Pope
The Associated Press

He'll celebrate Mass in Yankee Stadium.

Featured Topic | Posted 32 weeks 3 days ago

On to New York: How are Catholics affected by the pope's visit?

Pope Benedict XVI's trip to America moves to New York today; he'll address the United Nations and celebrate Mass in Yankee Stadium. Already he has met with survivors of clergy sexual abuse and challenged Catholics not to limit their faith to the private sphere. How is the American church being affected by the pope's visit?

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Ben likes: The indispensable church

Michael Gerson/Washington Post

The point here is simple and radical: As the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton argued, men and women are either created in "the image of God" or they are "a disease of the dust." If human beings are merely the sum of their physical attributes -- the meat and bones of materiality -- they are easier to treat as objects of exploitation.

So Catholicism offers a second contribution: It is the main defender of human dignity against a utilitarian view of human worth. And the church has applied this high view of man with remarkable consistency -- to the unborn and the elderly, the immigrant and the disabled. Individual views on issues of life and death vary widely, even within the Catholic Church. But it is a good thing to have at least one global institution firmly dedicated to the proposition that every growing child, every person living in squalor or in prison, every man or woman approaching death or contemplating suicide or trapped in profound mental disability, every apparently worthless life is not really worthless at all.

An institution accused of superstition is now the world's most steadfast defender of rationality and human rights. It has not always lived up to its own standards, but where would those standards come from without it?

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Joel likes: Disquieting words for the faithful

E.J. Dionne/Washington Post

The most jarring word that Pope Benedict XVI is using during his visit to the United States is "countercultural." The American sense of that term is shaped by the 1960s: free love, drugs, hippies, rock music and rebellion. Needless to say, that's not what Benedict is preaching.

For myself, I admire Benedict's distinctly Catholic critique of radical individualism in both the moral and economic spheres, and his insistence that the Christian message cannot be divorced from the social and political realms.

Yet I do not see the "spirit of this age" as being quite so threatening to faith or human flourishing as Benedict seems to think. As the pope has acknowledged in the past, Catholicism has been enriched by its encounter with enlightenment thought. The church should not now close itself off to what our age has to teach about the equality of men and women or the virtues of more democratic structures in its internal life.

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