EDITORIAL

America seems to get it from both sides sometimes.

From one side comes the complaint that America is hopelessly decadent, a place where the filth in the popular culture has reached toxic levels. From the other comes the charge that America is dangerously power-drunk, using the war on terror as an excuse to increase its worldwide dominance.

Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have been critical of America in ways that echo both of these lines of complaint — but without the casual prejudice and cynical anger of the anti-America crowd. For both popes, America is the source of more hope than fear.

For the past six years, the Register has celebrated July 4 each year by publishing Pope John Paul II's words of admiration for America's founding principles.

John Paul made his remarks about America on visits to the country and on several diplomatic occasions in the Vatican. Less than three months into his pontificate, Pope Benedict has not yet had such opportunities. But before his election, Benedict was very clear about what he saw as America's greatness.

If Pope John Paul II saw hope for the world in America's founding principles, Benedict sees hope for the Church in America's Catholics.

In the book God and the World, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger recognized that the Church in America is “characterized by divisions.”

As is the case elsewhere in the Church, there are strong elements in the Church and who resist the movement of the Holy Spirit. But, from Rome in the year 2000, Cardinal Ratzinger said, “I can indeed see many old and dying branches in the Church, which are slowly dropping off, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly.”

In America, they are being replaced by “quite new and vital religious manifestations. New religious communities are being formed whose members quite consciously aim at a complete fulfillment of the demands of religious life. They live this out of a great joy in their faith, also particularly intending to read again the Fathers and Thomas Aquinas, and to form their lives on what they read.”

Cardinal Ratzinger didn't just see hope in America's new movements, younger members and new congregations, either.

“This is a Church that is very strongly bringing to bear the vital element of religion: the courage to give one's life to and out of faith, in the service of faith,” he said. “This is a Church that takes great responsibility in society through her considerable system of education and through her hospitals.”

The future pope said that the actions of America's bishops were a model worldwide.

We are accustomed to complaints that our bishops have not done enough in one area or another, or that they have done the wrong thing. Cardinal Ratzinger points to the positive, instead. From his unique purview as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he could compare our bishops and institutions to others around the world, and see what has been going well.

He called U.S. bishops’ decision-making process a model for the world. Hospitals face a moral problem. The bishops’ conference brings opinions of Catholic experts to bear on the problem. Then the bishops write guidelines for all to follow.

“These remain partial at first,” said Cardinal Ratzinger, “for the time being American, so that, as it were, other experience can be brought to bear and the door is not closed. Yet they are already model decisions that have an effect on medical ethics in other parts of the Church and at least give some direction there.”

America is the new trend setter for the Church worldwide.

“It used to be said that what happens first in France then happens in the rest of the world,” he said. “Nowadays it is more the case that America, on the one hand, provides secular fashions and slogans that spread throughout the world yet, on the other, also offers ecclesiastical models.”

If Europe is still burdened by the baggage of the successes and failures of millennia of Christendom, America is still in some way the New World whose inhabitants want to take the best from the past and make it work as effectively as possible in the present day.

American Catholics at their best, said Cardinal Ratzinger, “do away with a Christianity that is seemingly modern but at the same time too rationalistic, insufficiently saturated with faith, and replace it with genuine impulses of faith and also model forms of the life of faith.”

Pope Benedict expects a lot from the Church in America, from the Catholics in the pews to the Catholics in the bishops’ offices. Let's not disappoint him.