Hard-Liner With Soft Touch Reaches Out to U.S. Flock

His reputation over many years is as a man of doctrinal hardness, who condemns homosexuality and abortion, who regards Catholicism as the only true faith — positions at times difficult to digest in a diverse America. This reputation, for admirers and detractors alike, is well earned.

But it is only one part of the man. Benedict’s manner is mild and humble, his often brilliantly crafted words delivered in a soft voice (and a strong German accent in English, one of his 10 languages). During his five days in the United States he is not expected to scold.

“What he will not do is wag fingers,” said Brennan Pursell, an associate history professor at DeSales University in Allentown, Pa., and author of a new book on the pope, “Benedict of Bavaria” (Circle Press). “He will present what the church offers.”

Vatican officials seem concerned enough about Benedict’s image that they are billing this trip as a proper introduction to Americans, intended in part to shed, as Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the papal nuncio to the United States, said, the idea that he is “this tough, this inhuman person.”

Benedict will almost certainly address an issue important to many Catholics, the sex-abuse scandals that racked the church and are now costing it millions of dollars in legal fees and settlements with victims. His speech at the United Nations on Friday is the centerpiece of the visit, and he is expected to speak out strongly on the importance of human rights and, possibly, to urge the world not to use only the military in solving security problems.

Last Sunday, the Vatican seemed to signal its desire to present a fuller, possibly softer, picture of Benedict and his papacy on the eve of his American trip. Even while repeating the church’s condemnation of abortion and divorce, the pope emphasized the need for compassion — “salve in the wounds,” he said — for people who have gone through either.

“In this debate, often purely ideological, a kind of conspiracy of silence is created around them,” he said. “Only with an attitude of selfless love can we come closer to bring help and to allow the victims to recover and return to the road of existence.”

While Benedict is a hero to many American conservatives — an affection he seems largely to return — he is, by no means, an American-style conservative. The pope opposes the war in Iraq, raises piercing questions about capitalism, is against the death penalty and strongly defends immigrants and the poor.

None of this implies that Benedict, who turns 81 on Wednesday, is a wishy-washy man of the middle. In more than two decades as John Paul II’s defender of the faith, he was the driving force in defining the church’s core principles, reining in what he saw as the excesses of the liberalization of a generation ago and instilling a strong and unafraid conservative Catholic identity.

As pope now for three years, those principles are spelled out clearly in two encyclicals, one on love, the other on hope. He also reached out to the church’s traditionalist wing by easing restrictions on using the old Latin Mass.

More broadly, he ordered a crackdown on homosexuality in seminaries, while forcing the retirement of the head of the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative order of priests, after a long sex-abuse investigation. He worked to open formal relations with China, as he has improved relations with Orthodox Christians, split from the Roman Catholic Church for a millennium.

But Benedict’s legacy may be less in concrete action than the power of his ideas and how they may take seed over time. Perhaps most important is his vigorous advocacy of a church of the most devout — the better, he believes, to withstand the threats of secular culture.

More liberal Catholics, and that includes many Americans, may find their seat at that table missing.

“I like the line that good morals, like good art, begin by drawing a line,” said Cardinal John P. Foley, an American who served for years as the Vatican’s chief of communications. Benedict, he said, “is more classical art than expressionism,” adding, “He is not the Jackson Pollock of the ecclesiastical world.”

But he may prove a surprise to many Americans, even if they may not feel the same emotional connection that John Paul II often evoked. This pope plays on the field of clear, forcefully expressed thought that often angers but also often disarms even his harshest detractors.

“He engages with Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, with all the great skeptics, and states their arguments so well you know he has really immersed himself,” said Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard professor who is the American ambassador to the Vatican.

Secret Iraqi Deal Shows Problems in Arms Orders

BAGHDAD — An $833 million Iraqi arms deal secretly negotiated with Serbia has underscored Iraq’s continuing problems equipping its armed forces, a process that has long been plagued by corruption and inefficiency.

Witness in Track Doping Case Ready to Name Big Name

The main witness against the coach, Trevor Graham, has said he supplied illicit drugs and advice on their use to Mr. Graham and his camp of elite athletes, including Marion Jones, as well as to many other sprinters and their coaches.

