Pope Benedict XVI spent his first full day in Washington, D.C. with intense media coverage, commentary and protests, some of it depressingly familiar. The Huffington Post published an obscure history professor's diatribe titled "Pope Should Start 'Spiritual Renewal' with Bisexual God." Pollsters built up to the Papal visit with their usual reports suggesting that U.S. Catholics differ with their church on such issues as abortion and civil unions for homosexuals. Noisy protests on D.C. streets heaped scorn on the Pope because of the child sexual abuse scandals, which have taken a heavy toll on the victims and provided opponents of the Catholic Church's moral voice with a new means to cudgel it into silence.
In the former Cardinal Ratzinger, the critics have a target whose career has been as closely identified as possible with that moral voice; it is highly unlikely that he will be quiet now, and this is clearly what worries the critics most. Even before his plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, Benedict XVI spoke of the "shame" occasioned by the sex abuse scandals in America and his resolve that they will not recur.
Greeted by President Bush and a massive crowd at the White House, the Pope heard a chorus of Happy Birthday as he celebrated his 81st. That music must have been sweet to his ears, but even sweeter must have been President Bush's hopeful words about human life, as he told the nation, "In a world where some treat life as something to be debased and discarded, we need your message that all human life is sacred and that each of us is willed, each of us is loved, and each of us is necessary."
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