A Reporter’s Notebook New York, – Friday, April 18
Blog
Father McGivney Would Be Proud
Day after day, in America’s newsrooms and television studios, in the midst of a contentious primary contest pitting the nation’s first viable black candidate against the first viable female candidate, a soft-spoken, 81-year-old foreign Christian leader has grabbed the headlines and the “live-at-five” media sound-bites. This could not happen in any other country in the world, least of all in self-consciously secular Europe, once a seedbed of Catholicism, where faith is studiously kept from public debate and policy decisions. Yet in the world’s only modern superpower, an ancient Church that is often ignored for its irrelevance or scorned for its “outdated” teachings on sex, Pope Benedict XVI has become a media star and entered the imaginations of millions who rarely given religion a second thought.
 Today, the pope arrives in the media capital of the world to address the world’s political forum, the United Nations, to deliver a moral and religious message that will receive more worldwide attention than the latest statement of the UN’s leaders. At the same time, in the Washington, D.C., where the pope had been greeted on the tarmac by the U.S. president, political and religious leaders from a range of faiths will gather at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, one of the hottest tickets in town, which the president has addressed in the past.
What does this all mean? It means that America, which was discovered for Europe by Christopher Columbus, whose first name means “Christ-bearer,” for God and king, and which was settled first by Catholics and then other Christians seeking “a city on a hill,” remains at heart a religious nation. Its people remain, as Pope Benedict said at his first public Mass at Nationals Stadium, “a people of hope” and great charity. Thus, it was a decision of great wisdom – with the guidance of God – that the pontiff chose as his theme for his first visit to this nation, “Christ Our Hope.” In their hearts, American people know this, and amid the rush of everyday work and family duties, in an age that is supposed to be post-Christian, they are listening, and hoping.
We Knights of Columbus know that our founder Father Michael J. McGivney, whom the Holy Father has just declared a Venerable Servant of God, would be proud. At the same time he would tell his Knights that much more needs to be done and exhort them, in the words of Pope Benedict, to lead the “new evangelization” by becoming “leaven” for the Church and the culture.
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