As mentioned below, the pope is coming! He arrives in Washington Tuesday afternoon and will be here until early Friday morning. I'm not one of the credentialed media that will be traipsing around after the pontiff this week, but I work with two ladies who will be part of the pack. And, yes, I am one of the blessed 45,000 who has a ticket to the Mass at Nationals Park, so you can look forward to reading some firsthand accounts in this space.
If anyone's looking for some up-to-the-minute Catholic commentary on the visit, here are two good sites:
pope2008.com (blog maintained by the National Catholic Register)
American Papist (see the link on the right)
There's enough punditry and polls in the mainstream media right now to satisfy anyone's appetite for analysis of what this visit by the Holy Father may mean for American Catholics. Suffice it to say that most of what I've read of the pre-visit press has been decidedly negative -- Catholics don't agree with the pope; the Church in America is still reeling from the sex abuse scandal of 2002; young people are going to send the Church back to the 1950s, etc. Yes, we're a fiercely independent bunch, and yes, there are lots of us in this country that struggle with the demands of what the Church -- and therefore Christ -- asks of us. But I'm a little more hopeful than all that.
There's a lot of good going on in the Church now. I'm excited by what I see among my peers. It's about time we start living like Catholics, and stop being ashamed of what sets us apart. Our 2,000 years of tradition have a lot to offer a world that's lost its sense of the divine. Other groups with much louder voices, larger bully pulpits and deadlier strategies are flooding the airwaves and the culture with messages of hate, relativity and intolerance.
The world needs the message of hope that can only be brought by the truth of Jesus Christ. The truth that the Catholic Church has taught for centuries -- we have a God who loves us infinitely and desires only that we love him back, by obeying his laws and loving him in the people we see around us.
That, and nothing more, is what I expect to hear from Pope Benedict this week.
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