E. J. Dionne has a good column up on the message with which Pope Benedict XVI is challenging America on his first papal visit. Given that Dionne is such a conventional American liberal Catholic, he’s surprisingly open to that message, with little more than a ritual genuflection to the “the Church needs to become more like us” altar; by and large, he seems to understand that the change needs to run the other way. To be sure, part of that is his recognition that the Pope’s message is in fact as countercultural and challenging in many ways for conservatives as it is for liberals, but even so, I’m glad to see him close with this:
For myself, I admire Benedict’s distinctly Catholic critique of radical individualism in both the moral and economic spheres, and his insistence that the Christian message cannot be divorced from the social and political realms. . . . Perhaps it is the task of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church to bring discomfort to a people so thoroughly shaped by modernity, as we Americans are. If so, Benedict is succeeding.
This is good news, because indeed, an important task for the church is to bring us to a holy discomfort with our lives and our world—to inspire us with a sacred disquiet with the selfish, reductionist assumptions we absorb from our culture, and with the ways in which that culture shapes us; and (as Dionne’s Washington Post colleague Michael Gerson notes) because of its size, ubiquity, and theological tradition, the Roman Catholic Church is and must be one of the chief standard-bearers in that work. It’s good to see that standard carried well.