This just in: The Pope is Catholic!

Rod, that was a well-deserved plug for John Allen of NCR.

What's infuriating for so many orthodox Catholics is how the "usual suspects" will be dragged out of mothballs and presented as authentic voices for the American church. Frances Kiesling, Charles Curran, Richard McBrien, Andrew Greeley, Joan Chittister, et. al. will all be dusted off and put out there "one more time" for another 5-minute shot at fame. Anna Quindlen, Maureen Dowd and other "professional Catholics" in the commentariat will once again don their old Catholic school uniforms and rework the same columns they wrote in 1995 (the year of the last Papal visit) excoriating the Church on the same, predictable litany of issues (women priests, married clergy, abortion, yada, yada, yada).

Of course, the media may surprise us. Would recommend that any enterprising reporter check out Allen's "Ten Catholic Megatrends" (an essay he wrote in December 2006 for NCR) and use that as a starting point to do some really fresh reporting on the Church, especially the role of lay ecclesiastical movements and the JPII generation. Come to think of it, I'll add this request to my prayer intentions for April :-)

"This will now be the eighth or ninth papal trip to the United States, depending on whether one counts John Paul II’s several hours of layover in Anchorage in 1981."

Actually Rod, I think the layover was in Fairbanks. The FIA has a Pope&President room where John Paul II and President Reagan met. My wife laments occasionally how her uncle forgot to pick her up to go see them meet.

Charles Cosimano: You say "JP2 was a tool of foreign policy, to be played like the stringed instrument that he was."

Could you explain yourself?

As I recall, JP-the-Great was the target of an assassin's bullet, part of the KGB's attempt to eliminate him as a factor in Poland's self-liberation. As an underground seminarian he risked death at the hands of the Nazis. As a priest and later an archbishop he outwitted the Communists who occupied his country and spied on his people. As Pope, he didn't hesitate to expend his media popularity to willingly be a "sign of contradiction" to the world. It's hard to see how someone so brave could be viewed the way you describe him.

Perhaps I have misunderstood your characterization. Help me out here :-)

Yeah, that massive outdoor Mass in Soviet controlled Poland was so servile of JPII. He didn't really understand the importance of his actions (or the dangers). What a tool. NOT.

The Creative Minority Report is always a great read!

It took me a while to understand this pope, and it really took a shift of my point of view to understand his (or I think I understand, anyway). I had to come to learn the Tradition of the Church, I had to get out of the round spaceship Catholic parishes to get to the old Catholic churches in the dumpy parts of town, I had to learn the Tridentine Rite of the Holy Mass-- in Latin, with the priest facing the Lord rather than the congregation closed in facing each other across the circle. I had to accept that this Pope has a vision for the Church that includes me, but that he would challenge the Church to do some things that no one was used to doing.

And he is subtle-- offering the Mass ad orientem, rolling out long-closeted vestments, issuing his motu proprio, removing the shackles on the indult Mass and elevating it to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass-- and it is truly Extraordinary!

Then, I began to understand this pope. He's not the charismatic pop star that his predecessor was, he's a quiet, contemplative academic. And I hope that, like St. Francis, he's slowing rebuilding the Church that appears to have fallen into ruin.

Viva il Papa!