The Pope’s Missed Opportunity

By Colman McCarthy

As expected, the pastoral visit by Pope Benedict XVI to Washington and New York brimmed with crowd pleasing pageantry. On substance, it was something else.

Opportunities for major advances in openness and daring were repeatedly missed.

It was admirable that the pope dialogued with four men and one woman who had been abused by priests. But why only five victims? Why for only 25 minutes? Why a closed meeting? More than 5,000 U.S. priests have been charged with inflicting horrific suffering on some 12,000 children over a period of decades. And the pope could spare less than half an hour to make amends? If a measure of justice prevailed, Benedict would have traveled to Boston--the epicenter of abuse where Cardinal Bernard Law oversaw a mammoth cover-up--and held at least an all-day public forum with a question-and-answer exchange with victims, and no limit on the number. That would have been genuine pastoring, humane in a way that apologizing in sermons is not.

--In New York amid politicians and prelates, Benedict knelt at the World Trade Center ground zero. Then he offered a prayer, calling on God to comfort the families of the slain. But the pope left out mention of the attackers responsible for the mass killings. Why not call on God to forgive them, as the Lord’s prayer explicitly demands that trespassers be forgiven. If 9/11 wasn’t about trespassing, what was? Why not use that moment to call on Catholics to love their enemies, as Christ attempted to teach?

Flying into the United States, did the pope need to land at a military site—Andrews Air Force base? Three civilian Washington-area airports were available. At Andrews, the pope walked through a color guard of soldiers standing at attention with raised rifles. The next day at a White House ceremony the pope allowed himself to be honored with a 21-gun salute. Benedict’s cooperation with all this signaled tacit approval with America’s militarism. Vatican advance men could have easily told White House planners that the pope is coming with a message of peace, skip the bang-bang.

At ceremonies end, George W. Bush led the Holy Father to the Oval office for a brief private conversation. Was it too much to ask that the pope and the president then move to the East Room for a joint press conference, as is routine when visiting heads of state show up. That would have been a true moment of papal openness: Benedict fielding all questions, Benedict speaking unscripted, Benedict showing his intellectual strength by parrying with the media, Benedict saying to Americans: here’s what’s on my mind about current issues, what’s on yours?

“To discover points of commonality,” the pope told a gathering of 200 leaders of five other faiths, “perhaps we have shied away from the responsibility to discuss our differences.” Then, unwittingly proving his point, he shied away by not discussing those differences with his audience. He read his speech, engaging in a monologue not a dialogue.

Had Benedict come for, say a nine or ten day visit, he could have had ample time to seek the sites to which Christ might have gone: America’s prisons and death rows, migrant worker camps, homeless shelters, Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, the growing unemployment lines, Pax Christi centers.

There he would find, far from his retinue of cardinals and bishops, people of faith heroically living their faith.

Colman McCarthy, a former columnist for The Washington Post, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington D.C. He teaches courses on nonviolence at Georgetown Law School, American University, the University of Maryland and three public high schools.