Angel Guillermo Heredia is identified as Source A in the felony indictment. He agreed to be a cooperating witness three years ago when, according to court filings, investigators confronted him with evidence of his drug trafficking and money laundering. Since then, Mr. Heredia said, he has provided prosecutors with documentation and with the names of many elite track athletes and Olympic medal winners.

Mr. Graham, who is charged with three counts of making false statements to federal agents, says that he is innocent. A defense motion to dismiss, which was denied, said the government’s case had been built on accusations by Mr. Heredia that “are not true and are merely an effort to attempt to divert attention from his illicit drug dealing and the illicit drug usage by athletes.”

Mr. Graham’s lawyers have said they will expose prominent athletes who were Mr. Heredia’s clients in an attempt to discredit him. They have said they will prove him to be a tainted witness who continued to dispense drugs and who should be the one facing charges.

Mr. Heredia said he had named names to prosecutors, identifying about two dozen elite athletes as his clients in the hope of keeping his status as a federal witness rather than as a criminal target.

The federal authorities who have worked with Mr. Heredia for three years say that he is credible despite his unsavory activities, and that nothing he has told them has been shown to be untrue, said a lawyer with knowledge of the investigation who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss it.

In recent interviews with The New York Times, Mr. Heredia described how and with whom he worked, sharing copies of records that appear to link him to many of the best sprinters of the last decade. Those records include e-mail exchanges of doping regimens, canceled checks, telephone recordings, shipping records, laboratory readings of blood and urine samples, and Justice Department documents.

Among his clients, Mr. Heredia identified 12 athletes who had won a combined 26 Olympic medals and 21 world championships. Four of the 12 athletes, including Ms. Jones, had been named and barred from competition for illicit drug use. Eight of the 12 — notably, the sprinter Maurice Greene — have never been previously linked to performance-enhancing drugs.

Mr. Greene, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and a five-time world champion, has never failed a drug test.

Mr. Heredia showed The Times a copy of a bank transaction form showing a $10,000 wire transfer from a Maurice Greene to a relative of Mr. Heredia’s; two sets of blood-test lab reports with Mr. Greene’s name and age on them; and an e-mail message from a close friend and track-club teammate of Mr. Greene’s, attaching one of the lab reports and saying, “Angel, this is maurices results sorry it took so long.”

Mr. Greene did not respond to numerous requests for comment over the last two weeks. His agent and his father each said he would pass along The Times’s messages to Mr. Greene. Copies of documents Mr. Heredia showed The Times were sent to Mr. Greene’s agent, Daniel Escamilla of HSInternational, based in California. Mr. Escamilla said he forwarded them to Mr. Greene but declined to make any comment.

The teammate also did not respond to telephone and e-mail messages asking for comment.

The Justice Department has kept its focus narrow in investigations rising from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, a California company raided by federal agents in 2003. The government has filed charges against only those who dealt the drugs or impeded the investigation, not the users who told the truth.

Regulators Take Notice

Even if the Graham case is settled before trial or the names of sprinters Mr. Heredia says he worked with never come out in public testimony, prosecutors are expected to pass along evidence to the United States Anti-Doping Agency, which investigates doping in sports after criminal proceedings are complete.

Travis T. Tygart, the chief executive of the antidoping agency, declined to comment about Mr. Heredia in a telephone interview Tuesday. Referring to his agency, Mr. Tygart said, “Usada continues to cooperate with the Balco investigators and will aggressively act on all reliable evidence of doping if and when received through the Balco investigation or otherwise.”

Mr. Heredia said he met with Mr. Tygart two years ago but did not reveal as many of his former clients to Mr. Tygart as he had to federal investigators.

The extent of Mr. Heredia’s disclosures were news to the International Association of Athletics Federations, track’s governing body.

Behind Air Chaos, an F.A.A. Pendulum Swing

Now they are in chaos, with airlines grounding more than 500 planes and thousands of flights so far because they may not meet safety requirements. Travelers have seen this before but only rarely, when all planes were grounded after the Sept. 11 attacks and when the government grounded all DC-10s after an engine fell off one of them in 1979, killing 273 people.

But there is a big difference this time: there has been no crash.

What happened?

One answer is that some whistle-blower inspectors for the Federal Aviation Administration disclosed that they had been discouraged from cracking down on Southwest Airlines for maintenance problems, and they found a sympathetic audience with some Washington lawmakers.

That prodded the F.A.A. to order a national audit to check whether airlines were in compliance — and to propose a record penalty of $10.2 million against Southwest.

