Pope Benedict has played to rock-concert-sized crowds on his first visit to the United States as head of the Roman Catholic Church.
"This has been a joyous week. It's been a joyous time for Catholics — and it wasn't such a bad week for Methodists, either. The excitement was just palpable," Bush, a Methodist, said at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, an event that coincided with the pope's visit. "It's not every day you get to be the warm-up act to the Holy Father," Bush said to an audience that brought raucous applause.
The pontiff's visit came at a challenging time for the American church. Wounds from the clergy sex scandals are still fresh, in Minnesota and across the nation, and are likely to scar the laity's trust for generations. In many areas, priest shortages and shifting resources are forcing the painful closure of beloved parishes.
After years of near silence on the issue of the abuse and rape of children at the hands of pedophile priests, Pope Benedict XVI made public acknowledgement of the scandal a central theme of his first visit to the United States as head of the church. The first mention of the scandal came while still en route from Rome when he told reporters he was "deeply ashamed" about the scandal that had caused "great suffering."
It was the first time the papacy had directly addressed the victims of abusive clerics, and it signaled that Benedict's first trip to the United States as pontiff would be not just a state visit but an effort at reconciliation with American believers and an exercise in humility for the church's role in a scandal the pope conceded had been "very badly handled."
He said he is "deeply ashamed" of the clergy sex abuse scandal that has devastated the American church. Roman Catholic sex abuse cases can be found here.
“Only in this way will we give unambiguous testimony to the truth of the Gospel and its moral teaching. This is the method which the world is waiting to hear from us.”
The Pope did not mention specific issues troubling the churches. However, many Protestant groups have been arguing for years over how to understand what the Bible says about truth and salvation, and whether it prohibits gay sex.
The U.S. Episcopal Church caused an uproar among its fellow Anglicans in 2003 by consecrating the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.
He also has said he would like to reach out to the Muslim community through dialogue, and Muslims were included in the pontiff's meeting with interfaith leaders in Washington on Thursday night. But many Muslims in America remain wary, saying the pope has created the impression that he is insensitive to their faith.
Many still recall the pope's September 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany, in which Benedict quoted a Byzantine Christian emperor saying that "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The full text is here.
That lecture sparked days of protests in Muslim countries, some of them violent, and an Italian nun in Somalia was killed in retaliation. The Pope repeated several times that he regretted the offense his speech caused, and that he has deep respect for Islam. But the remarks have caused lingering damage, according to Muslims and some Catholic scholars interviewed.
"I don't think he did enough to apologize," said Omar T. Mohammedi, a member of the New York City Commission on Human Rights.
"For a person of his stature to come out and say this about Islam, it amazes me, it's sad," said Wael Mousfar, president of the Arab Muslim American Federation, a community group in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, a largely Muslim neighborhood. "Islam is the target of everyone nowadays; he just jumped on the bandwagon and joined the crowd."
There have been other perceived slights. For example, the pope confounded Muslims when he baptized a prominent Egyptian-born Italian Muslim convert on international television Easter Sunday. Italy's most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service. The Egyptian-born, non-practicing Muslim who is married to a Catholic, Magdi Allam infuriated some Muslims with his books and columns in the newspaper Corriere della Sera newspaper, where he is a deputy editor. He titled one book "Long Live Israel."
"This person chose to be Catholic, it's not a problem," said Imam Shamsi Ali of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. The problem was the pope's celebration of the conversion on a global stage, he said.
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