So in the complicated wrestling match involving secularism, Christianity and Islam, some non-Roman Catholic Christians are looking to Benedict for leadership while others are trying to influence him. “One of the things that we are trying to do — the people behind the scenes in Rome — is to encourage the pope to speak more and more about what we might call the world’s agenda,” Flack said. “The future of the planet, the environment, poverty in Africa and India. How do we cope with rising fundamentalism not just in Islam but all the world religions? We need to hear what he feels about those things, not just internal church issues.”

“How much filth there is in the church and even

among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him!” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,

Stations of the Cross meditation, Good Friday, 2005

Last month, the pope stood on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and exhorted the thousands gathered below for his Saturday greeting that they must pray every day, telling them that prayer is “a question of life or death.” It was Benedict speaking, not Ratzinger. As pope, he has focused attention on such matters as the need for Catholics to reconnect with the Virgin Mary, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the importance of the liturgy in the Mass — all touchstones of Roman Catholic piety.

But the church is more than piety. It is undergirded by a network of rules, obedience requirements, punishments and admonitions of which Ratzinger is perhaps the chief modern architect and by a system of protecting its own that is centuries old. If the church fails to realize Benedict’s goal of bringing Europe back into the fold and of making itself a mediator between godless secularism and the fervent Islam of many of the Continent’s newest residents, what may be the prime reason for that failure was laid out for me by a calmly impassioned 40-year-old man sitting in a boxy, Ikea-style office just off leafy and genteel Merrion Square in Dublin. Colm O’Gorman is the founder and director of a counseling center called One in Four, the ratio referring to the percentage of adults in Ireland said to have suffered sexual abuse as children. Beginning when he was 14 and serving as a choirboy in the rural diocese of Ferns, O’Gorman was repeatedly abused and raped by the local priest. In 1998, he filed a lawsuit against the diocese as a way to get the church to recognize the problem of pedophilic clergy. In 2003, the diocese agreed to pay $325,000 to settle the suit. Meanwhile, as attention built, the Irish government opened a formal inquiry and issued a damning report in 2005. O’Gorman is now a celebrity in Ireland and currently is running for Parliament. The United States is the country with by far the largest number of sex-abuse claims made against Catholic priests, but Ireland has that distinction in Europe, and in both countries the number of priests who have committed sexual crimes on minors has been estimated at 4 percent.

O’Gorman told me the issue of sex abuse among the Catholic clergy, as big as it is in itself, gets at something even more elemental. Even after years of coverage in the U.S. and Europe, and hundreds of lawsuits and tales of woe, he said: “The Vatican has never, ever accepted responsibility for clerical sexual abuse at all. Never. John Paul talked about his hurt. Benedict talked about his devastation. But the Vatican has never acknowledged that they’ve failed in their responsibility.” While Benedict has said many things on the issue over the years, advocates for victims of abusive priests still rankle over his declaring in 2002 that “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign.” Regarding the longstanding policy of transferring abusive priests to other dioceses, O’Gorman said: “This wasn’t some passive benign failure. This was an active approach that was taken to these cases. In my view, there’s a system at work in this, and the Vatican is at the heart of it.”

A 2005 survey found that 34 percent of Irish Catholics attend Mass weekly, one of the higher percentages in Europe. But in 1973 the figure was 91 percent, so the decline is actually among the steepest in Europe. As far as O’Gorman is concerned, the connection between the church’s handling of the sex-abuse issue and the drop-off in Mass attendance is direct: “For the church to criticize secular society while at the same time not looking in any way at itself — for most people this is a reason they turn away from it. There’s a huge credibility problem, and I wonder if they’re capable of recognizing how much their currency is devalued. They don’t have any moral authority.”

The sex-abuse issue is part of what Hans Küng calls “the long-term structural problems of the church,” most of all its hierarchical decision-making process, which has kept church leaders looking out for their own and which ensures a broad gulf between what the cardinals and the pope decree and the way most Catholics live. Like John Paul II, Benedict XVI has shown little interest in reforming some of the basic policies affecting the lives of ordinary Catholics. “We can lament the rising divorce rate, but it’s a reality,” Pecklers said. “On Sunday mornings, the people in the pews, in Europe or America, are very often divorced or gay or are using birth control. Or else they’re not in the pews; they’ve left the church.” As Küng wrote last year, “For as long as the absolute primacy of Rome prevails, the pope will have most of Christianity against him.” That may be too strong to apply to Catholics everywhere, but it seems to ring true for Western Europe.

Benedict may be right that the Catholic Church has a world-historic chance to transform Europe and bring about change. But the church’s own strictures could work against that. The paradox may be that for all his stylistic softening as pope, Joseph Ratzinger’s own labors through the decades, applying his life experience with such rigor to protecting and preserving the church, are precisely what prevent Europeans from reconnecting with their roots. “Think of the silencing of theologians in recent decades,” said Father Reese, the former editor of the Jesuit journal America. “The suppression of discussion and debate. How certain issues become litmus tests for orthodoxy and loyalty. All of these make it very difficult to do the very thing Benedict wants. I wish him well. I want him to succeed. But it seems everything he has done in the past makes it much more difficult to do it.”