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.