c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) They say you only get once chance to make a first impression.

This is Pope Benedict XVI’s big chance.

I hope the pope chooses his words carefully. (I’m sure he will.) And I hope he speaks from his heart and leaves the more heady rhetoric for later.

Benedict’s American flock is in flux. The results of a poll by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University released earlier this week show how American Catholic practice and beliefs are changing.

More than two-thirds of the adult Catholics polled said they believed they could be “good Catholics” without going to Mass every Sunday. Only 12 percent said they “always” attended Mass on Holy Days of Obligation that didn’t fall on a Sunday.

Moreover, among those Catholics who attend Mass a few times a year or less _ the Christmas-and-Easter crowd, or Chreasters, if you will _ the most common reason given for their church absence was that they don’t believe missing Mass is a sin.

And speaking of sins: 45 percent said they never go to confession, and 26 percent _ about 13.3 million adult U.S. Catholics _ said they go to confession more than once a year; just 2 percent said they went to confession once a month or more.

There are other statistics that indicate the state of American Catholicism. More than 800 parishes have been shuttered in the last dozen years, and 1,267 Catholic schools have closed since 2000.

Then there are the declining numbers in the priesthood (only 456 men were ordained to the priesthood last year), and more than 3,200 of the nation’s more than 18,600 parishes currently have no resident pastor. It’s a portrait much different from what Pope Paul VI saw in 1965, when he became the first pope to visit the United States and more than 1,500 priests were ordained.

It’s been a rough six years for Catholicism in the United States, what with the clergy sex abuse scandal that has cost church coffers more than $2 billion and, with more than 5,000 victims revealed thus far, much more than that in the kinds of losses that can be accurately quantified.

To put it plainly, American Catholics need a pep talk.

They need to hear words of solace from the man who leads them (even if many of them don’t agree with everything he says about social issues or doctrine). They need to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd, the one who would go looking for them even if they were the only sheep lost in the whole world.

Doctrine and dogma and rules and even most theology can wait.

What the Catholic Church needs now is love. Just … love.

I hope in the days to come, Pope Benedict talks about love.

I hope he tells American Catholics (and anyone else who happens to be paying attention) how much God loves them. Not for anything they do or don’t do, but just because they are, and just the way they are.

I hope he talks about love, not just as an amorphous idea but as a visceral reality, the way a parent is supposed to love a child; the way spouses are meant to cherish and care for each other; the way true friends abide in a love they could never conjure on their own.

I hope Pope Benedict explains that the God of love walks with them, even and especially in the times when it feels like God has left the building.

I hope he tells them that God rebuilds, heals and resurrects. I hope he tells them that God is mercy, grace and justice, but not in the way we might do any of those things ourselves.

I hope Benedict goes on and on about how love is the opposite of not only hatred, but also fear.

I hope he reminds them that they are a light in the darkness.

And that love really does conquer all.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

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