -- said it inexplicably disappeared two months after his death after she and her fellow nuns prayed to him.

If the Pope approves the miracle [it is not the Pope who approves a miracle; there is a committee of scientists that does that for the Congregation for the Cause of Sainthood] then John Paul can be beatified. Another miracle would be required after the beatification in order to move on to canonization.



Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the archbishop of Krakow who was the late Pope's secretary of nearly 40 years, told reporters his office receives daily letters from people who say they have received "graces" after praying to the late Pope.

"Most of them are people who have been cured of cancer or couples who were considered infertile but had children after praying to John Paul," Dziwisz said. "We get so many of them we don't even pass them on to Rome anymore."

Three years is an unusually short time for the completion of the first phase of a sainthood cause, which can usually take decades or, in some cases, hundreds of years.

The evidence includes testimony from hundreds of people and scrutiny of John Paul's life, spoken words and writings.

Monsignor Slawomir Oder, the Vatican official in charge of the beatification process told reporters he has nearly finished a document of about 2,000 pages long summarizing evidence that John Paul should be made a saint. [Oder said the document iscomplete and only requires minor techinical adn editorial adjustments.]









Pope Benedict XVI pays tribute
to his predecessor


Vatican City, 2 April (AKI) - At a special mass to mark the third anniversary of the death of Polish pontiff Pope John Paul II, his sucessor Pope Benedict XVI, on Wednesday described him as a "servant of God". [The title 'Servant of God' is used to refer to persons in the process of beatification.]

Benedict praised John Paul II's "many human and supernatural qualities" including "an exceptional spiritual and mystical sensibility."

"It sufficed to watch him as he prayed: he literally immersed himself in God and, during those moments, it seemed as if everything else was foreign to him," Benedict XVI said in a sermon delivered before a crowd of over 60,000 Catholic faithful that included a number of cardinals.

"The Mass - as he often said - was for him the focal point of every day and of his entire life. The 'living and holy' reality of the Eucharist gave him the spiritual energy to guide the People of God along the path of history," Benedict continued.

Benedict XVI recalled the public outpouring of grief following news of the death of John Paul II (photo) on 2 April 2005, and the many people who prayed before his body and participated in his funeral.

John Paul II's pontificate, "both as a whole and in many specific moments, appears to us as a sign and testimony of Christ's resurrection," Benedict XVI said.

He recalled how John Paul II - whose name was Karol Jozef Wojtiyla - afflicted with advanced Parkinson's disease by the end of his pontificate, spoke "with unbending firmness, at first while carrying his bishop's staff with its cross, and later, when his physical strength was waning, almost while supporting himself on it."

Benedict XVI described John Paul II's participation for the last time Good Friday's Way of the Cross ritual holding the cross in his arms. "That eloquent scene of human suffering and faith ... revealed to believers and to the whole world the secret of an entire Christian life," he said.

As Wojtiyla "lost everything, in the end even the power of speech, his trust in Christ became increasingly evident. As it was with Jesus, so with John Paul II," Benedict XVI said.

"God's mercy is a good key to understanding John Paul II's pontificate," the pope said. "He wanted the message of God's merciful love to reach all mankind and exhorted the faithful to bear witness to it".

Benedict XVI, whose name is Joseph Ratzinger, was a cardinal during John Paul II's papacy, and served as the powerful head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Catholic Church's orthodoxy watchdog.

John Paul II, the 'globetrotting Pope', was a doctrinal arch-conservative who will be remembered for his open-air Masses in football stadiums as well as for his key role in efforts to end communism and build bridges with other faiths.





Vatican remembers John Paul II


CATICAN CITY, April 2 (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday celebrated mass in St Peter's Square to mark the third anniversary of the death of predecessor John Paul II, praising his "exceptional spiritual and mystic sensibility".

Several thousand pilgrims joined in the commemoration of the first Polish pope, who ruled the Roman Catholic Church for nearly 27 years and died aged 84.

John Paul II's personal secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz, who has since become the archbishop of Krakow, as well as several other cardinals concelebrated the Mass with Benedict XVI.

In his homily, Benedict noted "the many human and supernatural qualities" of John Paul II including "an exceptional spiritual and mystic sensibility".

He recalled one of the late Pope's final appearances when John Paul II, suffering from Parkinson's disease, could not speak. It was on Good Friday, when Christians mark Christ's crucifixion.

"This eloquent scene of human suffering and faith ... showed the secret of the whole of Christian life to the faithful and to the world," he said.

Benedict said John Paul II "personally knew and experienced the horrible tragedies of the 20th century, and he long wondered what could stem the tide of evil."

Only "the love of God" provided the answer, Benedict said, urging the worshippers to "thank the Lord for having given the Church this faithful and courageous servant".

Born Karol Wojtyla on 18 May 1920, in Wadowice, near Krakow, John Paul II lived through his country's occupation by the Nazis and subsequent communist rule.

On Tuesday, the prelate in charge of the beatification process for John Paul II said the dossier was nearly complete for the popular late Pope to take the first step to sainthood.







Pope Benedict praises
'supernatural' John Paul II
By Richard Owen in Rome
The Times of London
April 2, 2008


Pope Benedict XVI today said that his predecessor, John Paul II, had "supernatural qualities".

Speaking at a mass in St Peter's Square, marking the third anniversary of John Paul's death, the Pope said: "Among many human and supernatural qualities, he had an exceptional spiritual and mystical sensibility."

Pope Benedict, who shortly after his election put John Paul on the path to sainthood by waiving the five year waiting period before a beatification cause can be opened, said: "We relive with emotion the hours of that Saturday evening when the news of his death was announced to the great crowd which filled St Peter's Square ... Let us give thanks to the Lord for having given to the Church this faithful and brave servant."

The Congregation for the Causes of Saints is examining miracles attributed to the late Pope's intercession as part of the beatification process, the step before sainthood.

Father Slawomir Oder, the postulator of the cause, said that he was drawing up a 2,000 page "definitive summary" of a dossier, or positio, on John Paul's life.

The prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, said that the Vatican wanted to beatify John Paul as soon as possible. He said this was a response to the cries of "santo subito" at John Paul's funeral.

The Vatican is reported to be considering moving John Paul's tomb from the crypt of St Peter's to the Basilica above, and may exhume the body for display to pilgrims in a glass casket after beatification is approved.

However, Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said that "no decision on the matter will be made before beatification".

Cardinal Angelo Comastri, archpriest of St. Peter's Basilica, told the Italian newspaper La Stampa that the tomb of John Paul could be moved to a chapel on the right hand side of the Basilica, near the entrance and next to the chapel containing Michelangelo's statue of the Pieta.

Cardinal Saraiva Martins said that a glass casket "would be a way to make him closer and more visible to the thousands of faithful from all over the world who come every day to pray at his tomb". His face would be covered with a wax mask, "as has been done with other saints".

The diocesan phase of the beatification cause opened in Rome in June 2005 and was concluded in April last year. The next step is for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to conclude that John Paul had "heroic virtues" and for Pope Benedict to issue a decree proclaiming his predecessor " venerable".

Celebrations and commemorations making the third anniversary of Pope John Paul II's death also took place in Poland today, with Poles praying for his swift beatification and canonisation.

Francesco Pasanisi, the senior Italian police officer who covered John Paul II's body with his own to protect him when the Pontiff was shot by a Turkish gunman on St Peter's Square in May 1981, said that he had preserved his blood stained trousers unwashed, because "I knew in my heart they would become a relic."

He said that he had been offered money for the trousers, but had refused to sell them.

"One does not joke about such things. This was the blood of a saint," he told Il Messaggero, the Rome daily. He said that he had given evidence for the beatification dossier on his "many years" at John Paul's side.

"Without a shadow of doubt this was an exceptional man, out of the ordinary," he said. "What struck me above all was his capacity to penetrate the human soul. He had a magnetic personality".

Mr Pasanisi said he believed that Mehmet Ali Agca, the would-be assassin, had acted alone. The fact that John Paul had later visited Agca in his prison cell and forgiven him "confirms his stature. Only a saint could have done that."


Both Caterina in the main forum and Gregor Kollenmorgen at New Liturgical Movement have posted a series of representative screenshots of the Mass. I will enlarge and reproduce some later.

The papal visit
By Thomas Patrick Melady
Washington Times
April 2, 2008


Mr. Melady is professor and senior diplomat at the Institute of World Politics, and was a U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican.


On April 15, Pope Benedict XVI, the 264th successor to Saint Peter and Sovereign of the Vatican City State, will arrive in Washington.

After the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005, the assembled College of Cardinals needed only four ballots to decide upon his successor.

For many, it was somewhat of a surprise to see Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger emerge from behind the scarlet curtain. But for any student of Vatican politics, the cardinal from Bavaria was the clear choice to maintain continuity with the pontificate of his great predecessor.



(Thanks to Sihaya for the montage.).


When I served as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, I knew Cardinal Ratzinger to be the most influential colleague of Pope John Paul II. I was also aware that Cardinal Ratzinger was not the "Rottweiler" of caricature in the media.

Indeed, during my tenure at the Vatican, Cardinal Ratzinger inspired some of Pope John Paul's most popular initiatives. He gave steady, balanced and far-sighted counsel to the Pope during tumultuous times.


(And thanks to Pandora for this picture.)


