The End of the Caricature

Forty-eight hours into his visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI had done something remarkable: he had successfully buried the cartoon Joseph Ratzinger, a nasty caricature created decades earlier by his theological enemies and subsequently marketed to the world press. From his first moments at Andrews Air Force Base, however, it was clear that this was no hard-edged theological enforcer, no Rottweiler. Instead of the cartoon Ratzinger, America was introduced to a modest, friendly man, a grandfatherly Bavarian with exquisite manners and a shock of unruly white hair, full of affection and admiration for the United States.

Nor was Ratzinger's cartoon image the only thing crumbling on the brilliant spring morning of April 16, when President George W. Bush formally welcomed the pope to America. Forty-five years before, a White House fearful of the political backlash from anti-Catholic prejudice insisted that a brief meeting in Rome between President Kennedy and Pope Paul VI be described as informal and unofficial. Now an evangelical Texas Methodist pulled out all the ceremonial stops to welcome the Bishop of Rome on the south lawn of the White House—and the Bishop of Rome, a former American POW, could be seen singing the refrain of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" along with the U.S. Army choir. It all seemed a very long way indeed from the days when the Know Nothings bludgeoned the marble sent by Pope Pius IX for the Washington Monument and threw the fragments into the Potomac. What historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr., used to call the deepest prejudice in American history—anti-Catholicism—was largely a thing of the past, save in the fever swamps where ancient bigotries and hatreds fester.

The transformation of the papal image was complete when Benedict XVI surprised everyone (including many senior churchmen) by meeting privately for conversation and prayer with five Boston-area victims of clergy sexual abuse. On the flight to America the pope had forthrightly seized control of this issue, speaking of his own "shame" over the behavior of priests who had abused the young; he later acknowledged the parallel and related disgrace of bishops who had failed in their duty to protect the flock. Still, it took that meeting with those who had suffered at the hands of something both they and he loved—the Catholic Church—to drive home the point that Benedict XVI was not just a friendly scholar. By meeting, praying and even crying with those who had been deeply hurt, Benedict made unmistakably plain what those who had known him already knew: that he is a man with a pastor's heart and a true priest's compassion.

That pastoral touch continued to be displayed throughout the six days of Benedict's visit to New York. His masterful sermon in St. Patrick's Cathedral—in which he used the building's stained glass, its symmetry, and the countervailing tensions in its stonework as metaphors for the life of the Church—was a brilliant, evocative exercise in the preacher's art and a useful reminder to pastors of all denominations that "preaching up," rather than "preaching down," is the way to inspire and nourish. The pope's reception by 25,000 young people at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers made clear that, while his is a different form of magic, he shares with the pyrotechnic John Paul II the capacity to call the younger generation to lives of spiritual and moral grandeur. Then there was Ground Zero, and the pope's prayer for the conversion of the hearts of the violent and wicked. Nothing maudlin, nothing artificial, a candle lit in memory, and words of compassion to those who bear the burden of survival.

This magnificent Catholic theater shouldn't have been a distraction from the substance of Benedict XVI's message, but it was, almost inevitably. A world of sound bites and rapidly shifting images does not take easily to Professor Ratzinger, the pope who answers questions in complete and coherent paragraphs and whose demeanor is not electric. And that, perhaps, explains some of the inattention to this very substantive man of ideas in the three years since his election. Yet there are ideas Benedict proposed that are very much worth pondering in the afterglow of his American media debut, ideas about the way the world works, ideas about interreligious dialogue and ideas about Christian ecumenism. The common thread among them was the Benedictine project of turning noise into conversation through the recovery of moral reason.

Human Rights: The World's Moral Vocabulary
The primary purpose of Benedict's transatlantic pilgrimage was to address the General Assembly of the United Nations. He did not blast the Bush administration for Iraq, as some uninformed sources had declared he would during the previsit spin games. Nor did he conduct the international tour d'horizon that the diplomats of the Vatican might have preferred. Rather, Benedict XVI put on Professor Ratzinger and gave the General Assembly a thoughtful lecture on how to turn noise into conversation.