(This story courtesy of Whispers In The Loggia blogspot!!)To paraphrase Paul Revere, and with especially good reason: Yanks, the Pope is coming.... The Pope is COMING!
Two weeks ago, preliminary plans for Benedict XVI's first US visit were disseminated among a handful of senior hierarchs at a DC meeting. In the days since, a rough sketch of the much-anticipated apostolic journey -- the first since 1999 -- has begun to emerge.
Currently slated to take place from 15-20 April 2008, the Tuesday-to-Sunday visit's official centerpiece will be a papal speech before the United Nations General Assembly in New York -- the prime cause for the US tour, which sprung from the pontiff's invitation to the UN headquarters by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Among other events in the Big Apple, the Pope is also slated to celebrate Mass at Central Park alongside, of course, an address and prayers in St Patrick's Cathedral and moment of reflection at Ground Zero.
Alongside the "capital of the world," what could well be Benedict's only on-ground exposure to America and its 70 million Catholics looks set to be concentrated strictly to the East Coast. Though another stop or two remain a distinct possibility -- with Baltimore the most likely addition -- also already confirmed on the papal itinerary are Washington and Boston. The latter's coveted place on the schedule represents a marked victory for Cardinal Sean O'Malley, whose invitation to the pontiff was said to have been initially declined, then accepted only after a firm push by the Capuchin cardinal, who's believed to enjoy a particularly high standing in B16's eyes.
Touching down in Washington, where the professor-Pope is said to be especially eager to see the campus of the Catholic University of America, Benedict will grant the trip's first hosting honors to another of his highly favored ones -- his most-prominent US appointee yet, Archbishop Donald Wuerl. Beyond the requisite meeting with President Bush at the White House and the other formalities of a head of state paying an official visit to the capital, a Mass on the National Mall is reportedly in the early plans.
The most charged and significant of the stops, however, will be Boston, where -- to put it lightly -- the public attitude is still perceived as "raw" following the local revelations of sexual abuse and cover-up that served to spark the most seismic crisis in the history of American Catholicism and forced the nation's senior churchman, Cardinal Bernard Law, into early retirement. As previously mused on these pages, and especially as accusations of Vatican negligence in dealing with the abuse scandals have spread from beyond US circles into the global church, the evocative venue provides Benedict with the unparalleled stage to address the situation in his most extensive and high-profile detail yet.
While the Boston leg is notable, its place on the the itinerary's first draft isn't surprising; arguably, the first papal visit to the nation since the explosion of 2002 would be panned if the Pope attempted to avert a head-on encounter with the issue that's become the US church's "800lb gorilla."
Boston is slated as the last stop, with a climactic Sunday Mass on Boston Common and lunch with the bishops of New England included on the still-developing schedule. Disputes over logistical and security arrangements for the final leg have reportedly already begun in earnest, and the continued search for healing in the besieged archdiocese was further underscored at a heated clergy convocation yesterday. According to attendees, a psychological profile of the Boston presbyterate released at the gathering reported that nearly half of the priests "want to bail out" of their current ministry, or ministry altogether, and that the priests' experience through the last five years has yielded rates of post-traumatic stress disorder in excess of the survivors of the 1994 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, which killed 168.
The pontiff's arrival for the first multistop papal trip to the States in almost 13 years will come but a week after five dioceses mark the 200th anniversary of the American hierarchy's first expansion: Pope Pius VII's elevation of the founding diocese of Baltimore to metropolitan rank and erection of new local churches at Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Bardstown (now Louisville) on 8 April 1808.
On the anniversary date itself, New York will hold its celebration at Radio City Music Hall. The visit's slated timing alleviates panic among some Gothamites that Benedict would end up in the city for the anniversary, thus taking on the celebrant's role for the bicentennial liturgy, a development that would've rendered the Rockette mecca's capacity of 6,000 insufficient. The proposed liturgy sites imply the Vatican advance team's expectation for larger crowds than the initially-proposed venues for the Masses -- New York's Yankee Stadium and Boston's Fenway Park -- could accommodate.
On a related note, despite prior assurances that no change at the helm of the nation's most influential local church would take place until the bicentennial celebrations had been concluded, whether Benedict's Manhattan leg is hosted by Cardinal Edward Egan or an archbishop of New York of the reigning Pope's own choosing remains a very open question. As canonically required, Egan submitted his resignation at his 75th birthday last April, and the customary alarms that invariably accompany a pending transition are being felt in Midtown -- where, no joke, the ceilings have already begun to cave in.
Furthermore, as Catholic News Service's John Thavis reported yesterday from Rome, the April timetable deals a setback to hopes for the Pope's attendance at the International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec City. The mid-June event in Canada's ecclesiastical cradle -- but a month before Benedict's intended journey to Australia for World Youth Day in Sydney -- is the marquee project of Cardinal Marc Ouellet, a member of the reigning pontificate's "kitchen cabinet."
Lastly, as the plans stand, the visit shatters the long-standing protocol for papal trips to the US.
From Paul VI's 1965 14-hour jaunt to New York and the UN straight through 'til the last visit (John Paul II's 1999 stopover in St Louis), the Popes and their advance teams made the conscious effort to keep the pontiff out of the States in the midst of a presidential election year.
This time, with the primaries winding down and the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees likely emerging in the very midst of the papal presence, the usual scenario is conspicuously not the case.
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