The day after Pope Benedict arrives in the United States for his inaugural two weeks from now, he will turn 81. When one considers that Pope John Paul II, by far the most traveled Pope in history, visited the United States only five times in 27 years, this may be the only chance for 80 million U.S. Catholics to welcome this Pope to their country.

Why is he coming to Washington and then New York? In addition to being the leader of more than one billion Catholics worldwide, he is the influential head of the government of the Roman Catholic Church.

He has no military and he cannot threaten to cut off economic assistance. But like John Paul II and Paul VI, he can set the tone and the framework for the discussion.

He has two issues that he will be discussing with the president. They are the Iraq War and how it can be brought to a close that leads to a period of tranquility in this war torn area; and the problem of Iraqi refugees, a good number of whom are Christians. This is a vexing problem which the Holy See believes must be ameliorated.

What can be done to re-establish a cordial relationship with the leaders and peoples of the predominantly Muslim and Arabic countries? In Washington, Pope Benedict will meet with leaders from all principal faiths including Islamic leaders. The conversation will take place at the John Paul II Cultural Center, which is symbolic of the church's interest in dialogue and conversation.

Pope Benedict specifically requested to visit the Catholic University of America, where he could meet the presidents of Catholic colleges and universities. He will speak with more than 200 heads of these institutions. The guests will also include representatives of the Catholic elementary and secondary schools.

The Pontiff's visit to Catholic University of America clearly indicates his fundamental persona. For many years he headed the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, which gave him the public reputation of being the enforcer of church discipline.

Now he has returned to his original role as a theologian and teacher. This has been his public portrait in the first three years of his pontificate.

I expect that Pope Benedict will set forth his vision of Catholic education: faithful to core Catholic beliefs while open to all in the pursuit of truth.

On his second day in Washington, seven former ambassadors to the Holy See arranged a reception in honor of Pope Benedict's 81st birthday. Six of these ambassadors served with John Paul II; one worked with Pope Benedict.

The Pope will depart Washington on Friday, April 17th, and travel to New York. He will carry out two wishes, which he explicitly expressed: first to visit Ground Zero, second to speak before the United Nations.

Both requests reflect what is in his mind. He understood the horror inflicted in the terrorist attack. As a young man of high-school age, he saw the horror of war in Europe. His visit to Ground Zero will be a symbolic expression of solidarity with the victims of the attacks.

But in his UN address, we can expect that he will call for political solutions to the problems of terrorist extremism, for preventing the formation of new terrorists is not to be done by military means but by instruments of statecraft that address the hearts and minds of people driven to extremism.

Thus he will continue in the tradition of Pope Paul VI, who in his 1965 address to the UN General Assembly gave the challenge of "war: no more war."

Several weeks ago in Rome, Pope Benedict issued a similar appeal: to end the bloodbath and hatred tearing Iraq apart. Indicating his unease on Iraq, the words were very clear: "Enough with the bloodshed, enough with the violence, enough with the hatred in Iraq."

Pope Benedict will be sending a message of peace — which is not based on some mostly utopian hope that man's capacity for evil will somehow end, but is instead rooted in a very realistic strategy that there exist nonviolent ways to change people's hearts. Our competing presidential candidates would do well to heed his message.

Again, this may be the only time that Pope Benedict XVI will visit the United States or the United Nations. These visits will set the framework of future papal relationships with the United States and the world's leading international organization.




Pope will bring
a "revolution of virtue"


VATICAN CITY, APRIL 1, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI will bring with him to the United States this month a "revolution of virtue," says the leader the Knights of Columbus.

Supreme Knight Carl Anderson, in Rome today to present his book A Civilization of Love: What Every Catholic Can Do to Transform the World, told ZENIT that the message of the Pontiff's two encyclicals is the same one the people of the United States are waiting for when he visits April 15-20.

"We are talking about a revolution of virtue, but of the theological virtues: faith, hope and love," said Anderson. "And this is the message Benedict XVI has given us with his two encyclicals, Deus Caritas Est, on love, and Spe Salvi, on hope."

The supreme knight said that especially during this election year, Americans are waiting "in a tremendous way” to hear about “the question of change and the question of hope, and Christianity is a religion of change and a religion of hope.”

Commenting on the contents of his book, Anderson said, “The effect of 9/11 it still very strong in the United States, and one of the things I suggest in the book is to discover what kind of people we are, what kind of people we want to become.”

The answer to these questions, he said, is precisely in the civilization of love.

“In such a civilization every person is a child of God. We are all intrinsically valuable. The battle today is between the culture of death (where people are judged by their social or economic value) and the culture of life,” he said.

Anderson pushes aside religious differences in order to spread a message of hope to those who are wary of the constant turmoil of modern society.

“By embracing the culture of life and standing with those most marginalized and deemed “useless” or a “burden” on modern society, Christians can change the tone and direction of our culture,” he affirmed.

Anderson noted that his book seeks to transcend the "clash of civilizations," because he says love isn't something exclusive to Christians. He added that he attempts to present “a road map for helping Christians understand their role in the World.”

To promote this civilization of love, clarifies Anderson, implies a decision to promote life and the family.

Anderson was appointed a member of the Pontifical Council for the Family in 2007, and consultor to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications in 2006.

He was also appointed consultor to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in 2003, a member of the Pontifical Council for the Laity in 2002 and the Pontifical Academy for Life in 1998.

Anderson is the leader of the 1.7 million members of the Knights of Columbus, the world’s largest Catholic fraternal organization, which was founded in 1882 by the Venerable Servant of God Father Michael McGivney in New Haven, Connecticut.

Still maintaining its headquarters in New Haven, the Knights of Columbus has members in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean islands, the Philippines, Guam and, most recently, Poland.

From a Florida-based site called AHN (All Headline News), which describes itself as 'digital news for a digital world), comes this item which I decided to post as my daily example of lazy and irresponsible journalism. It's really insignificant as news in the broad picture but simply reinforces the imoressio of the general lack of professionalism among those who call themselves journalists today, even very well-connected journalists like that recidivist, habitual offender of journalistic propriety, Richard Owen of the Times of London.

The Vatican made known before Holy Week that Cardinal Bertone would issue a clarifying statement on the disputed prayer but that this would come after Holy Week. This wasn't reported by most media originally, except as supplementary information when the German Jews announced their decision after Holy Week.

To claim now that the Vatican statement is a reaction to the German move shows that the reporter did not bother to background her styory properly.



Pope to clarify prayer
after German Jews cut ties
By Isabelle Duerme
AHN News Writer

Berlin, Germany, Mar. 31 (AHN) - Pope Benedict XVI is expected next week to issue a statement in reaction to a Jewish council's decision here to cut ties with the Catholic church.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany announced that it was cutting ties with the Catholic Church after the Pope used a Latin prayer during Good Friday services that called for the conversion of Jews.

The council said that any future talks will not take place until the Pope issues a public apology and reverts to the original prayers, according to Haaretz.

"As long as Pope Benedict does not return to the previous wording, I assume that there will not be any further dialogue [such as we had] in the past," said Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Jewish council. [Again, may I point out that Ms. Knobloch herself is unforgivably mixing up prayers, because 'former wording' in reference to the prayer used with the Old Missal would mean going back to the formula that prays 'pro perfidis judaeis', or at least the one in which John XXIII took away the term 'perfidis' (which simply means in ecclesiological Latin, we are told, 'without the faith', and not 'treasonous' as the English cognate means) - but retains the phrases about people in darkness and with a veil over their eyes. She obviously means the prayer formulated by Paul VI for the Novus Ordo.]

Haaretz reported that the Pope's statement is expected to insist that the Latin prayer is not an attempt to start missionary efforts within the Jewish community. [Which Cardinal Kasper made clear in the Vatican's first comment on the new prayer two days after L'Osservatore Romano' published it. But few subsequent stories even refer to that statement at all, as this onen not surprisingly, does not.]

The prayer asked for Christians to "pray for the Jews. May the Lord our God enlighten their hearts so they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, the savior of all men...Almighty and everlasting God, you who want all men to be saved and to reach the awareness of truth, graciously grant that, with the fullness of peoples entering into your church, all Israel may be saved."

The prayer appeared to raise fears that the statements might spark thoughts of anti-Semitism that may result in a "new burden" in the relationship between Christians and Jews.

Professor Micha Brumlik told The Jerusalem Post that while the statements might not lead to anti-Semitism, "it strengthened attitudes of traditional Christians that Jews are less gifted and have darkened hearts." [Sheer paranoia! Stop it already. We are in teh 21st century, not the 16th.]

He added that the statements were "a huge rollback" in the relationship between the Christians and the Jews.[YADA, YADA, YADA!]

=====================================================================

And what about this headline from the BBC News account of the Mass today?
'Solemn mass held for former Pope'

Isn't the BBC English? "Former Pope" indeed - as if John Paul had simply decided to retire, or was superseded. Wasn't it simpler and more direct to just say 'Solemn mass held for John Paul II'? Surely, even a Martian would know who he is!

THE WOJTYLA-RATZINGER PARTNERSHIP



Two veteran Vatican correspondents today each had interesting and unusual reflections on the Wojtyla-Ratzinger relationship and succession. Too bad they confined it to their blogs, and not to the pages of the newspapers they work for - Luigi Accattoli for Corriere della Sera, and Marco Tosatti for La Stampa.


From Wojtyla to Ratzinger -
a reversal of roles
Translated from the blog of
Luigi Accattoli
2 April 2008

The uniqueness of this particular papal succession: Called to take the place of 'the missionary to the world' was the cardinal theologian who for 23 years had helped him find the words for that mission.

