I wanted to share some of my impressions after watching a good bit of the coverage of the first day of Pope Benedict’s visit to America. First of all, I should mention that EWTN has a nice page where you can view the various events (with the stupid Windows Media Player, unfortunately), fast forwarding, as it were, or rewinding to watch an exciting part again. :) It’s a great thing not to have to watch the coverage live because this would require listening to Raymond Arroyo and, far worse, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.

- Thank the good Lord for Msgr. Guido Marini! At so-called “Evening Prayer” on Wednesday, the Pope wore a magnificent cope, recently restored, Arroyo said, and dating from the time of the original dedication of the shrine to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. And, as according to the story I linked in the Ephemeris a couple days ago, the beautiful and impressively large staff (is there a more proper name for it?) - it looks like the Pope could fit off the Huns single handedly with it, given its size and apparent weight - was also used.

- 3/4 of those bishops present had probably never heard such beautiful music as was sung at the Vespers. Well, or if they had, they probably did and still do shy away from it as “contrary to the spirit of the Council” and “not likely to foster harmony between cultures” or some such rot.

- Unfortunately, some bozo chose a woman to do the Scripture reading. There were, like, 200 bishops in the room, and they chose a woman to stand up there and read to them?? It’s just bizarre. In the recent past, these sorts of addresses were behind closed doors; bet there weren’t any female lectors then. I wish they’d stop pandering to different demographic groups like the shameless politicians many of our U.S. bishops are.

- Which reminds me, that was the one thing I liked about Fr. Neuhaus’ commentary: he seemed never to miss a chance to speak slightingly of the bishops in America. When Arroyo said that the Pope, after visiting a couple chapels on the main floor of the basilica, would go down into the crypt for so-called “Evening Prayer” and then his address, Neuhaus corrected him by saing: “Rather, down into the undercroft, lest we give our viewers the wrong idea about the state of the U.S. bishops conference.”

- Leo XIII and whole bunch of other saintly souls whom we love must have been rolling over in their graves as they listened (after a manner of speaking) to endless praise of America’s pluralistic society. It was not surprising that President Bush spoke in praise of our arrangement here in this country, and really, no less surprising that Benedict did as well: he has often said as much in the past. Benedict talked about the privilege we have in this country of being able to worship God according to the “dictates of conscience”. Yet the so-called “freedom of conscience” was condemned by every supreme pontiff (or at least the ones that got around to it) before the Second Vatican Council. It’s an innovation. It seems to verge on the error of failing to give precedence to Truth over Charity, as Romano Amerio might say. Stat veritas and all that. Maybe if, one day, when I’ll have read the documents of the Second Vatican Council, I’ll see what the theoretical framework is supposed to be that undergirds the practical endorsement of a pluralistic society. (What’s really bizarre to me, though, is that Benedict doesn’t just talk of this as though it were something to be tolerated, given the present state of affairs; rather, he seems to speak of it as being the most desirable state of affairs: Church and State should be separate and we all worship according to the dictates of our consciences. Last time I checked, worshipping according to the dictates of one’s own conscience was protestantism.)

- Watching the Drum and Fife corps at the reception on the South Lawn was cool. I don’t know that I had ever seen that before. Speaking of that reception, President Bush’s shorter speech there was much better, or at least more engaging, than the Pope’s longer address. Bush drew applause from the crowd, which, I’m sure, was mostly Catholic and conservative, on more than one occasion. The Pope’s speech drew no interrupting applause, partly, I think, because when he began to speak, he was speaking very quickly - was he nervous? - and between the haste of his words and his accent, it was sometimes hard to understand him. Also, in comparing the audio with the written speech that I had read beforehand, it seemed like he was hard to understand on precisely those words where the import of his message was supposed to come across.