Washington, USA - When Pope Benedict XVI makes his first papal trip to the United States in April, he will be guided by a seasoned Vatican ambassador who sees the visit as an opportunity to introduce a little-known pope to a complex set of audiences: American Catholics, Americans in general and global opinion leaders.
“The image of Benedict XVI is not only not well known, but it is badly known,” said Archbishop Pietro Sambi, who, as apostolic nuncio, is the Vatican’s top diplomat in the United States.
“He is known as an intransigent man, almost an inhuman man,” the archbishop said of Pope Benedict in an interview at the Vatican Embassy in Washington. “It will be enough to listen to him to change completely the idea of this tough, this inhuman person.”
The pope’s visit, from April 15 to 20, will draw Catholics from around the country for Masses at Nationals Park in Washington and Yankee Stadium in New York. He will meet President Bush at the White House and talk to Catholic educators at Catholic University of America in Washington, pray at ground zero in Lower Manhattan and address the United Nations.
Benedict, a former professor, is a pope who cultivates words more than dramatic gestures — in contrast to his predecessor, Pope John Paul II. The key to this trip, Archbishop Sambi said, will be to listen to Benedict’s speeches in their entirety.
“He is not a man of blah, blah, blah,” the archbishop said. “He’s a thinker, and before speaking, he thinks. And he prays a lot.”
As the archbishop spoke on a recent weekday, workers were polishing the floors of the Vatican Embassy in preparation for the pope, who will stay there on the first three days of his visit. On the morning of April 16, his 81st birthday, the pope will say Mass in the embassy’s small chapel with embassy staff and have a celebratory breakfast before heading to the White House.
Archbishop Sambi is an old hand at hosting papal visits. An Italian, he represented the Holy See in Jerusalem for seven years and served before that in Indonesia, Cyprus and Burundi. He arrived in Washington in 2005, as the church was struggling to recover from the scandal over sexual abuse by priests and the nation was mired in a war in Iraq that the Vatican had opposed.
The United States will be only the seventh country Pope Benedict has visited since he was elected three years ago. The timing, Archbishop Sambi said, is intended to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the dioceses of New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Bardstown, Ky. (the seat of the first inland diocese). It is also 200 years since the nation’s first Catholic diocese, Baltimore, was elevated to an archdiocese.
Although the pope is arriving in the midst of a presidential election, Archbishop Sambi said: “I can assure you that the pope will not at all interfere with the electoral process. He will not meet with any of the candidates.”
But it is likely that Pope Benedict will touch on issues germane to the election: poverty, the war in Iraq, abortion and euthanasia, gay marriage, environmental degradation and illegal immigration. (Some of these issues will probably arise in his address to the United Nations on April 18. Abortion is expected to come up when he meets with young Catholics, some severely disabled, at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y.) Pope Benedict has spoken before on how Catholic teaching applies to all of these issues.
“The Pope will speak about the doctrine of the Church, which has been established 2,000 years ago, much before there was any Democratic or Republican Party of the United States,” Archbishop Sambi said.
But the pope’s primary purpose is to tend to his flock. The Roman Catholic Church in the United States is in flux. Demographic changes, along with a shortage of priests and financial pressures, have led dioceses to close urban schools and parishes and open ones in suburbs and exurbs. Hispanic immigrants are flocking to parishes, and the church is scrambling to meet their spiritual and material needs.
This is the first papal visit to the United States since the abuse scandal revealed thousands of victims and left families and parishes devastated. There was speculation when the American trip was announced that the pope might travel to Boston, where the scandal erupted in 2002, but to do so would have put the scandal front and center. Yet Archbishop Sambi said he was confident that Pope Benedict would address the scandal during his visit.
In an acknowledgment of America’s religious diversity, Benedict will meet in Washington with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and the leaders of other faiths. Catholic officials want to avoid the kind of contretemps that occurred in Germany, in 2006, when the pope offended Muslims by quoting a 14th century slur on Islam, and in Brazil last year, when a line in a speech infuriated indigenous people.
Archbishop Sambi demurred when asked whether the Pope’s speeches would be vetted, and if so, by whom, saying, “All this is an internal matter.”