Perhaps in that joint effort, the latter may have even kept Papa Wojtyla from an excess of zeal - and now, their dialog on almost every question continues, but with the roles reversed.

Where once the cardinal theologian favored more prudence, today the theologian Pope perceives the impulse of the apostle Pope.

May that dialog continue for many more years so that the great soul of Papa Wojtyla may reciprocate in overflowing measure what he had received from the one he called his 'trusted friend'.



Wojtyla, three years later
Translated from the blog of
Marco Tosatti
2 April 2008


On April 2, 2205. John Paul II died. In the days that followed, millions came from everywhere to pay him the last farewell.

Three years ago, his death touched so many hearts. Th ways of our interior consciousness are not rational. "I cried, and I believed", , wrote Francois Rene de Chateuabriand, recalling his conversion in Memories beyond the grave.

Tears and emotion usually open windows on non-mateiral ralities. So it was then, if we are to go by the testimonies of the many persons who have written to the site for the cause of the late Pope's beatification.

John Paul II, in his trajectory from an athletic and vigorous Pontiff to a daily image of effort and suffering, succeeded to gradually gain universal sympathy. His evident fragility dampened any aversion and hostility.

And the battle he fought against going to war in Iraq, even as he was nearing his end, even gained him the sympathy of those on the left who otherwise do not look kindly on the Church.

We all lived the years from 2000 to 2005 in an excess of emotion, watching every effortful step he attempted, trembling, almost tottering. Our attention was focused more on him than his message. Which remained the same - without making any allowances nor compromises - from 1978 onwards, up to the end.

Thus was repeated a phenomenon that had been seen before, especially for Paul VI. Many of those who mourned with John Paul II then, and who participated in stunned silence in the 'excess' of humanization that suffering had brought him, now seem to feel ashamed of that, and show the Church an extraordinary harshness - almost in amends, it seems, for their moments of sentimental weakness in that April of 2005.



And the one who is paying for it is the friend and theological 'shoulder' on which John Paul II relied, Joseph Ratzinger, who, when Karol Wojtyla was alive, bore the bitterness aroused by some of the decisions they shared and took on the role of 'the mean one'.

Now he finds himself defending the message of old, the message of the Church as it has always been, but without the shield of the human sympathy aroused by Karol. He, too, is aged now, and perhaps, suffering himself, although in a different way.



Karol Wojtyla thought that llness, exposed, was a form of evangelization. Joseph, more timid, has a different vision of the public and private roles of a Pope.

Of course, we miss John Paul II. Perhaps that should make us reflect on how fragile our rationality is if superficial emotions like antipathy or sympathy can hide from us the profound sense of the Christian message.

Pope to visit New York synagogue



NEW YORK, April 3 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI will visit a synagogue near the United Nations when he travels to the United States this month.

The U.S. bishops said Thursday that the Pope plans a brief visit to the Park East Synagogue on the evening of April 18.


Park East Synagogue at 67th Street in Manhattan.

It will be the second time he's visited a synagogue as Pontiff since being elected Pope in 2005.

Separately, Benedict will meet with Jewish leaders and representatives of other faiths in Washington on April 17th. He will also meet with leaders of other Christian groups.

Benedict is traveling to the two cities from April 15 through April 20. It will be his first visit as Pope to the United States. On his first trip abroad as pontiff in 2005, Benedict visited a synagogue in Cologne, Germany.


The Pope at the Synagogue of Cologne in August 2005.


Pope to visit U.S. synagogue

04/03/2008

JTA is the New York-based Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the oldest itnernational Jewish news service.


Pope Benedict XVI will make a historic visit to a New York synagogue later this month.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops announced Thursday that the pope will visit the Park East Synagogue on Manhattan's Upper East Side -- the first time a pope has visited an American synagogue.

The Milan daily Il Giornale also reported the April 18 visit, saying the Pope will meet at the synagogue with its rabbi, Arthur Schneier, and a group of Jewish children.



"For the last 46 years I have preached from this pulpit advocating Torah values of freedom, human rights and mutual respect,” said Schneier in a statement.

“It is my unique privilege to welcome Pope Benedict XVI to Park East Synagogue on his first visit to a Jewish house of worship in the United States. This historic first is a reaffirmation of Pope Benedict XVI's commitment to interreligious dialogue and outreach to the Jewish community.”


Interior of Park East Synagogue.

The visit, part of the Pope's six-day visit to New York and Washington, comes at a fraught moment in Jewish-Christian relations. The pope's decision last year to allow the recitation of a prayer for the conversion of the Jews sparked fears of a major setback in Catholic-Jewish relations, while a recent declaration by evangelical leaders of their intention to continue missionizing to Jews is seen as further cause for worry.

Il Giornale also said that after an interfaith meeting April 17 in Washington, the Pope would meet privately with Jewish representatives to offer a personal greeting for Passover.

Neither of these stops is on the Vatican's official schedule for the Pontiff's trip.


How wonderful that the Pope will be meeting Jewish children here. Park East Synaogugue has a famous Day School for toddlers and elementary school children.

BTW, all the major Jewish news outlets picked up the news and reported it immediately.


=====================================================================



The Mercedes Benz "Popemobile" is transported on a flatbed truck along U.S.Interstate 295 near the Delaware Memorial Bridge near Wilmington, Delaware, yesterday. It will be used in both Washington and New York to allow the public a chance to see the Pope as he travels selected routes. (AP)

THE POPE'S DAY

---

The Holy Father met today with
- H.E. Dieter Althaus, Minister President of Thuringia (Germany), his wife and delegation
- Cardinal Peter Seiichi Shirayanagi, Emeritus Archbishop of Tokyo
- Bishops of the Antilles (West Indies), Group 2, on ad-limina visit.

Yesterday, he had a private audience with
- Cardinal Stanislaw Dsiwisz, Archbishop of Cracow and with Mons. Mieczysław (Mietek) Mokrzycki,
bishop coadjutor of Lviv of the Latins (Ukraine).

---

POPE TO VISIT BERLIN
IN APRIL 2009?

Germany's largest-selling newspaper BILD reported today that the Pope will be visiting Berlin and at least one other city in former East Germany in April next year, and that the invitation was fOrmally extended to the Pope, presumably on behalf of the federal government, during the visit today of the Minister President of Thuringia.



Here's a translation of the BILD story:

SENSATION!
The Pope is coming to Germany again!



The picture BILD used with its story.

BILD has learned that Pope Benedict XVI will be coming to Germany most likely in the second half of April next year.

His visit would include arrival in Berlin, where he will meet with the Federal President of Germany and other German officials, as well as the Mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit.

Like Pope John Paul II, who gave his famous 'Freedom' speech at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in 1996, his successor will also visit it, in which case, he will most likely deliver an adrress.

As is usual for a visiting Pope, he would be staying at the residence of the Apostolic Nuncio in Berlin, which is on Lilenthastrasse beside St. John Basilica in the Neukoelln sector of Berlin.

The trip is reportedly planned to start on a Friday evening, and Sunday, he would fly to Heilgenstadt in Thuringia. He will probably celebrate Mass in the open space in front of Scharfenstein Castle in Eichsfeld, followed by Angelus.

He is also supposed to travel to Erfurt, whose Domberg (Cathedral Hill) serves as a powerful symbol of Catholicism in Eichsfeld, where Catholics resisted both the Nazis and the Communist dictatorship of East Germany. The Pope would then return to Rome from Erfurt. [Catholics are a small minority in northern Germany, bastion of reformed (evangelical) Christianity.]

[Erfurt was in the news earlier this week because six sermons of St. Augustine were unearthed there.]

When the Pope visited his homeland of Bavaria in 2006, critics had said he should also visit Berlin and the region that was once East Germany.



Speculation mounts that Pope
may visit Germany yet again


Berlin, April 3 (dpa) - Speculation mounted Thursday that Pope Benedict XVI, who has been sparing in his foreign travel during his three-year papacy, may next year visit his native Germany yet again.

A 2009 visit would likely be restricted to the capital Berlin and a provincial city, Erfurt, the website of the mass-circulation newspaper Bild said Thursday.

The occasion would be the 20th anniversary of the November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the 60th anniversary of the May 1949 passage of Germany's democratic constitution.

Erfurt, in the formerly communist part of Germany, is capital of Thuringia state, whose premier Dieter Althaus visited Benedict,80, Thursday in Rome.

To German media, an Althaus spokesman quoted the premier saying Benedict had been "basically open" to the invitation to visit Erfurt.

Benedict visited World Youth Day, a Catholic youth convention in Cologne, Germany, in 2005. His 2006 visit to his home state, Bavaria, was described as a last farewell by an old man to the haunts of his youth.

Former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger set off worldwide controversy during that visit with a lecture in Regensburg in which he quoted a 14th century remark that challenged Islam.

In German terms, a visit to eastern Germany would be seen as a political gesture, touring an area where Catholics are few.

Speculation about a fresh visit first peaked in February. Catholic church figures have asked Benedict to visit, but the Catholic Diocese of Erfurt said Thursday there was no official confirmation that the Pope had accepted those invitations.

Thuringia is the centre of the cult of St Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231), a queen who sacrificed her life for the poor and sick.

The Pope's eight trips outside Italy so far have also taken him to Poland, Spain, Switzerland*, Turkey, Brazil and Austria. Trips are set this year to the United States, Australia and France.

