Take a cue from Pope Benedict

Shame about Pennsylvania. No, I’m not talking about Barack Obama’s narrow loss Tuesday night to Hillary Clinton. I’m talking about the opportunity cost of spending the last week schlepping from Scranton to Harrisburg and back. What Sen. Obama could have been doing this past week is keeping an eagle eye on Pope Benedict’s whistle-stop tour of the eastern seaboard. I am not a Catholic, nor is he, but the lessons from this visit transcend Catholicism.

The Pope made a number of stops over the past week, most visibly his masses in front of packed houses at Yankee Stadium in New York and Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. But his most important appearances were before much smaller crowds. Smallest of them all was the group of victims of sexual abuse he met in Boston. This was a handpicked group, tightly controlled by the Boston Archdiocese and the Vatican, yet they were also skeptics — skeptical the church would be more responsive on the sex abuse issue, after years of stonewalling, and skeptical the Pope even understood the depth of their pain.

And Benedict mostly won them over. Typical in his response to the meeting was Gary Bergeron, a victim who said, “I think we moved the ball down the field this week. … I really think he set the bar.” How did Benedict accomplish this? He did it through his ability to project personal compassion, grief for their suffering, and steadfastness in addressing the problem. None of this is rocket science, but it bears repeating that the personal touch is important, especially for someone often labeled aloof.

Benedict’s other notable meeting was with a group of Catholic educators from around the country. The Vatican has expressed no small displeasure over a perceived breakdown in teaching standards at Catholic schools, and many thought he was going to drop the hammer on them. He didn’t, or at least not in the way most expected. Instead, the Pope called for a robustly intellectual approach to Catholic teaching. In his words, “I wish to reaffirm the great value of academic freedom. In virtue of this freedom you are called to search for the truth wherever careful analysis of evidence leads you.”

Mostly his words were intended to buck up the resolve of Catholic teachers, not chide them for straying from the path. None of this is to say that he is anything but a very conservative theologian, or that America has suddenly ditched the vice of secular materialism that Benedict finds so alarming. The gap in this country between what Benedict and the average Catholic believes may not be as wide as that in Europe, but it is not small. Benedict made sure the teachers know he is disturbed by the liberties taken on some Catholic campuses. And his message was not the call to individualism that is so unique to our political culture. Benedict is not interested in people exploring their own moral landscape.

The takeaway for Barack Obama is in Benedict’s approach, not his ideology. Sen. Obama has lost some of his authenticity and humanity in recent weeks. In light of the constant shelling he’s taken from Team Clinton and the media viper’s nest he encountered at the last debate, that’s no surprise. But he needs to remember that he has been able to win over voters who are a long ways from him on the political spectrum because he is able to show them he has a functioning moral compass. He also needs to stick with the Pope’s strategy of convincing through force of ideas. The Senator has already said that words matter — let’s hope he doesn’t forget it.

Second, Sen. Obama would do well to remember that he doesn’t need to dumb down his message to win. In calling for an intellectual Catholicism, Benedict refused to speak down to American Catholics, and one senses this was appreciated. The temptation for Sen. Obama, fresh off his shellacking for his “bitter” comments, is to tone down his professorial side. This would be a mistake.

Unlike Mike Huckabee, Sen. Obama is not a hambone and never will be one. He brings the most lofty, stentorian style to Presidential politics in decades, and it sets him apart from the other candidates. It also gives him at least a veneer of wisdom beyond his years. Whether he wins the White House will turn, to a large extent, on whether blue collar voters relate to him, but that question will not come down to his style. It will turn on their perception of his values, and they don’t need a lot of small words and folksy turns of phrase to make that call in his favor.

Third and finally, there is the religious import of the Pope’s message. Although the Pope said that faith is not a matter simply of personal devotion, his was not a rallying cry for either party. As E.J. Dionne noted in The Washington Post, “American Catholics of all political hues will find themselves struggling with his message.” This basic point holds true for Protestant evangelicals as well, who have found their faith cheapened by their status as shock troops for the Republican Party.

Sen. Obama has won votes from people who don’t share his faith, which is both liberal and in the hands of a nutty preacher, because he has managed to convince them that we should be both faithful and skeptical of politicizing our faith. It wasn’t too long ago most American preachers of various denominational stripes agreed, but those days are past. However, the rise of preachers like Rick Warren, of Saddleback Church, indicates the pendulum may be swinging the other way.

As a Democrat, Sen. Obama will be boxed in by the party’s platform. He will never reach voters whose top three issues are abortion, gay marriage, and euthanasia. What he can do is show fence-sitters a measure of optimism and good will, and ask them to question whether their faith makes such clear political demands on them. Pope Benedict is no politician, and his view of the future is certainly not Sen. Obama’s, but the Senator would do well to mimic his approach.

<i>Paul Nitze is a deputy district attorney in Adams County and has been a part-time Aspenite his entire life. Before attending law school, he worked as a legislative assistant to another part-time local, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).</i>