On Friday morning, April 18, Pope Benedict will arrive at JFK airport to spend the weekend with us! I know that all of us are preparing for his visit and that we will welcome him with the joy and the pride of members of the One Church of Christ of which our Holy Father, Pope Benedict, is shepherd and head. Our parishes have received information about ordering brochures and prayer cards for his pastoral visit. I am hopeful that all of us in our diocese will be one praying for him and his intentions before, during and after this pastoral visit.

Many persons have asked me about the Holy Father, what type of person he is and what to expect from him. I do not have a close personal relationship. During my years in Rome, the work of my office did not intersect much with that of his. We knew each other. We exchanged Christmas cards, but that was about it. Since his election as pope, I have been at several Wednesday audiences including the wonderful one when over 100 of us were in Rome for the jubilee pilgrimage of our diocese last November. In our brief meetings, the Holy Father and I have talked about a number of things, including how to interpret the Second Vatican Council correctly, the possibility that St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross might be declared a Doctor of the Church, and what was going on in our diocese and in the Church in the United States. At the November pilgrimage, I had the privilege of presenting the three auxiliary bishops and Msgrs. Brennan and Morrissey to him. They can all attest to the fact that we have a kind and gentle pope who greets you warmly, listens to you intently and is very outgoing and affirming of everyone he meets. He envelops you and indeed the world with a kind and gentle love and engages you with a keen and brilliant mind. In short, we are blessed to have him as pope and we should pray to God daily for him and for his leadership of our Church.

What can we expect from him? Of course, he is first and foremost a priest and a bishop. He comes to us as our pastor and shepherd. Because he is pope, he is the visible center of unity for our Church and, as St. Ignatius of Antioch said in the second century, “He presides over the Church in unity and charity.”

In my judgment, the Church has been blessed as in very few times, if any other time, in history with over 100 years of holy popes with different but all outstanding gifts. They have shared these generously and with great love for the Church. Benedict is no exception but, rather, the latest star in this pantheon.

He brings so many gifts and talents as a theologian, a teacher, a deep man of the spirit, prayer and holiness. He says profound things simply and clearly. As a young priest theologian, he assisted the brilliant Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joseph Frings, as his theological expert during the Council. He knows the Council from the inside and shares Pope John Paul’s estimate that the “Council was the most significant religious event of the last century.” Both popes know that the measure of the Council is that it was a moment of both ‘aggiornamento’ and ‘re-sourcement,’ a call for updating guided by a renewed understanding of the sources of the Church’s life.

That Council which has so shaped our lives has often been misinterpreted during our lifetimes by those who appealed to the “spirit of the Council” to justify aberrations or novelties that do not build up the Church. John Paul answered them by his truthful statement, “you cannot know the spirit of the Council if you do not know the texts of the documents.” Pope Benedict added a second important insight to the Council by his insistence that the only way to interpret the Council correctly is by the “hermeneutic of continuity.” We can expect Pope Benedict to offer us authentic and authoritative presentations of the Council and of the whole corpus of the Church’s magisterium.

One of the areas that have interested him as a professor is that of the relationship between faith and reason. Consistent with all the great theologians from St. Augustine on, the Holy Father always presents a vision of the mutuality of faith and reason as two complementary aspects of human living that together offer us a wholistic understanding of the human heart and human life with God. Faith without reason easily becomes superstition. Reason without faith produces the distorted vision of the human person that the secularist mind offers us, a vision that ultimately is destructive of the person and of humankind.

The Holy Father will celebrate the Eucharist with us. His approach to liturgy is profound and expresses in prayer his deep union of heart with our Lord and Savior. In the liturgy he will enter into the mystery of our salvation and be caught up in the beauty of the Church’s ever life-giving action of praise to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit.

As he speaks with us, prays with us, teaches and exhorts us, he will be calling us to an inner renewal that is personal, an invitation to each of us, a renewal that is communal, seeking a Church that is ever renewed and ever holier. In this way the Church through God’s grace is the sign and instrument of the unity of God and His people. He will want us to make that inner renewal of holiness the basis of our offering our communities, and our whole nation, a public witness to the truth about the human person before God, a witness of life and love that is truly transformative. This is his message to us. It is the message he will share with our brothers and sisters in the other Christian Churches and ecclesial communities, to our friends be they Jews, Muslims, believers or nonbelievers. He will invite one and all into a dialogue of truth, seeking understanding based on mutual respect. This is the dialogue of faith and culture that is so lacking and so needed in our modern American society. It is a dialogue that releases us from the narrow visions of our own prejudices and turns to God who is love, seeking from Him the light which is Christ in the Spirit that brings us renewed faith, deepened hope and a love that is truly of God.

With gratitude to God we welcome Pope Benedict and we pray for his health, his strength and his witness to the world.