Facing east: in anticipation of Benedict's visit

A month ago, prompted by the latest issue of the magazine Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, I arranged a panel discussion that offered reflections on the bodily dimension of campus life at our Jesuit university. An art history professor on the panel spoke of the humanizing power of the aesthetic. The men's basketball coach described his recruiting pitch, in which he invites high school seniors to a place that offers a particular formation for becoming a man. A Jesuit administrator invoked the beauty of our campus. A theater student told of her involvement in a project for feminist awareness. And one young woman shared her experience as a leader of student eucharistic ministers, asking if we might want to consider kneeling during the eucharistic prayer, to live in our bodies the reverence to which we are called.

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Meeting with a Catholic women's group a few evenings later, one woman commented on the rumors of liturgical retrenchment--the calls for more kneeling, the suggestion of the return to the reception of Communion on the tongue--by drawing a wheel-and-spokes pattern in the air, saying, "Don't you see, it's always about them, they always want to have themselves at the center." In her decades of observation, invitations to increased reverence were usually thinly disguised calls by clerics for increased clericalism. For her, word of Pope Benedict XVI's appreciation for the tradition of having the celebrant "face east" during the liturgy, with his back to the congregation, simply confirmed her suspicion that the goal of these "retrievals" was that those who had long dismissed her would now no longer feel obligated even to attempt to establish eye contact.

Catholics in the United States are now facing east, to the arrival of Benedict in April. His visit will be an important event for U.S. Catholics, particularly those on the scene in Washington and New York. He will address several different audiences. Global eyes and ears will tune in to the speech at the United Nations and the visit to Ground Zero. His address to college and university presidents, on the other hand, will primarily be directed to the attendees, though it will be spun for maximum effect' by those dedicated to keeping the culture wars alive. Liturgical celebrations will be scrutinized for "the signs of the times to come," for example, the decision to call in hundreds of priests to distribute Communion at outdoor Masses, despite the fact that thousands of extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist are sure to be on hand. Throughout, what is said will matter, what is not said will matter just as much, and the pope knows he can only control the first.

In John Paul's shadow

He cannot control the fact that he walks in the shadow of John Paul II. For the pope-watching public, Benedict's quiet intensity plays in relief across the memory of his theater-savvy predecessor, whose command of the camera worked particularly well in the giant media marketplace of the United States. Although John Paul's Polish sensibility was seen as having only a niche appeal near the beginning of his papacy, as the years went on his pastoral and humane presence was widely admired. In contrast, Benedict's focus on Europe seems oddly parochial in a global church, until one understands that, for Benedict, "Europe" is not a static entity, but a narrative whose intellectual history and future are indelibly linked to the Christian message. European secularism, then, is not a matter of indifference to the sacred, but a competing--and potentially catastrophic--ideology.

So when he speaks to Catholic college presidents, of course he will call for a more direct statement of the religious identity of their institutions, an identity strongly grounded in the Western intellectual tradition. He will probably insist that the integration of faith and reason be a central formative principle for campus dialogue. Whatever he says, one can be certain that his nuanced presentation will be quickly proclaimed by the blogging right as "courageous" and "countercultural," and then reduced to the most trivial of bumper stickers: No Talking Vaginas! More Catechism!

Sound bites aside, Catholics do face a serious question as to whether the culture of Catholicism will actually be transmitted to the next generation. So, while only a fraction of Catholics attend Catholic colleges and universities, the chance to have this significant minority engage in a substantive way with the Catholic intellectual tradition is an opportunity that must not be squandered. But the symbolism of this meeting is probably more important than the substance, as this call for deeper engagement has been already sounded clearly in Ex Corde Ecclesiae.

Less confrontational

Indeed, if Benedict has seemed, thus far, to be less confrontational than John Paul II, perhaps this is because he doesn't make headlines about sex. To be sure, Benedict opposes the ordination of women. But he doesn't need to talk about this, having given the ban quasi-dogmatic status in his previous position as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Nor does he make a great point of sexual complementarity, the male-female duality that so captured the theological imagination of John Paul II.