*The 'trip' to Switzerland does not count, as this refers to when the Pope crossed over the Swiss border to visit a monastery during his vacation in Les Combes, in the Italian Alps, in July 2006.

Vatican will repudiate 'proselytizing',
Jewish leader says


Rome, Apr. 3, 2008 (CWNews.com) - A Vatican statement clarifying the meaning of an amended Good Friday prayer for the Jewish people will be released within a week, according to a Jewish leader involved in discussions with the Holy See.

Rabbi David Rosen, the chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Inter-religious Consultations, has told reporters that Cardinal Tarciscio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, will sign the statement, which has been approved by Pope Benedict XVI. The Vatican itself has not commented on the latest reports.

The clarifying statement will respond to concerns raised by Jewish leaders after Pope Benedict issued a new version of the traditional prayer for Jews in the 1961 Roman Missal.

The revised text - used only in Latin, wherever the extraordinary form of the liturgy is used during the Easter Triduum - preserves the traditional prayer that the Jewish people might come to recognize Jesus as their Redeemer.

Some Jewish leaders protested that wording, claiming that it was a setback for inter-religious dialogue since it expresses a desire to convert Jews to the Christian faith. [The Vatican through Cardinal Kasper, immediately said at the time that the prayer expressed eschatological hope, i.e., for the eventual end of time.]

Rabbi Rosen, who said that he has seen a draft of the clarifying statement, said that reassurance on that point would repair any problems in Catholic-Jewish relations.

It should be understood, he said, that the Good Friday prayer "certainly in no way compromises the Church's total opposition to proselytizing."

It's been quite a while since the mysterious Spengler of Asia Times has written about Benedict XVI, of whom he has probably been the most unhesitating so far about naming him unequivocally the single most important leader and voice of the Western world today.

In a review of Fergus Kerr's Catholic Theologians last November (posted in this Forum),



Spengler found Benedict the dominant voice of modern Catholic theology, and interspersed throughout his book review were paragraphs like these:

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None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West's opinion leaders, comprehend this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a Pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I.

Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address.

Who is Joseph Ratzinger, this decisive figure of our times, and what led the Catholic Church to elect him? Fr Kerr has opened the coulisses of Catholic debate such that outsiders can understand the changes in Church thinking that made possible Benedict's papacy. Because Benedict is the leader not only of the Catholics but - by default - of the West, all concerned with the West's future should read his book...

The Pope has no strategic agenda apart from reconciliation and peacemaking. His work is to shepherd souls, not soldiers. But Benedict is the first pope in the past century to draw a bright line between Islam on one hand and Judeo-Christian revealed religion on the other, and that may destine him "not to send peace, but a sword", like his predecessor.

This makes Benedict the most indispensable man of our times, and the Catholic Church, the founding institution of the West, its still-indispensable institution. ...

In the person of Benedict XVI are embodied contributions of Jewish and Protestant thinkers, which miraculously converged upon the innovations in Catholic theology recounted by Kerr. This convergence is one of the most inspiring stories of the past century, and waits in obscurity for the historian who will bring it to light. ...

For the time being, the West has only one public figure to enunciate its fundamental character and interests, and that is Pope Benedict XVI. Fergus Kerr has done a service in making him more comprehensible to the broad public.

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This new piece is a commentary on Magdi Cristiano Allam's conversion, and while Alam himself is quoted often and generously, and begins with describing a 'revolution...in the heart of one man' (Allam), it is really about Benedict XVI, as the column title makes clear, and how, as Spengler writes in his concluding paragraph, "The global agenda has changed, not through the machinations of statesmen or the word-mincing of public intellectuals, but through the soul of a single man" - Benedict XVI.




The mustard seed in global strategy
By Spengler
Asia Times
March 26, 2008


A self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam, whom Pope Benedict XVI baptized during the Easter Vigil at St Peter's.

Allam's renunciation of Islam as a religion of violence and his embrace of Christianity denotes the point at which the so-called global "war on terror" becomes a divergence of two irreconcilable modes of life: the Western way of faith supported by reason, against the Muslim world of fatalism and submission.

As Magdi Allam recounted , on his road to conversion the challenge that Pope Benedict XVI offered to Islam in his September 2006 address at Regensburg was "undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert".

Osama bin Laden recently accused Benedict of plotting a new crusade against Islam, and instead finds something far more threatening: faith the size of a mustard seed that can move mountains.

Before Benedict's election, I summarized his position as "I have a mustard seed and I'm not afraid to use it." Now the mustard seed has earned pride of place in global affairs.

Magdi Allam tells us that he has found the true God and forsaken an Islam that he regards as inherently violent. Magdi Allam has a powerful voice as deputy editor of Italy's newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, and a bestselling author. For years he was the exemplar of "moderate Islam" in Europe, and now he has decided that Islam cannot be "moderate".

Since September 2001, the would-be wizards of Western strategy have tried to conjure an "Islamic reformation", or a "moderate Islam", or "Islamic democracy". None of this matters now, for as Magdi Allam tells us, the matter on the agenda is not to persuade Muslims to act like liberal Westerners, but instead to convince them to cease to be Muslims.

The use of the world "revolution" is Magdi Allam's:

---

His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims.

---

There is no deference to mutual respect and multi-culturalism. Magdi Allam forsook Islam because he considers it to be "inherently evil". As he wrote to his editor at the Corriere della Sera:

---

My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy ...

I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a "moderate Islam", assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Koran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive [emphasis added].

---

Far more important than denouncing the evils of Islam, though, is Magdi Allam's embrace of what he calls the God of faith and reason:

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The miracle of the Resurrection of Christ has reverberated through my soul, liberating it from the darkness of a tendency where hate and intolerance in before the "other", condemning it uncritically as an "enemy", and ascending to love and respect for one's "neighbor", who is always and in any case a person; thus my mind has been released from the obscurantism of an ideology which legitimates lying and dissimulation, the violent death that leads to homicide and suicide, blind submission and tyranny - permitting me to adhere to the authentic religion of Truth, of Life, and freedom. Upon my first Easter as a Christian I have not only discovered Jesus, but I have discovered for the first time the true and only God, which is the God of Faith and Reason ...

---

Magdi Allam presents an existential threat to Muslim life, whereas other prominent dissidents, for example Ayaan Hirsi Ali, offer only an annoyance.

Much as I admire Hirsi Ali, she will persuade few Muslims to reconsider their religion. She came to the world's attention in 2004 after a Muslim terrorist murdered Theo van Gogh, with whom she had produced a brief film protesting the treatment of women under Islam. As an outspoken critic of Islam, Hirsi Ali has lived under constant threat, and I have deplored the failure of Western governments to accord her adequate protection.

Yet the spiritual emptiness of a libertine and cynic like Theo van Gogh can only repel Muslims. Muslims suffer from a stultifying spiritual emptiness, depicted most poignantly by the Syrian Arab poet Adonis (see Are the Arabs already extinct?, Asia Times Online, May 8, 2007).

Muslim traditional society cannot withstand the depredations of globalized culture, and radical Islam arises from a despairing nostalgia for the disappearing past. Why would Muslims trade the spiritual vacuum of Islam for the spiritual sewer of Dutch hedonism?

The souls of Muslims are in agony. The blandishments of the decadent West offer them nothing but shame and deracination. Magdi Allam agrees with his former co-religionists in repudiating the degraded culture of the modern West, and offers them something quite different: a religion founded upon love.

Only a few months ago it seemed fanciful to hail Benedict XVI as the leader of the West. I wrote late last year (The inside story of the Western mind, Asia Times Online, November 6, 2007):

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The West is not fighting individual criminals, as the left insists; it is not fighting a Soviet-style state, as the Iraqi disaster makes clear; nor is it fighting a political movement. It is fighting a religion, specifically a religion that arose in enraged reaction to the West. None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West's opinion leaders, comprehends this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I. Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address.

---

One does not fight a religion with guns (at least not only with guns) but with love, although sometimes it is sadly necessary to love one's enemies only after they are dead. The Church has lacked both the will to evangelize Muslims as well as the missionaries to undertake the task.

Benedict XVI, the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, has thought about the conversion of the Muslims for years, as I reported just before his election in 2005 (The crescent and the conclave, Asia Times Online, April 19, 2005).

Where will the Pope find the sandals on the ground in this new religious war? From the ranks of the Muslims themselves, evidently. Magdi Allam is just one convert, but he has a big voice. If the Church fights for the safety of converts, they will emerge from the nooks and crannies of Muslim communities in Europe.

The Pope also has in reserve the European youth movement "Communione e Liberazione", which he has nurtured for decades. Forty-thousand members turned out in 2005 when the then Cardinal Ratzinger addressed a memorial service in Milan for the movement's founder.

European Christianity may be reduced to a few coals glowing in the ashes, but it is not dead, only marginalized. If the Catholic youth of Europe are offered a great task - to evangelize the Muslims whose restlessness threatens to push Europe into social chaos - many of them may heed the call.

As I wrote in 2005, "Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity."

Today's Europeans stem from the melting-pot of the barbarian invasions that replaced the vanishing population of the Roman Empire. The genius of the Catholic Church was to absorb them.

If Benedict XVI can convert this new wave of invaders from North Africa and the Middle East, history will place him on a par with his great namesake, the founder of the monastic order the bears his name.

