Here is a fine discussion about the Pope’s pending visit, and what he sees as the big issues.

An interview/dialogue with John Allen and George Weigel, sponsored bythe Pew Forum. It takes 20 or so minutes to read, but very worthwhile.

The Pope Comes to America

John Allen

… finally what we might expect for the American Catholic Church. Again, a lot of things we could say here, which we can unpack in Q&A, but I think the dominant note of the pope’s message will be various versions of what I have come to see as the interpretive key to his papacy, which is what I call affirmative orthodoxy. And what I mean by that is a strong defense of traditional Catholic faith and practice – that is, a kind of recalling people to those traditional markers of Catholic thought, speech, practice, but phrasing all that in the most relentlessly positive fashion possible.

So I think Benedict’s diagnosis is that people are far too familiar with what the Catholic Church is against rather than what it’s for. People know far more about what the Catholic Church says no to rather than what it says yes to, and so I think his effort is to try to present a positive vision of what the Catholic Church represents. And we’ve seen that in his two encyclicals on love and hope. I suspect we will see it in various mutations when he’s here in the States. That’s all by way of saying that the people who were expecting him to come in and go negative in one form or another, I suspect, are going to be disappointed. I’ve covered all of Benedict’s foreign trips; I have yet to see him go negative in one of these settings. I suspect people will be surprised by and large by the overall positive tone of his presentation.

George Weigel

So you have this remarkable combination of a walking encyclopedia of theological, philosophical and historical knowledge, but with a dramatic capacity to simplify in the best sense of the term. It’s the kind of simplicity that only comes on the far side of complexity. It’s the kind of simplicity that only comes from having worked through the arguments and debates in a very detailed way and yet coming to a point of articulation that is accessible and that has proven remarkably popular, not only in Rome but wherever the pope has traveled.

>>>>>>

If you’re looking at this in 100-, 200-, 300-year terms, as John correctly suggests this pope thinks, what’s really of interest is not what those people think, but what King Abdullah has done. What is of interest is not that certain people complained about the Magdi Allam baptism, but that the guy who raised the loudest complaints is still coming to the Catholic-Muslim Forum meeting in Rome because he knows that’s where the action is.