Pope arriving for first U.S. visit

Despite his reputation as a stern guardian of Catholic orthodoxy, Pope Benedict XVI's first papal visit to the United States will likely be upbeat and positive, say church leaders.

Benedict plans to arrive Tuesday evening at Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Washington and spend two days in the capital before departing Friday for New York City.

The visit, which is scheduled to include a Wednesday meeting with President Bush, a Friday address to the United Nations, and stadium Masses in Washington and New York, also will mark the creation 200 years ago of four Roman Catholic dioceses, including Philadelphia's.

Benedict will not visit Philadelphia, but 3,000 Catholics from the archdiocese will attend his Mass at Yankee Stadium next Sunday. Later that day, he returns to Rome.

"No one knows for sure what he's going to say" in his 11 prepared remarks over five days, the Rev. David O'Connell, president of Catholic University of America, said in an interview Thursday.

"But I can tell you what he's not going to do: He's not going to hammer us over the head," said O'Connell, who serves on the organizing committee.

O'Connell will be Benedict's host Thursday when the pontiff visits Catholic University to address the presidents of all the nation's Catholic colleges and universities.

As the Vatican's chief theologian under Pope John Paul II, Benedict - then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - was often caricatured as a harsh enforcer of Catholic orthodoxy and nicknamed "God's rottweiler."

No one knows that better than the Rev. Thomas Reese, a liberal Jesuit and author whose frequent challenges to Vatican orthodoxy cost him his job as editor of the Catholic weekly magazine America soon after Benedict's election three years ago.

"But the papacy changes the man," Reese, now a senior fellow at the Jesuits' Woodstock Seminary in Washington, said last week4/7-11. "He's got the whole world on his desk now."

Demand for tickets to the two stadium Masses has outstripped supply by 10-1, Reese said, as "people have warmed up to his personality, his smile, the way he has eye contact."

Benedict will sometimes travel in the famous "popemobile," a tall, glass-enclosed vehicle that allows him to stand and wave to crowds as his motorcade passes by. He might also use it to circle Nationals Park in Washington and Yankee Stadium in New York.

Other highlights on the schedule include a Sunday morning visit to the site of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and an address to the nation's Catholic bishops Wednesday - his 81st birthday - at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington.

Benedict, who has rankled some in the Jewish community by saying the church awaits the day when Jews will "say yes to Christ," recently added a Friday visit to a Manhattan synagogue to his itinerary.

By now, most people living around the capital have gotten the message that popes wear white.

Anticipating large crowds during his stay, the Washington subway system last week ran a TV commercial urging anyone attending the papal Mass at Nationals Park to take public transportation. In an attempt at levity, the commercial featured a grinning bobblehead doll of the pope riding the Metro. The doll, however, wore the red cap and cape of a cardinal.

The local news media had a field day with the gaffe, and the Archdiocese of Washington made it known it was not amused to see the spiritual leader of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics represented by a jiggling, six-inch-tall doll. The subway system apologized and yanked the ad.

Just what the Holy Father seeks to achieve with the visit was a matter of some discussion Thursday, when Reese and other Catholic scholars joined in a telephone news conference sponsored by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

"This is not a visit to the United States. It's to the United Nations," said the Rev. Richard Ryscavage, director of Fairfield University's Center for Faith in Public Life. "It's been traditional [for popes] to do this early in their papacy."

Ryscavage said he thought Benedict would use the U.N. address to speak to the needs of the world's poor in an era of globalization.

The Rev. David Hollenbach, director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College, said he saw Benedict as a "theologian pope" who would seek to "communicate certain fundamental realities of the Christian faith."

Hollenbach said he thought that if Benedict made something "distinctive" of the visit, "it will be the way he addresses issues of political and social concern, like environment and war."

Reese speculated that Benedict might want to speak to the relatively high rate at which American Catholics are departing the faith.

Although the U.S. Catholic population of 67 million is growing, Reese remarked that numerous studies show the growth is due largely immigration from Latin America.

The panelists were uncertain whether Benedict would mention the clergy sex-abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic Church in the United States this decade. Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the papal nuncio, or representative, to the United States has replied vaguely when asked.

Maryann Cusimano Love, a professor of politics at Catholic University, said she anticipated that the overarching theme of Benedict's trip would be a call to nonviolence and "the need to be peacemakers around the world . . . at home as well as in international conflicts."

"The heart of his message is that these are not divisible ways of looking at the world," Love said. "They're all interconnected.

Contact staff writer David O'Reilly at 215-854-5723 or

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