As Magdi Allam enjoins his new Church:

---

For my part, I say that it is time to put an end to the abuse and the violence of Muslims who do not respect the freedom of religious choice. In Italy there are thousands of converts to Islam who live their new faith in peace. But there are also thousands of Muslim converts to Christianity who are forced to hide their faith out of fear of being assassinated by Islamic extremists who lurk among us.

By one of those "fortuitous events" that evoke the discreet hand of the Lord, the first article that I wrote for the Corriere on September 3, 2003, was entitled "The new Catacombs of Islamic Converts". It was an investigation of recent Muslim converts to Christianity in Italy who decry their profound spiritual and human solitude in the face of absconding state institutions that do not protect them and the silence of the Church itself.

Well, I hope that the Pope's historical gesture and my testimony will lead to the conviction that the moment has come to leave the darkness of the catacombs and to publicly declare their desire to be fully themselves.

---

What the outcome will be of the evangelization of Muslims lies beyond all speculation: that is a matter of every soul's relationship to God.

But the global agenda has changed, not through the machinations of statesmen or the word-mincing of public intellectuals, but through the soul of a single man. Benedict's Regensburg challenge to Islam now demarcates the encounter between the West and the Muslim world, and nothing will be the same.

The Holy Father is on the cover of TIME magazine
in all its editions this week except in Europe
(where the cover is an ear of corn to illustrate
the cover story on "The clear energy myth'!]



The American Pope
By DAVID VAN BIEMA & JEFF ISRAELI

April 3, 2008


In 1984, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger dropped by New York City. He was heading home to the Vatican from a conference in Dallas and had saved a day to tour what was then still regularly called the Big Apple.

According to Father James O'Connor, who was acting as his chauffeur, Ratzinger sat in the front seat, the better to take in the hustle and buzz of the city. They visited the (Episcopal) Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the medievally furnished Cloisters museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On the way to Kennedy Airport, the car stalled halfway through the Midtown Tunnel, between Manhattan and Queens. O'Connor trudged to the Queens side, where he found a mechanic - who happened to be a Jordanian Catholic, recognized the Cardinal and rushed to his aid.

O'Connor recalls Ratzinger, up and running again, saying "There is every sort of person in New York, and they're all helpful." A few minutes later, just after he stepped out onto the curb at J.F.K., someone rear-ended the car, shattering the back window.

Despite such sweet and sour experiences (including one in 1988 that produced the memorable tabloid headline GAYS PROTEST VATICAN BIGGY), the Pope likes New York and what it stands for.

"I think he's really fascinated by the city and what it represents," says Raphaela Schmid, a Rome-based German with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, who knows him. "It's about people being two things at once, like Italian Americans or Chinese Americans. He's interested in that idea of coexistence."

That observation captures an often ignored side of the German-born Pope Benedict XVI, 80, on the eve of his first pontifical visit to the U.S. The trip, which begins in Washington on April 15 and ends in New York City on April 20, will present most Americans with their first opportunity to take the "new" Pope's measure.

Some American Catholics already feel they are familiar with Benedict and his values and coexistence is not an association that immediately crops up.

Benedict clearly lacks his predecessor's charismatic affability and sense of the dramatic gesture. His conservative writings suggest a divergence from a large part of the U.S. laity, whom he regards as victims of the moral relativism he feels pervades Western culture.

Given his past role as the Vatican's enforcer of orthodoxy, he might not seem to have any particular affinity for the democratic, pluralistic values that constitute (on our good days) the American brand.

And yet that last perception is particularly flawed. A survey of the 80-year-old Pontiff's writings over the decades and testimonies from those who know him suggests that Benedict has a soft spot for Americans and finds considerable value in his U.S. church, the third largest Catholic congregation in the world.

Most intriguing, he entertains a recurring vision of an America we sometimes lose sight of: an optimistic and diverse but essentially pious society in which faiths and a faith-based conversation on social issues are kept vital by the Founding Fathers' decision to separate church and state.

It's not a stretch to say the Pope sees in the U.S.--or in some kind of idealized version of it--a civic model and even an inspiration to his native Europe, whose Muslim immigrants raise the question of religious and political coexistence in the starkest terms.

Says David Gibson, author of The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World: "As he tours the U.S., it's important to underscore that his philosophy has more consonances with our culture than meet the eye - some very profound."

What, if anything, does this American attachment mean, either about him or about how he sees America's place in the world? It does not necessarily translate into uncritical support for the Bush Administration's foreign policies or into willingness to overlook the U.S. Catholic Church's sexual-abuse scandal.

But an examination of his lifetime of visiting and writing about the U.S. helps provide insight into what drives the Pope: his intellectual curiosity, his search for national models that can accommodate Catholicism as the vibrant minority in a position that he feels may be its next world role and his firm commitment to combine faith with practical reason.

It is also a rather touching valentine and a testament to Benedict's surprising openness toward a very different culture that he sees us as the world's best example of how such things can be done.

Out of the Ruins

The Pope's admiration for the U.S. has deep roots. Unlike John Paul II, who was intellectually and theologically fully formed when he met his first Americans, Ratzinger first observed them when he was 18.

As a defeated German soldier, he spent three months in a POW camp but was then allowed to return home and witness one of the great modern acts of charity, the rebuilding of Germany by an occupying force that could just as easily have exacted revenge.

Cardinal William Levada, the Californian whom Benedict tapped as his successor at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), says, "He's of a generation that remembers, gratefully."

Ratzinger's next American exposure came during the momentous Second Vatican Council in Rome, from 1962 to '65. Then in his early 30s, Ratzinger was a theological wunderkind who made his name behind the scenes.

The U.S. delegation, meanwhile, was embroiled in a contentious debate over religious freedom. Conservatives opposed it: states must sponsor faith, and the faith should be Roman Catholic. The Americans argued that religious liberty was morally imperative and - from experience -that in a multireligious state, Catholicism could best thrive when the government could not play favorites.

The Council sided with them, and Ratzinger, anticipating a world composed of jostling religious pluralities, heartily approved. In a 1966 analysis, he wrote, "In a critical hour, Council leadership passed from Europe to the young Churches of America and [their allies]," who "were really opening up the way to the future."

After Vatican II, Ratzinger embarked on a more conservative path. The embrace of religious plurality, in his view, did not extend to an acceptance that all roads to salvation are equal or to a license for democracy within his church.

During 24 years as the prefect of the CDF, Ratzinger earned the nickname "God's Rottweiler," savaging suspected heresies, mostly liberal ones, and ending the careers of several old Vatican II allies. Americans were not exempt. [The verb 'savaging' is patently wrong and unfair to apply to the relatively mild sanctions that Cardinal Ratzinger and the CDF handed out - basically, to forbid the dissenting theologian from teaching his questioned views in a Catholic institution; this has ended no one's career - in fact, almost all of the handful of theologians so disciplined went on to greater success as dissident Catholics.]

But he also came to respect the way Catholic leaders in the U.S. went about their business. A current (non-American) CDF official notes that the U.S. Church is the only one that keeps a "serious" doctrinal office rather than an unthinking rubber stamp or an old-boys' club; when conflicts arise, its bishops are actually prepared to discuss them. Moreover, says Levada, "he seems to recognize that we're plain speakers. We don't hide behind words."

The Pope also admires the Americans' role as, in the words of one cleric, "intellectual first responders," especially as the country's great network of Catholic hospitals wrestles with novel problems of medical ethics.

"Through the great sphere of worldly experience that the Church has in America," Benedict wrote, "as well as through her faith experience, decisive influences can be passed on."

He has shown his comfort with the direct and thoroughly American approach by appointing Americans to the No. 1 and No. 3 spots in his powerful former office.

The most rapt expression of the Pope's enthusiasm for the U.S. came in a high-minded 2004 dialogue with the president of the Italian Senate, Marcello Pera, published as the book Without Roots.

It bemoans the European Union's refusal to acknowledge Christianity in a draft constitution, and Pera wonders about bringing back some kind of multi-denominational "Christian civil religion."

In response, Ratzinger cites Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and makes the case that America's Founding Fathers were pious men of different denominations who wrote the First Amendment prohibiting state establishment (that is, sponsorship) of religion precisely because sponsorship would stifle all non-established creeds - which they hoped would achieve full and varied flower.

Of course, no such bloom would occur if the American soil were not already faith-saturated. But Ratzinger believes in America's "obvious spiritual foundation," its natural, Puritan-instilled DNA.

He is well aware that this is eroding; he thinks we watch too much TV and fears that American secularization is proceeding at an "accelerated pace." But he insists that there is a "much clearer and implicit sense" in the U.S. than in Europe of a morality "bequeathed by Christianity."

He has also given earnest thought to the mechanics of this civil religion, specifying that to affect the moral consensus, it is not enough for Catholics to rub shoulders with other Christians; they must translate their concerns from doctrinal language into a "public theology" accessible to all.

His American Flock

It may be that Benedict, who has sometimes seemed ready to trade a larger, lukewarm flock for a small, fervent one, is studying how to be small effectively.

Says a church official whose thoughts usually reflect his boss's: "The American church has always had to live the minority experience, and that's where the universal church is headed."

In fact, the American church has not really shrunk much. At 24% of the population, Catholics remain a pivotal voting bloc, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania, where they appear to favor Hillary Clinton by sizable margins.

A recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that a quarter of the country's cradle Catholics had left the fold. But they are being replaced by a few converts and a lot of (Mass attending!) Hispanic immigrants, and remarkably, such churn is about par across the American religious landscape.