Then F.A.A. inspectors discovered the mistakes that prompted American to cancel more than 3,000 flights last week. Delta, United, Alaska and others also canceled hundreds of flights.

But more broadly, the turmoil is better understood as a reaction — or overreaction, in the eyes of some in the industry — to a long-term shift, over two presidencies, in the way the F.A.A. oversees the airlines.

In the 1990s, the agency was more of a cop on the beat, handing out penalties to those who broke the rules.

“You used to fear an F.A.A. inspector showing up,” said Joseph Tiberi, a spokesman with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. “They checked everything from the nuts and bolts in your tool kit to the paperwork in the cockpit.”

But then a different, more collaborative approach emerged that critics say went too far. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, which crippled the industry, the agency began “a creep away from their rigorous oversight of maintenance,” said Representative James L. Oberstar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairman of the House committee that has pushed the issue.

That arrangement was “coddling the airlines,” he added, which eased the burden on the F.A.A., with its inspectors spending more time on paperwork than on airplanes.

The change began after the T.W.A. 800 and ValuJet disasters in the mid-1990s, when regulators and the industry convened a “safety summit.” Then the Clinton administration formed a national commission in 1997 on aviation safety and security, led by Vice President Al Gore and known as the Gore Commission. It set a goal of cutting the rate of fatal accidents 80 percent over 10 years.

One idea was for the F.A.A. to start working more closely with the industry. If airlines shared their mistakes or problems without fear of retribution, the reasoning went, the system would benefit from these shared lessons.

And it seems to have. Over the next decade, the accident rate fell 65 percent, and this new approach is widely seen as having played a role in the drop.

Then the F.A.A., under the Bush administration, took on a role after the Sept. 11 attacks to help the industry recover — “through technology, through greater efficiencies, through sensible and non-burdensome regulatory schemes,” Marion C. Blakey, the F.A.A. administrator in 2002, said at the time. She declined to be interviewed for this article.

This more collaborative approach was reflected in a “customer service initiative” announced by the F.A.A. in April 2003.

The customers in this case were not passengers; they were the airlines the F.A.A. regulates. The core principles of the new initiative, which inspectors could print up on pocket-size cards, included creating for the airlines “an environment without fear of retribution if you challenge our decisions” and “clear guidance on how you can elevate your concerns to the next higher level of authority.”

The F.A.A.’s watchdog role, to many Democrats in Congress who now oversee airline regulators, grew toothless. “We had drifted a little bit too much toward the over-closeness and coziness between regulator and regulated,” said H. Clayton Foushee Jr., a former F.A.A. official who led a recent inquiry by Mr. Oberstar’s committee.

Some inspectors in the field were also concerned by the drift. In early 2003, Charalambe Boutris, an inspector in the F.A.A.’s Dallas office, began reviewing Southwest’s engine maintenance records.

The task would seem the equivalent of the Maytag repairman’s job, since Southwest has a stellar safety record. But Mr. Boutris discovered the airline’s record-keeping was inconsistent and varied from aircraft to aircraft, according to the United States Office of Special Counsel, which reviewed his accusations.

After raising the issue with a supervisor, Mr. Boutris was told he could send Southwest a letter expressing concern, but not a more serious “letter of investigation,” which is what regulations called for under such circumstances.

The View From My Pew

For many years a framed document adorned the dark-wood stairwell in the house of my wife’s childhood. It was a papal blessing from John XXIII — “Good Pope John” — honoring the 1959 wedding of my mother- and father-in-law and mystically connecting a ceremony in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., with a place far, far away: the

Thirty-one years later, my wife, Mary, and I were married in a church whose very name, Our Lady of Sorrows, seemed to emphasize the tribulations over the joys that awaited us. A family friend, a nun with connections, presented us with our own papal blessing, this time linking a wedding in suburban New Jersey with the spiritual Emerald City of our Roman Catholic faith.

Today that document, framed in silver, is piled among yellowing college textbooks and other outgrown possessions in a storage room in the basement, a few feet from the washing machine; loads of our dirty laundry rinsing and spinning and emerging cleansed, year after year, all under the benevolent gaze of Pope John Paul II. Then to the dryer, for some meditative Gregorian humming.

