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	Pope Benedict XVI By Michael P. Riccards Times of Trenton April 12, 2008 http://www.nj.com/opinion/times/editorials/index.ssf?/base/news-0/120797317082130.xml&coll=5 When Pope Benedict XVI comes to the United States next week, the Church he visits will be different from what Pope John Paul II saw at the beginning of his reign. The U.S. is in deep military, financial and political trouble -- and it is a great nation at war with the forms of militant Islam of which the Pope himself is wary. He will meet with the lame-duck president, and he will try to figure out this strange new land that is so different from the rarefied cultures of Europe. Benedict, as was John Paul, seems to be fixated on warning that the Church is being overwhelmed by the forces of secularismm and atheism, or at least nonreligious consumerism. But secularism is not the major cause of disenchantment in the American Roman Catholic Church. The Church is sill hurt by the steady stream of pedophilia and other forms of sexual abuse and its attendant costs -- moral, fiscal and political. In addition, American consumer choice is oddly apparent in religious affiliations. More than 40 percent of us change our religious affiliation (or nonaffiliation). The major force keeping Catholic numbers up is the large number of Hispanics in the United States, many of them illegal. Those groups aside, the Catholic Church is losing adherents. Churches and schools are closing. In the midst of the turmoil, the Church in America has made it clear that it is especially hostile to gays, divorced Catholics, couples using birth control, those who do not link opposition to abortion to opposition to the Democratic Party, and efforts to increase the participation of the laity, especially women. Only one-third of Catholics in the U.S. are observant. The Catholic Church used to have schisms and heresies; now it has the faithful simply opting out. Churches can resist dogmatic er rors, but they cannot deal with a general sense that they are irrelevant to the people who used to be in the pews. The American Church has additional problems. The Catholic Church is a sacramental church, not a Scripture-based evangelical church. It requires priests to perform its most important rituals, especially the consecration of the Eu charist. It is for this reason the priest cannot be replaced by church elders or inspired speakers. The huge loss of priests, the rapid aging of the remaining men, and the closing of neighborhood parishes have created problems for the ties that bind and have burdened a shrinking group of weary priests. In facing those problems, the last two popes abandoned Pope Paul VI's emphasis on naming pastoral bishops and chose instead to select conservative company men to toe the new doctrinal lines. They often came with a strong conservative political agenda, insisting that Catholic politicians' views on abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and gay rights were more impor tant than their positions on social justice or peace and war. The America that Benedict will see is indeed a modern, wealthy nation, but it is not a secular country. Large segments of Americans, especially Protestants, are fundamentalists and have very active churches, indeed even megachurches. But Catholic Americans are still called by Vatican observers "cafeteria Catholics." They pick and choose what they will observe and believe. Their attitudes on abortion, birth control and gay rights are very similar to those of other white Americans in their in come groups. Benedict understands in many ways what is happening in the Church he is leading. And he is a knowledgeable and rather clear scholar on Church history and dogma, more so than his predecessor, who was influenced by the ob scure vocabulary of phenomenology. Still, Benedict is an admirer of the harsh St. Augustine rather than the more moderate St. Thomas Aquinas. His best-selling book on Jesus is really rather eng aging, and it shows how well Benedict knows the new scholarship and the old tenets. His concerns are the rise of antireligious feeling in his beloved Western civilization and the belligerence of militant Islam. In a remarkable interview, he lamented how the church conveys a sense of negativism, of a listing of things one cannot do in life, rather a sense of joy over the good news of the Gospels. Still, his pleas for a re turn to reason in discussions of faith came from the same man who for two decades was the bulldog of Vatican orthodoxy who terrorized the greatest theologians of his time. One of the reasons the church is having such a difficult time dealing with science, secularism and Islam is that the bright young thinkers in the church are intimidated into re citing the cliches of the old orthodoxy. The greatest theologian of the church, Thomas Aquinas, welcomed the insights of Aristotle and his Jewish and Muslim commenta tors into his brilliant encyclopedic work, and the church lived off of his intellectual capital for centuries. But even he was excommunicated for his views. Benedict is an old man who must garner his strength and not globetrot. In some ways, he lives a lonely life. He remembers the pub lic adulation for the actor-pope John Paul II, the special ties the latter seemed to have with the young, the delight of the people with his sense of mood and ges ture. In contrast, Benedict is hemmed in. He cannot be even more conservative than John Paul, who was really more conservative than most realized. He cannot turn to the left, as John XXIII did, for as he approaches age 81, he cannot alter his views, his instincts or his Church to accommodate that church to the dissidents. So he will be respectfully received as he should be. He will say Mass in the most elegant style, and will remind us of the better angels of our nature. But in the end, American Catholics will do their own thing: They will baptize their children, attend Mass periodically and bury their loved ones in sacred ground. But they will remain Americans in so many ways -- cafeteria Catholics -- which is another definition for the use of their own reason and conscience, and perhaps self-interest and lethargy.
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