Although the Catholic priest shortage continues in the U.S., the priest-abuse scandals have not sparked a massive parishioner exodus. (Benedict is expected to address the topic on this trip, but there have been no leaks as to how.)

Perhaps out of relief that he has been writing encyclicals about love and charity rather than heresy, U.S. Catholics seem to be treating him a lot like former Pontiffs: handing him a 70% approval rating while continuing to ignore Church teaching on birth control and abortion. [This could, in fact, describe Catholicism in the Western world today - where most Catholics are, in practice, cafeteria Catholics. A recent poll in Poland about attitudes to John Paul II shows that despite virtually unanimous approval of John Paul II, a shockingly low 30% or something share the Church teachings on primacy-of-life and sanctity-of-marriage issues.]

In any case, Benedict often seems less interested in scolding American Catholics than in talking up "new religious communities ... being formed who quite consciously aim at a complete fulfillment of the demands of religious life."

In the U.S., that could mean schools like Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, Calif.; Christendom College in Front Royal, Va.; and Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Fla. The numbers are tiny - the three colleges combined claim some 1,200 undergrads - but they are precisely the kind of eruptions of non-state-related religious vitality at which he thinks we excel.

There are times when Benedict's love affair with American religious pluralism seems a bit naive, especially when it clashes with his non-negotiable doctrinal stands. Without Roots had wonderful things to say about Protestantism as the genius of American religiosity and burnished the alliance between Catholic conservatives and American Evangelicals against abortion.

But in 2000 and more acidly in 2007 (after he became Pope), the Vatican released documents describing Protestant churches as suffering from ecclesiastical "defects," adding that "it is difficult to see how the title of 'Church' could possibly be attributed to them." Some of Benedict's new allies were a bit stunned. [What's to be stunned about? Level-minded non-Catholic Christians took it for what it was: The CDF was re-stating what Vatican-II declared, and the ecclesiological distinction - basic to Catholic doctrine - does not take anything away from the inherent Christian value of the Protestant confessions. The Pope has not let it stand in the way of appreciating the Protestant confessions for their achievements.]

When Benedict zings the Protestants or his proxies zap scientific atheists, he is actually engaging in cultural pluralism American-style, which resembles a political talk show more than a stately seminar on the Bill of Rights.

The desire to keep talking while airing real differences may also be influencing his policy toward Islam (which, as the Vatican noted in March, has just replaced Catholicism as the world's most populous faith). After a startling 2006 speech in which he quoted a source calling Muhammad evil, prompting enraged extremists to burn churches and kill a nun in Somalia, Benedict entered into a dialogue with Islamic clerics who sent an open letter expressing a more conciliatory if sometimes critical response.

None of the parties are departing from their theology, but out of frankness, a tenuous bridge seems to have been built.

This may hold some implicit lessons about how Benedict feels the U.S. and its allies should interact with Islam.

The Pope has refused to accept pre-emptive war as just, and a confidant recalls him shaking his fists and shouting "Basta!" -Enough! - back in the early days of the Iraq war. He may be trying to model a clash of civilizations without bloodshed.

As Roberto Fontolan, the Vatican-savvy spokesman of the lay group Communion and Liberation, puts it, "Let's not talk about dogma. Or whether my God is better than your God. Let's talk about reason that we both have as a gift from God. What does it tell us?"

Benedict's Quest

Reason is a word that surfaces repeatedly in conversations about the Pope and the U.S. Benedict's critics regularly accuse him of Vatican II revisionism - of downplaying the idea that Catholics may legitimately balance church teaching against the demands of their conscience. More broadly, they accuse him of minimizing the degree to which the Holy Spirit led the council to make substantial changes in the faith.

But he remains true to the Vatican II precept of complementing blind piety that prevailed in the church before the 1960s with the rationalism of the Enlightenment and thus with modernity.

He is hardly the first: John Paul II described faith and reason as the twin wings that lift the church. And yet a balanced takeoff has remained elusive. The U.S. is one of the few places where it seems to happen regularly.

"America is simultaneously a completely modern and a profoundly religious place. In the world, it is unique in this," says a senior Vatican official. "And Ratzinger wants to understand how those two aspects can coexist."

Almost all the things the Pope likes about us - our faith in the real value of plainspokenness, our pluralistic piety and even our wrangles around applying religiously grounded moral principles to increasingly abstruse science - can be understood in light of this quest. If he finds answers in the U.S., they could help define his papacy.

When he arrives on U.S. soil on April 15, we in the press will no doubt be parsing Benedict's every sentence for his opinions on U.S. policy or remonstrance of American morals.

But the most important waves emanating from this contact may reverberate well beyond tomorrow's news cycle. John Paul II and the U.S. played as anticommunist co-leads on the 20th century stage.

This Pope, more a student of global drama than an eager protagonist, knows that rising religious conflict may be the 21st century's great challenge.

He also appears to sense that American power alone won't solve it -but that the power of American values still might. In rummaging through our founding precepts for a path for his own purposes, he might find something important for us to remember too.

=====================================================================

Wow! To come upon two articles (Spengler's from Asia Times and this one) - in the same hour - that both present Benedict XVI the way we admirers (who at the same time have been studying the Pope and his record as much as we can) see him, is exhilarating!

This time, we can all thank David von Biema and Jeff Israely for an admirable overview of the Pope's thinking and attitude about the United States on the eve of his visit. Especially since I still have a bad taste from the last Von Biema-Israely article on him, and more of Israely's subsequent 'savaging', to use his term. Would that more articles like this one - not based on swallowing facile preconceptions
uncritically - will appear in the US general media at this time.

How ironic that Davuid Gibson, the one American author they cite - with a positive statement about Benedict - in an article entitled "The American Pope' has been saying in his pre-visit articles in the general press that this Pope is 'foreign' to America - foreign both to Americans, and foreign in knowing little about teh United States.

BTW, considering that the Holy Father has been in teh United States five times before, I hope more previously unpublished stories about those visits - like the the delightful opening anecdote of this article - will surface.

VATICAN STATEMENT ABOUT
THE NEW GOOD FRIDAY PRAYER
FOR THE JEWS


The Vatican today released the anticipated statement from the Secretariat of State about the new Good Friday prayer for the Jews. The communique was issued in both Italian and English.

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Following the publication of the new Prayer for the Jews for the 1962 edition of the Roman Missal, some groups within the Jewish community have expressed disappointment that it is not in harmony with the official declarations and statements of the Holy See regarding the Jewish people and their faith which have marked the progress of friendly relations between the Jews and the Catholic Church over the last forty years.

The Holy See wishes to reassure that the new formulation of the Prayer, which modifies certain expressions of the 1962 Missal, in no way intends to indicate a change in the Catholic Church's regard for the Jews which has evolved from the basis of the Second Vatican Council, particularly the Declaration Nostra Aetate.

In fact, Pope Benedict XVI, in an audience with the Chief Rabbis of Israel on 15 September 2005, remarked that this document "has proven to be a milestone on the road towards the reconciliation of Christians with the Jewish people."

The continuation of the position found in Nostra Aetate is clearly shown by the fact that the prayer contained in the 1970 Missal continues to be in full use, and is the ordinary form of the prayer of Catholics.

In the context of other affirmations of the Council - on Sacred Scripture (Dei Verbum, 14) and on the Church (Lumen Gentium, 16) - Nostra Aetate presents the fundamental principles which have sustained and today continue to sustain the bonds of esteem, dialogue, love, solidarity and collaboration between Catholics and Jews.

It is precisely while examining the mystery of the Church that Nostra Aetate recalls the unique bond with which the people of the New Testament is spiritually linked with the stock of Abraham and rejects every attitude of contempt or discrimination against Jews, firmly repudiating any kind of anti-Semitism.

The Holy See hopes that the explanations made in this statement will help to clarify any misunderstanding. It reiterates the unwavering desire that the concrete progress made in mutual understanding and the growth in esteem between Jews and Christians will continue to develop.

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John Allen's insta-comment on the above, from his on-and-off daily column which is on today:

Vatican fence-mending campaign
with Jews picks up steam
4/408


Efforts to mute criticism of a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews in the old Latin liturgy of the Catholic Church, which have escalated ever since Pope Benedict XVI announced the revival of the Latin Mass last July, intensified this week.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops announced two additions to the program of Pope Benedict while he’s in the United States in mid-April, both directed at Jews.

After a general April 17 session with 200 leaders of other faiths in Washington, D.C., the Pope will also meet briefly in private with the Jewish delegation. On April 18, Benedict will make a stop at New York’s Park East Synagogue, located near the Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations.

While the official motive is for the Pope to offer greetings for Passover, which begins on April 19, the clear subtext would seem to be a desire to reassure Jews that the Pope remains committed to Catholic/Jewish dialogue, despite recent turbulence.

Today, the Vatican released the text of a statement from the Secretariat of State, its central administrative authority, asserting that the Good Friday prayer does not signal any change in the Church’s commitment to better relations with Jews.

The statement was released in both Italian and English, in part so that it would be readily understood by Jewish readers, but in part, too, suggesting that the timing is related to the Pope's upcoming trip to the United States.

Benedict's decision to approve the old Latin Mass for wider use was never intended, papal spokespersons have repeatedly said, as a statement about Catholic/Jewish relations, but rather as an intra-Catholic stimulus to a stronger sense of traditional Catholic identity.

