Diary, Curious News

Catholic Heaven & Hell: The Pope Visits America

19 April 2008

image I consider myself an honorary alumnus of the catholic church since as child I went to catholic mass, was asked to go to confession even though at the time a had nothing to confess, and served as an altar boy although I did not belong to catholic faith.  Like any alumnus of an old successful institution, I like to receive updates on where the organization is going.   As I have written before, the current Pope is an smart fellow and I was curious how he would handle his visit to America.

Pontiff Prays With Sex Abuse Victims
Meeting Follows Stadium Mass
By Jacqueline L. Salmon, Michelle Boorstein and Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 18, 2008; 9:49 AM

Pope Benedict XVI talked and prayed with a small group of victims of clergy sex abuse yesterday, the first publicly known meeting between a pontiff and victims since the most recent scandal erupted in Boston six years ago.

The 25-minute meeting at the Vatican Embassy put an intensely personal focus on a subject that has become an important part of the pope’s Washington visit. It came after a morning Mass that Benedict celebrated for about 45,000 people at Nationals Park, the new baseball stadium in Washington.

Later, he met with interfaith leaders and Catholic educators, telling the latter not to stray from the mission of the church.

The pope’s visit to the nation’s capital ended this morning, when he left the Vatican Embassy at 8 a.m. to the goodbye cheers of 165 young Catholic adults who waved yellow Vatican flags and shouted “Viva il papa”—long live the pope in Italian.

He shook hands with some of them as he left.

Telia Anderson, 38, an attorney in the District, kissed the pope’s hand and his golden ring as he departed.

“I think I will never be the same again,” she said afterward. “He looked me in the eye! He looked me in the eye and smiled at me—I think because I was screaming so loud.” She said she saw singer Placido Domingo kiss the pope’s ring yesterday after singing “Panis Angelicus” at the stadium Mass, and got the idea to do the same

He boarded the “Shepherd One” Alitalia plane at 8:30 a.m. at Andrews Air Force Base and landed in New York a little over an hour later. There he is scheduled to meet with United Nations officials and visit the Ground Zero site of the World Trade Center.

The Mass was the third time in as many days that the pope addressed the sex abuse issue, telling the silent crowd: “No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse. . . . Nor can I adequately describe the damage that has occurred within the community of the Church.”

A few hours later, the pope met with at least five abuse victims, all middle-aged men and women from Boston. Benedict requested the meeting, said Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the Boston archbishop, who was present during the gathering.

“It was very positive—healing, I think—and very prayerful,” O’Malley said, describing some of the victims as being in tears. “It was a moving experience.” The meeting was not announced in advance, and the names of the victims were not made public.

Each of the victims had a brief private conversation with the pope. Afterward, O’Malley gave Benedict a list of more than 1,000 people victimized over the years in the Boston archdiocese and asked the pope to pray for them.

National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” quoted Bernie McDaid, a victim who attended the meeting, as having told Benedict: “Holy Father, I want you to know you have a cancer in your flock and you need to correct that, and I hope you do. You need to do more.”

Gary M. Bergeron, 45, a sex abuse victim from Boston who was not included in the meeting, welcomed it. “This is the first time in seven years that the leader of the Catholic Church has come out saying the behavior of the past is not acceptable anymore,” he said.

Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, never met with sex abuse victims. Bergeron and a small group of Boston area victims flew to Rome in March 2003 in an effort to see John Paul II. They knocked on doors for five days and eventually met with an official from the Vatican secretary of state’s office. But they failed in their effort to talk with the pope.

Since 1950, more than 5,000 U.S. priests have been accused of abusing about 12,000 children, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The church has spent about $2 billion on legal claims.

While Benedict was planning his trip, some U.S. cardinals urged him to include a meeting with victims, according to Bishop Gregory M. Aymond of Austin, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse. Other parties had urged him to visit Boston, the epicenter of the scandal.

At Catholic University in Northeast Washington, the pope warned educators yesterday against a betrayal of their purpose. He told them that “any appeal to the principle of academic freedom in order to justify positions that contradict the faith and the teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university’s identity and mission.”

At the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center, Benedict addressed 200 leaders of five other faiths, saying: “In our attempt to discover points of commonality, perhaps we have shied away from the responsibility to discuss our differences with calmness and clarity. While always uniting our hearts and minds in the call for peace, we must also listen attentively to the voice of truth.”

The pope also offered Passover greetings to members of the Jewish community “in a spirit of openness to the real possibilities of cooperation which we see before us as we contemplate the urgent needs of our world and as we look with compassion upon the sufferings of millions of our brothers and sisters everywhere. Naturally, our shared hope for peace in the world embraces the Middle East and the Holy Land in particular.”

During the Mass, the 81-year-old pontiff, on a gold and white stage dominated by a 14-foot crucifix, preached a message intended to buoy his wandering U.S. flock while acknowledging the pain suffered by some of the more vulnerable members of American society. He spoke of the “injustices endured by the Native American peoples and by those brought here forcibly from Africa as slaves.”

Yet “hope, hope for the future, is very much a part of the American character,” he said.

At the Mass, Angela Clare Davis, 43, an office manager from Charlestown, W.Va., said, “I can die now.” She won a ticket to the Mass in a church raffle. “This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me,” she said. “I am going to receive the Eucharist consecrated by the Holy Father’s hands.”

Papal experts have said Benedict does not like stadium Masses as he prefers to worship in a liturgically sacred space whenever possible. Nationals Park, however, had been turned into a hybrid ballfield-sanctuary. The service took place across the outfield, with the towering stage in center field and white-robed clergy in far right and left fields. Much of the new grass was covered with white tiling to protect it from the hundreds of people seated in chairs facing the pope.

