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By the time this piece gets into print, Pope Benedict XVI would be
winding up his first visit to the United States. He has been to the
US before but that was when he still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head
of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Early on this trip, on “Shepherd One,” a
chartered Alitalia airliner, on the way to the US, the Pope chose to
tackle the touchiest subject involving the Roman Catholic Church in
America, the sexual scandal involving priests and get it out of the
way so that he could concentrate on the main business of his visit.
Whether he laid the issue to rest, at least even
only during his visit, is perhaps asking too much of a hostile media
chewing on a juicy story. He formally addressed the issue during
mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. The apparent
hostility may be understood in the assessment of the television
reporter covering the visit. She said the Church at first took not
much notice of it, then suggested that it was an isolated case and
only afterwards admitted that it was a problem.
In his planeboard press conference, he said
steps have been taken to redress the problem. Seminaries have been
warned that pedophiles should be kept out of the priesthood. “We
are deeply ashamed and will do whatever is possible that this does
not happen in the future. The Church is also helping in the healing
and rehabilitation of victims. American dioceses have paid more that
$2 billion to victims in settlements.”
That the visit was not going to be a bed of
roses my be gathered from an observation by the TV commentator
covering the Pope’s arrival at Andrews Air Force Base in
Washington. In a near-derisive tone, she asked, “Is he going to
kiss the ground?” as if this was a strange and outlandish thing to
do. Her partner said that the late Pope John Paul II used to kiss
the ground after leaving the plane on his visits to his flock around
the world.
The Pope, this time, did not kiss the ground
after alighting from the plane. He was met by President George Bush.
It was the first time that President Bush met a dignitary at the
airport. Mr. Bush was accompanied by Mrs. Laura Bush and a daughter.
Much was also made of the Pope’s declining an
invitation to dinner at the White House because of a previous
engagement. Notice was said to have been given about this and the TV
commentator archly said that to an American, an invitation to a
White House dinner cannot be refused. Well, the Pope is not an
American.
American Catholics are about a quarter of the
population in the US. As Time observed, “Catholics remain a
pivotal voting bloc, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania,
where they appear to favor Hillary Clinton by sizable margins.”
Hillary’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, may have won a
second term, inspite a bruising sexual scandal, with the help of
Catholic voters.
Previous Popes probably acted and spoke because
Catholics were the majority in the world. However, last March, the
Vatican noted that Islam has replaced Catholicism as the leading
international faith. Now the Pope must learn to speak while in the
minority. He was against the invasion of Iraq, but today he talks
about Iraq in terms of protecting the Christian minority in that
country.
Time underscores why Pope Benedict feels close
to the US. “Reason is a word that surfaces repeatedly in
conversation about the Pope and the US. 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 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 US 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
Americans—their faith in the real value of plainspokeness, their
pluralistic piety and even their wrangles around applying
religiously grounded moral principles to increasingly abstruse a
science—can be understood in light of this quest. If he finds
answers in the US, they could help define his papacy.”
opinion@manilatimes.net
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