Nevertheless, revival of a Good Friday prayer was interpreted by some Jewish groups as a retreat from the outreach associated with the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and the papacy of John Paul II.

Responding to those concerns, Benedict XVI issued a revised version of the prayer, removing pejorative language about Jews but preserving the reference to conversion.

Several Jewish leaders and organizations, as well as some Catholic veterans of dialogue with Judaism, signalled diappointment with the result.

Today's statement attempt to offer an official framework for interpreting the pope's intent with the revised prayer.

(As a bit of insider baseball, it’s interesting to note that the Vatican clearly wanted this statement to be perceived as coming from the very highest level, representing the personal will of the pope – hence it was issued by the Secretariat of State, not the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, even though it arguably addresses a matter of Catholic teaching.

It’s a small but telling sign of the ascendancy of Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Secretary of State, who has successfully consolidated a remarkable degree of power and visibility in his office.)

[Allen's parenthetical comment seems to be overstating the significance of the provenance for the statement - part of what seems to be a general media hypothesis about Bertone's 'power'. The statement had to come fom the Secretariat of State because it involves diplomacy and general relations of the Vatican, rather than a question of doctrine! In fact, the theological explanation for Pope Benedict's revision was given by Cardinal Walter Kasper, who heads a curial committee for relations with Judaism, not by the CDF.

At the same time, Cardinal Kasper's explanation that the prayer does not call for active and present conversion but for eschatological conversion should be mentioned in every story about this dispute. It is very central to this Pope's thinking and why he used Biblical and traditional Catholic prayer language in his revision of the prayer.]

[Allen then posts the English text of the Vatican statement].



From the wire services:


Vatican seeks to reassure Jews
on Good Friday prayer
By Philip Pullella



VATICAN CITY, April 4 (Reuters) - The Vatican tried to reassure Jews on Friday that a new prayer that some saw as a call for their conversion did not indicate a change in the Church's high regard for Jews or its contempt for anti-Semitism.

A statement which Vatican sources said Pope Benedict had approved and partly drafted stressed that the new prayer used in some Good Friday services "in no way intends to indicate a change in the Catholic Church's regard for the Jews."

Catholic and Jewish sources said the statement had been delivered to the secretariat of the chief rabbinate of Israel.

The Vatican had been keen to try to defuse the controversy with Jews over the Good Friday prayer before Pope Benedict's first trip to the United States as Pontiff later this month.

The German Pope will meet American Jewish leaders and make a brief visit to the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan.

In February the Vatican revised a contested Latin prayer used by traditionalist Catholics on Good Friday, the day marking Jesus Christ's crucifixion, removing a reference to Jewish "blindness" over Christ and deleting a phrase asking God to "remove the veil from their hearts."

Jews criticized the new version because it still says they should recognize Jesus Christ as the savior of all men. It asks that "all Israel may be saved" and Jews said it kept an underlying call to conversion that they had wanted removed.

Friday's Vatican statement said the Church's relations with Jews were still based on the landmark 1965 Second Vatican Council statement Nostra Aetate, which repudiated the concept of collective Jewish guilt for Christ's death and began dialogue.

"Nostra Aetate presents the fundamental principles which have sustained and today continue to sustain the bonds of esteem, dialogue, love, solidarity and collaboration between Catholics and Jews," the statement said.

The Church "rejects every attitude of contempt or discrimination against Jews, firmly repudiating any kind of anti-Semitism," it added.

Rabbi David Rosen, chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC) and a leading Jewish interlocutor with the Vatican, welcomed the statement but said he had hoped for an explicit reference to proselytism.

"It is implicit in the statement that esteem and solidarity imply that proselytism is inappropriate but I would have been happier if this had been said explicitly," Rosen, who is based in Jerusalem, told Reuters.

The Vatican said it "hopes the explanations made in this statement will help to clarify any misunderstanding. It reiterates the unwavering desire that the concrete progress made in mutual understanding and the growth in esteem between Jews and Christians will continue to develop."

======================================================================


Since Philip Pulella was one of the few in the Anglophone MSM who reported Cardinal Walter Kasper's theological explanation for Pope Benedict's version of the Good Friday prayer for the Jews, it is even more inexplicable that he omits to include at least a one-sentence reference to it. After all, it tells us clearly what guided the Holy Father in making the revisions the way he did. It is bad enough that the explanation was largely ignored elsewhere - especially by the objecting Jews.

In the interests of presenting a more complete picture over this dispute, I will re-post here a translation of Luigi Accattoli's interview with Cardinal Walter Kasper published in Corriere della Sera on February 8, the day after Osservatore Romano unveiled the text of the new prayer.

This story, the Reuters article based on it and other reactions are posted on Page 163 of this thread.




Cardinal Kasper says: 'No offense!
The text comes from St. Paul'
By Luigi Accattoli


VATICAN CITY - "We think that, reasonably, this prayer cannot be an obstacle to dialog because it reflects the faith of the Church, and moreover, the Jews have texts in their own liturgical prayers that we Catholics are not happy about. We should accept and respect each other's differences."

Thus, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who is the top Vatican official responsible for dialog with the Jews, commented on the protest of the Rabbinical Assembly of Italy and other Jewish representatives on the new prayer 'for the Jews' published yesterday by the Holy See.


Eminence, the fact that bothers the Jews is that this prayer asks for their conversion...
That is true, but this is an invocation that must be understood according to the source of the words used to formulate the prayer: it is a text of the Apostle Paul and expresses the eschatological hope - that is, referred to the 'final times', to the end of history - that even the people of Israel enter the Church when all other peoples will also do so. It expresses an ultimate hope, not a proposal to evangelize the Jews."


The prayer asks God that "as all peoples enter into the fullness of your Church, all Israel may be saved". So it does ask that Israel enter the Church...
You can check it out - the words are taken from Paul's Letter to the Romans, 11, 25-26, which says "Until the full number of the Gentiles comes in, and thus all Israel will be saved".

Scripture is a normative text for us. No one should take offense that we are faithful to our Scriptures, when it is clear - as it is in this case - that we do not have an offensive intention.


The prayer also asks that Jewish hearts may be enlightened "to recognize Jesus Christ as the savior of all men".
With that statement, we testify to our faith in Jesus Christ. For us, Jesus is the Christ - the Messiah - and the Son of God. The Jews do not recognize him as such - our difference on this point is constitutive, basic, and such differences must be reciprocally accepted.

We will dialog with all our power but certainly, the objective of dialog cannot be to nullify our constitutive differences.


If the prayer formulated for Paul VI's missal had been used, this problem would not arise... [There it is, the first question that came to my mind when I first read the new prayer!]
That's true, but the Pope preferred to compose a prayer that calls attention to the centrality of Christ, as he did in the Dominus Iesus declaration of 2000. The Holy Father is very vigilant about this aspect of our faith, which is of course, central to it.

I must say I do not understand why the Jews cannot accept that we are free to formulate our prayers as we wish.


It might be because of the memory of forced conversions in the past, don't you think?
Indeed, terrible things were done in the past to force Jews to convert. We understand the bad memories associated with facts for which the Church has already asked forgiveness.

But it is more difficult to understand why terrifying to our own faith cannot be accepted when that is expressed with full respect for the faith of others.

=====================================================================

I found it admirable how Cardinal Kasper could explain everything in so few sentences that are clear, unequivocal and unexceptionable.

Posted today in the preceding page:

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The mustard seed in global strategy - Spengler of Asia Timescomments on Magdi C. Allam's
conversion in the light of what he sees as Benedict XVI's global strategy with respect to Islam,
starting with Regensburg. Spengler on B16 has had fresh insights and is always a must-read.



The American Pope - TIME magazine does an unexpectedly positive and compelling cover story
on the Holy Father which explores his known thinking about the United States. A model for objective
reporting on the Pope without the usual unexamined prejudices and assumptions.

The Vatican releases statement on the new Good Friday prayer for the Jews - Plus John allen's insta-comment,
the Reuters report, and a re-post of Luigi Accattoli's Correire della Sera article on Feb.8 in which
Cardinal Kasper gives the theological and Scriptural basis for the Pope's revision.

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The America of Benedict XVI,
a Model for Catholic Europe

The agenda of the papal voyage to the United States.
And a major study by the Pew Forum on religion in the nation where religious adherence
is constantly changing, each faith losing or gaining followers daily.

by Sandro Magister




ROME, April 4, 2008 – When, in mid-April, Benedict XVI lands at the military airport of Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, the United States will take the lead in the list of the countries most visited by the Popes, tying Poland for the number of visits, with nine, and Turkey for the number of Popes who have visited, with three (starting with Paul VI).

John Paul II, a ceaseless traveler, 'made the rounds' all over the United States. During his first visit, in 1979, he visited seven cities in six days, delivering 63 speeches.

The more sedate [and 21 years older now than JPII was in 1979] Joseph Ratzinger, who will also visit for seven days [only five days actually, since April 15, he arrives in DC but his first official event is not until the next day, and April 21 is when he gets back to Rome, after leaving New York Sunday evening], will indeed visit only two cities: Washington – where he will meet George W. Bush at the White House on April 16 – and New York. He will deliver just 11 speeches.

But the mere announcement of at least two of these are already causing jitters, after the current Pope showed the world in Regensburg to what daredevil extremes*[?!] he is willing to go. These will be the speech on April 17, in Washington, to representatives of Judaism, Islam, and other religions, and the one on April 18, in New York, to the General Assembly of the United Nations.