Let me say at the outset that I am your classic stumbling, grumbling, trying-to-sort-it-all-out American Catholic. I consider myself a practicing Catholic because I dearly need the practice. My family and I attend Sunday Mass with some regularity, though not always at the same parish — in case anyone is taking attendance. Our older child goes to catechism class, as will our younger child when she is of age. I have eaten enough stale crumb cake at after-Mass socials to earn penance for at least a few of my many venial sins.

In other words, for all you nativists out there, I’ll use one of your terms to explain: I am proud to be a mackerel snapper.

Then why is our papal blessing not on display? Is it because the document might clash with a haphazard interior design that includes a W.C. Fields movie poster? Is it because we worry that in some circles our faith might be considered a bit — uncool? (You actually attend Mass? Really?) Or is it because, quite frankly, we feel virtually no connection to the papacy?

As the Thursday night players used to shout in the church basement of my Long Island parish long ago: Bingo!

Pope Benedict XVI plans to visit the United States this week, a tour that will include touchstones in my own life — ground zero, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Yankee Stadium — and will attract throngs of American Catholics. Still, beyond the fact that I’m not much of a throng guy, I will not be among those craning their necks for a glimpse. I feel a palpable papal disconnect.

I was 7 when Paul VI became the first pope to visit the United States, in 1965. I remember the nuns and teachers at SS. Cyril and Methodius School being in the kind of tizzy reserved then for the Beatles, and my mother hunched before our black-and-white television set, just as she was after the first Kennedy assassination, only this time she wasn’t crying.

I must have lost track of the second papal visit, that of John Paul II in 1979; back then I was a student at St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York, more concerned with the Bonnies basketball team’s visit to Niagara than with the pope’s visit to Manhattan. Less than two years later, though, I was sitting in a dusty old van, taking a lunch break from my post-graduate job installing lawn sprinklers, when the radio shouted that His Holiness had been shot in Rome.

The sandwich-eating ditch digger next to me, someone who was not Catholic, wisecracked about the news, but I didn’t laugh. Instead, I felt as though I had somehow suffered collateral damage. This was the first and last time that I sensed true closeness to the pope. A would-be assassin had nearly killed the head of the church — my church — and I was wounded.

Pope John Paul II more than survived; he rallied. But as the years passed, that intense feeling of connection, of solidarity with Il Papa, faded. By the time the pontiff returned to New York, in 1995, I was just another reporter in the city, and his visit was just another assignment.

The disconnection I feel may be rooted in the good old American distrust of monarchs and frippery. And, unlike American Catholics of 150 years ago, I do not feel the sting of prejudice that would cause me to embrace the pope in defiant declaration of my faith.

Since the day my in-laws first displayed their papal blessing nearly 50 years ago, much has happened to wear away at the authority of the pope. There remains great awe and respect for anyone charged with managing a 2,000-year-old institution and spiritually guiding more than a billion people around the world. For stumbling, grumbling worshipers like me, though, obedience to the pope has morphed into a respectful taking of his pronouncements under advisement — a cafeteria-like approach that drives more rigid Catholics to the brink of saying the Lord’s name in vain.

And peace be with you.

As Peter Steinfels, the Beliefs columnist for The New York Times, recently noted, there is nothing particularly new in this tension. He wrote that many American Catholics “honor the pope yet disagree with papal positions, whether about using contraception, restricting legal access to abortion, ordaining married men or women to the priesthood or recognizing same-sex relationships.” I would add to that list disgust, more than mere disagreement, with the way the church has handled the priest scandals of the last decade.

But what does all this mean?

It means that I got my Catholic Irish up when I read recently that the Rev. John Hagee, a Texas televangelist, uses code language for the Catholic Church when he speaks of a “false cult system” and — what was it again? Oh, yes: “the great whore.” The good reverend says his words have been misconstrued, and I don’t want mine to be: It would be my humble honor to share a dinner of solidarity with the pope — a dinner, even, of mackerel.

But all this also means that I read the parish bulletin and the gospels, not papal encyclicals or L’Osservatore Romano. That I mutter more about the priest’s aimless homily or some action by the local bishop than about anything the pope has said or done. That on Sundays, though hardly every one, I try to concentrate on the Gospel and on the celebration of the Eucharist as best I can with a distracted 10-year-old and a squirming 4-year-old. That I never once ask myself: What would the pope do?

I am just an American Catholic shirt in a pile of human laundry, rinsing, twirling, praying that things don’t spin out of balance.