11 April 2008
Fans Eager to Glimpse Pope Benedict During His U.S. Visit, April 11, 2008
(Pontiff will have large crowds at events in Washington, New York)
By Louise Fenner
Staff Writer
Washington -- It is pretty safe to say that most of America’s 69 million Catholics will be closely following the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Washington and New York April 15-20.
Tickets to the two public Masses the pope will celebrate were swept up quickly by people eager to see and hear the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Requests for tickets for the Washington Mass at the new Nationals baseball stadium -- which opened March 30 -- numbered more than 150,000 for the 46,000 available spaces. And more than 200,000 applied for the 57,000 available seats in Yankee Stadium in New York.
The United States has the third largest Catholic population in the world, after Brazil and Mexico. Nearly one-fourth (24 percent) of all U.S. residents are Catholic, according to a recent poll, making Catholics the single largest religious denomination in the United States. (See “U.S. Religious Landscape Is Marked by Diversity and Change.”)
Young people will play a major role during the papal visit. On April 17 in Washington, several young adults will present Pope Benedict with symbols of peace from their faith traditions during an interfaith meeting between the pope and representatives from non-Christian religions, including Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists. In New York, the pope will meet with a group of 50 disabled young people and address a rally of some 25,000 Catholic teens and seminarians.
Two students at Catholic University in Washington designed the altar that will be used by the pope during Mass at Nationals Park. Washington schoolchildren competed to create two-minute videos to welcome the pope, and three of the videos will be shown during a pre-Mass program. The pope will be taking an unusual souvenir back to the Vatican -- a skateboard from the children of New York. Replicas of the winning skateboard design, which was selected from 76 entries, will be sold to raise money for Catholic charities.
The pope’s first U.S. visit since his election as pontiff in 2005 also will include a meeting with President Bush at the White House on April 16 -- which is the pontiff’s 81st birthday -- an address to the United Nations General Assembly; celebration of Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York; and a visit to Ground Zero, site of the World Trade Center destroyed by terrorists in 2001.
A SLICE OF THE WORLD
The immense diversity of the Catholic Church in America will be reflected in the choirs, the congregations and the co-celebrants at the papal Masses, said Washington Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl. "If you stand at any altar in a parish throughout this archdiocese, what you see when you look out at the congregation is a slice of the world," he told the Catholic News Service.
An intercultural choir with members from 35 countries will sing at the papal Mass at Nationals Park in French, Spanish and Zulu, according to the archdiocese, which is providing its own 250-voice choir. There also will be children’s and gospel choirs.
"We want to make sure he sees the true face of the church of the Archdiocese of Washington,” said Wuerl. “It's a beautiful face, a face that includes the young and old, the rich and poor, and just about every ethnic and cultural background you can identify.”
There are 600,000 Catholics in the Archdiocese of Washington, and each Sunday, Masses are celebrated in nearly two dozen different languages in 150 parishes. Among the languages are Arabic and Syriac (of the Aramaic language family), Chinese, Croatian, French, Korean, Polish, Vietnamese and Ge’ez, an ancient African liturgical language. About 30 parishes in the archdiocese -- which includes Washington and five counties in Maryland – celebrate the Mass in Spanish to accommodate the large population of Hispanic Catholics in the area.
For the papal Mass at Yankee Stadium, one of the liturgical readings and some prayers and benedictions will be offered in Spanish. Puerto Rican-born singer Jose Feliciano will join a 200-voice choir and other notable performers, including Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, during the Mass.
The Archdiocese of New York serves 2.6 million Catholics in 402 parishes with Masses in at least 35 different languages. About 23 percent of the congregants are foreign-born. In the neighboring Brooklyn Diocese, more than half are foreign-born. New York and Brooklyn are among the 10 U.S. dioceses with the largest Hispanic populations.
CHANGING POPULATION
The proportion of Catholics in the U.S. population has held steady at around 25 percent since the 1970s, but “this apparent stability obscures a great deal of change in the makeup of Catholicism in the U.S.," says the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, which recently issued a survey on America’s religious landscape.
“Catholicism has lost more people to other religions or to no religion at all than any other single religious group,” the survey reports. However, such losses are offset by the number of Catholics who have immigrated to the United States.
Some 61 percent of all immigrants are from Latin America and the Caribbean, with half of these from Mexico. Nearly three-fourths of Mexican immigrants and half of other Latin American immigrants are Catholic.
This explains why Hispanics account for nearly one-third of U.S. Catholics. They may comprise an even larger proportion in the future.
See a White House backgrounder on the visit of Pope Benedict XVI.
See Diversity-At Worship.