*[Magister's translator uses the phrase 'daredevil extremes' to translate 'spericolati affondi' in the original Italian, but I think the correct sense is 'fearless thrusts', even if 'affondi' refers primarily to plunging into waterous depths.]

In Regensburg, Benedict XVI denounced as the chief error of today's world its separation of faith from reason,- which he sayshas happened in ISlam - and the loss of faith and reason, which he instead imputed to the dominant culture in Europe and America.

It's a good bet that he will go even farther at the podium of the UN, and will offer the world a primer on peace founded upon natural law, on the inviolable rights engraved in the conscience of each person, but also written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that marks its 60th birthday in 2008.

This is an easy forecast to make, if one only looks at what the Pope said last February 29, while receiving the new U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, Mary Ann Glendon.

For Benedict XVI the United States is a model to be imitated by all. It is the country born and founded "on the self-evident truth that the Creator has endowed each human being with certain inalienable rights," among the first of which is liberty.

With this Pope, the United States is no longer a target of 'scolding' by Vatican authorities. Until a few decades ago, it was considered (at the Vatican) as the temple of Calvinist capitalism, of social Darwinism, of the electric chair, with and an interfering trigger in every corner of the world.

Today these paradigms seem to have been set aside to a great extent. The Church of Rome vigorously contested the military attack on the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. Even Benedict XVI as Cardinal Ratzinger.

But it is not now pressing for the withdrawal of the (Coalition )soldiers. It wants them to remain there "on a peacekeeping mission," including the defense of the Christian minorities.

In any case, the general judgment on the United States has shifted to the positive, to the same extent that judgments on Europe have become more pessimistic.

To Ambassador Glendon, Benedict XVI said that he admires "the American people's historic appreciation of the role of religion in shaping public discourse," a role that in other places – read, Europe – is "contested in the name of a straitened understanding of political life."

With the consequences that stem from this on the points that are most crucial to the Church, like "legal protection for God's gift of life from conception to natural death," marriage, the family.

The Church of Rome has more often found itself in harmony with the Republican presidents, from Reagan to Bush Sr. and Jr., than it has with the Democrat Clinton, precisely because of the greater dedication of the former to safeguarding life and promoting religious freedom in the world.

In Cairo in 1994, and in Beijing in 1995, at the two international conferences convened by the United Nations on the demographic question and on women, both held during the Clinton presidency, the delegation of the Holy See fought tenaciously against the United States and Europe, which wanted to incentivize abortion in order to reduce births in poor countries.

And who led the Vatican team in Beijing? The same Mary Ann Glendon, a former feminist, a law professor at Harvard University later appointed by John Paul II as President of the pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, who is today the ambassador to the Holy See. [And who led the US delegation in Beijing? Hillary Clinton!]

Glendon's speech in Beijing fell like a sharp sword: "Does the conference want to combat the violence suffered by women? Very well. Then let's take note of this. Among these forms of violence are mandatory birth control programs, forced sterilizations, pressure to abort, sex selection and the consequent destruction of female fetuses."

In a collection of her essays just released in Italy, published by Rubbettino, Mary Ann Glendon again criticizes what happened in Beijing and in the following years. She accuses rich countries of cutting off financial aid, preferring the shortcut of abortion and zero cost population curbs.

Above all, she accuses the secular Western elites of replacing the "full, rich, balanced" language of the universal declaration on human rights with the "mediocre jargon" of individual desires without duties or responsibilities. Her indictment has been republished by L'Osservatore Romano.

For these same reasons, on multiple occasions in recent years, the Vatican authorities have criticized the UN and the European Union. This does not take away from the fact that the Holy See continues to trust in and support the United Nations as a peaceful means of solving international controversies.

The Holy See is present at the UN as a "permanent observer state." It cannot vote, but it has the right to speak and to reply. The campaign for its removal, orchestrated a few years ago by non-governmental organizations committed to population control, annoyed over the opposition from the Vatican, produced the opposite effect.

In July of 2004, the UN General Assembly unanimously approved a revolution that not only confirmed, but even reinforced the presence of the Holy See in the organization.

From the dais of the UN, Benedict XVI will speak to the entire world, in which Catholics are less than one sixth of the population. The Catholics are a minority in the United States - 70 million out of 300 million, or 23.9 percent, according to a very recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, conducted on a sample of 35,000 Americans.

But they have a significant presence nonetheless, much more so than the Catholics in Italy, and they belong to a strongly Christian country, with rates of religious participation much higher than in Europe.

In the presidential elections of 2004, Catholics played no small role in the reelection of George W. Bush. But the members of the hierarchy did not tell them how to vote, nor will they do so in the upcoming elections.

Pro-life Catholics are inclined to vote for the Republican John McCain, while Catholics in favor of peace and justice are for the Democrat Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. The Church authorities appreciate in any case the fact that all of the candidates have given a prominent place to the religious dimension.

Because that's the way the United States is. It is at the vanguard of modernity, but is also the most religious nation in the world. It is a model of separation between Church and state, while at the same time a country where religion plays a significant public role.

The study by the Pew Forum has found that the numbers of atheists and agnostics are very small, 1.6 and 2.4 percent respectively, in spite of the fact that they seem much more represented numerically in the media and more outspoken.

But the most relevant finding of the Pew study is something else: It is the extremely high number of American citizens who pass from one religious confession to another, or who are "reborn" to a new spiritual life while remaining in the same religion.

In no other nation in the world is the religious market so vibrant, and the competition so fierce. 44 percent of Americans over the age of 18 have changed their religious affiliation, some of them more than once, or have passed from unbelief to the faith, or vice versa.

Among the Protestant confessions, to which about half of Americans belong, a sharp decrease is underway among those of "liberal" orientation in matters of individual rights. But the "evangelical" puritan groups are increasing, some of which have strongly anti-Papist traditions, but have now drawn closer to the Church of Rome in the name of a common battle in defense of life.

One out of three American Catholics who grew up in the Catholic Church has left it. But these losses are compensated by the acquisition of new converts and by the arrival of many Catholic immigrants from various countries, above all from Latin America.

This immigrant contribution is of such proportions that it is changing the face of Catholicism in the United States. And Rome understands this very well: At the last consistory, on November 24, 2007, Benedict XVI made Daniel DiNardo a cardinal.

DiNardo is the archbishop of Galveston-Houston in Texas, a diocese never before honored with the purple, but where the number of Catholics is on a dizzying increase, as it is in other dioceses that are prime immigrant destinations, as Dallas, where there were 200,000 Catholics 20 years ago and more than a million now, most of them having come from Mexico.

If one also considers that Mexico is now the Latin American country in which the Catholic Church is most vigorous among young people as well - with an impressive blossoming of vocations to the priests and religious life - one can understand another new development in Catholicism in the United States: the decrease in the average age of its members.

Among Catholics over the age of 60, the great majority are white, but among those from 18 to 40 years old, almost half are "Latinos," meaning that they have come from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

These are fresh infusions that compensate for the abandonment of the Catholic Church on the part of young whites under the age of 30, the age group most extensively eroded by secularization.

In all of 2007, the New York Times put Benedict XVI on the front page only twice, compared to 25 times for John Paul II in the third year of his pontificate. But Papa Ratzinger will make up ground with his upcoming voyage.

The United States appears to him as very promising terrain for planting. The year after World Youth Day in 1993, the diocese of Denver recorded 2,000 new converts and in a percent rise in Mass attendance. Weary Catholic Europe should take a lesson.

____________


The survey on the U.S. religious landscape cited here is available in its entirety on the website of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:

> U.S. Religious Landscape Survey
religions.pewforum.org/

The following data are taken from that survey.

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RELIGION IN THE UNITED STATES, IN 2008

Percentages out of the total adult population:

CHRISTIANS 78.4
Protestants 51.3
"Evangelical" Churches 26.3
Mainline Churches 18.1
Historically black Churches 6.9
Cattolics 23.9
Mormons 1.7
Jehovah's Witnesses 0.7
Orthodox 0.6
Greek Orthodox <0.3
Russian Orthodox <0.3
Other <0.3
Other Christians 0.3

OTHER RELIGIONS 4.7
Jews 1.7
Reformed 0.7
Conservative 0.5
Orthodox <0.3
Other 0.3
Buddhists 0.7
Zen Buddhists <0.3
Theravada Buddhists <0.3
Tibetan Buddhists <0.3
Other 0.3
Muslims 0.6
Sunnis 0.3
Shiites <0.3
Other <0.3
Hindus 0.4
Other faiths 1.3
Unitarians and other liberal faiths 0.7
New Age 0.4
Native American religions <0.3
Other world religions <0.3

UNAFFILIATED 16.1
Secular unaffiliated 6.3
Unaffiliated but with religious sentiments 5.8
Agnostics 2.4
Atheists 1.6

DON'T KNOW / NO ANSWER 0.8


SOME FIGURES ON THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Out of 100 Catholics...
Whites 65
Latinos 29
Blacks 2
Asians 2
Other 2


Out of 100 Catholics over the age of 60...
Whites 83
Latinos 15

Out of 100 Catholics under the age of 40...
Whites 48
Latinos 45

Out of 100 Catholics...
Born in the U.S. 76
Born elsewhere 24

Out of 100 Catholics born outside of the U.S...
52 from Mexico
30 from other countries of Latin America
6 from Western Europe
5 from East Asia
2 from Eastern Europe
1 from Africa
4 from other countries

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