The crowd was uncharacteristically still for a ballpark gathering. Few of the thousands of worshipers moved during the homily delivered in Benedict’s heavily accented but calming voice. People listened quietly until the end, when Benedict broke out into a short message in Spanish, immediately prompting a whoop and shouts of “Viva!”

The scene in the hours before the Mass was celebratory and upbeat, not unlike a World Series game. Lines were huge, with more than 50 waiting at most women’s restrooms. There were also crowds at stands that sold rosary rings, postcards, yellow golf shirts with Benedict’s insignia, T-shirts with the message “The one who has hope lives differently” and baseball hats with the words “Christ our Hope.”

Security was extremely tight, creating long lines at the entrances. In addition to passing through 25 metal detectors, worshipers were scanned with a wand, and their bags were searched.

Sonia Bungcayao and her niece Helen Ford bought rosary rings, prayer cards and bumper stickers to give to friends. They hope to have them blessed by priests.

“It’s holy, you know?” said Bungcayao, who traveled from her home near Chicago to attend the Mass. “I might not see him [the pope] again. He might not come to the U.S. again. This is our last chance.”

The super-size service required super-size accommodations. Three hundred deacons were stationed around the stadium so that Communion could be offered to everyone within 20 minutes.

Before Mass, hundreds waited in line for the sacrament of penance under white tents inside the ballpark. With pairs of chairs as confessionals, 65 priests in ivory robes leaned forward, listening to the penitents’ sins, while sisters from the Servants of the Lord and the Virgin of Martara, baseball caps over their waist-length blue veils, corralled people into lines.

“I’m due,” said Rob Donovan, a Gettysburg College senior, who acknowledged that it was his first confession in two years. “This is an event where you want to return to your faith, and it’s time to take my faith a little more seriously.”

As 10 a.m. and the start of the Mass drew near, dozens were still in line, so priests began hearing confessions under the stairs and by the soda machines.

Staff writer Petula Dvorak and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

Benedict becomes first pope to visit American synagogue
By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer
24 minutes ago
Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope to visit an American synagogue Friday, bringing greetings for the Passover holiday and accepting gifts of matzo and a seder plate. Benedict, 81, stopped briefly at Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, near the Vatican residence.

“I find it moving to recall that Jesus, as a young boy, heard the words of Scripture and prayed in a place such as this,” he said.

At a Roman Catholic church in Manhattan, the pope later warned other Christian leaders against “so-called prophetic actions” that conflict with traditional views of the Bible, a reference to the debate over Scripture that is fracturing churches in America and around the world.

In his visit to the synagogue, Benedict was shown the congregation’s collection of parchment scrolls, and two youngsters presented him with the Passover gifts.

The German-born pontiff then offered a gift of his own: a reproduction of a Jewish codex.

“In our lifetime, we have experienced the ravages of war, the Holocaust, man’s inhumanity to man and tasted the joy of freedom,” said Rabbi Arthur Schneier, who lived in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.

“This momentous occasion takes places on American soil, where men and women escaping the clutches of oppression and religious persecution have built a nation of democracy and freedom. This is a nation which has allowed all religious communities to flourish.”

The Jewish community makes “a valuable contribution to the life of the city,” Benedict said. “And I encourage all of you to continue building bridges of friendship with all the many different ethnic and religious groups present in your neighborhood.”

The visit was Benedict’s second as pontiff to a Jewish house of worship. On his first papal trip abroad in 2005, Benedict entered a synagogue in Cologne, Germany, that had been destroyed by the Nazis and rebuilt.

At his visit with Christian leaders, the pontiff said allowing individual congregations to interpret the Gospel undermines evangelism at a time when “the world is losing its bearings” and needs “persuasive common witness” to salvation in Christ.

“Only by holding fast to sound teaching will we be able to respond to the challenges that confront us in an evolving world,” Benedict said at the evening service with Protestant and Orthodox clergy at St. Joseph’s church, which was founded by German immigrants and still regularly celebrates Mass in German.

“Only in this way will we give unambiguous testimony to the truth of the Gospel and its moral teaching. This is the method which the world is waiting to hear from us.”

Benedict did not mention specific issues troubling the churches. However, many Protestant groups have been arguing for years over how to understand what the Bible says about truth and salvation, and whether it prohibits gay sex.

The U.S. Episcopal Church caused an uproar among its fellow Anglicans in 2003 by consecrating the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

The global Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest religious group, is now near the break of schism. Other mainline Protestant groups based in the U.S. are also divided over the issue.

Several of those denominations sent representatives to the pope’s Friday event.

Christopher Epting, ecumenical officer of the Episcopal Church, said he didn’t feel the pope was singling out his or any other church. He added that Episcopalians are still in dialogue with the Catholics.

The ecumenical service was one of the many efforts by Benedict to reach out to other Christians and to members of different faiths during his six-day visit to Washington and New York. It is his first visit to the United States since he was elected pontiff in 2005.

Earlier this week in Washington, the pope met with Jewish leaders, along with Muslim, Buddhist, Jainist and Hindu representatives.

The American Muslim leaders who attended the Washington interreligious meeting had said they were committed to working with the Roman Catholic church but were uneasy about some of Benedict’s past comments and actions.

Many were upset by his Easter baptism in St. Peter’s Basilica of an Egyptian-born Muslim who has called Islam inherently violent.

Benedict, like Pope John Paul II, has also worked to heal the centuries-old rift between the Orthodox and Catholic churches.

At Friday’s services, leaders from several of the denominations briefly greeted the pope. Among them was Bernice A. King, daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and an elder at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga.

The head of the National Association of Evangelicals, Leith Anderson, a pastor in Eden Prairie, Minn., also attended.

___

Associated Press Writer Victor L. Simpson contributed to this report.

 

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Peter

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