WASHINGTON

Twenty-nine years ago a conservative new pope made history by saying Mass before tens of thousands of Americans on the National Mall between the Washington Monument and the Capitol, foreshadowing what proved to be an epic papacy with links to such momentous change as the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Today, Pope Benedict XVI — conservative and relatively new on the scene but very different from his predecessor in presence and personality — will begin a pastoral journey to an American Catholic Church that has been wounded and challenged in ways unforeseen at the time of Pope John Paul II’s “Mass on the Mall.”

All the same, the Catholic Church in the United States is still the world’s richest, still among the biggest and “still surprisingly vibrant,” in the words of one Providence College scholar. The traditionalist pope, according to many observers, will encounter American Catholics hungry for guidance on how to live their faith in the modern world — and in the aftermath of a sex-abuse scandal and a wave of parish closings and other financial trials.

Benedict will also encounter a flock that reflects the larger society, steeped in popular culture and consumerism but at the same time far more religious than its counterparts elsewhere in the industrialized world.

“The United States is a developed country with such pluralism — ethnically, religiously, even morally,” said James F. Keating, an associate professor of theology at Providence College. “It’s the only country in the world where all these things coexist in this way.”

Therefore, Keating said he will closely watch and listen to Benedict for “signs as to whether he views the American church as an anomaly or as a model” for the global church, a question that the Vatican has never clearly answered.

Closely related is the suspense about how Benedict will approach American Catholics and their nation at large. There is little mystery, however, about President Bush’s approach to the pope. This afternoon, he will make an unprecedented symbolic statement by traveling to Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, to greet the arriving pontiff with First Lady Laura Bush.

Tomorrow morning, the pope will attend a huge outdoor reception on the South Lawn of the White House before meeting privately with the president inside the executive mansion. In the evening, Benedict will meet and pray with 300 U.S. bishops at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. On Thursday morning he will say Mass at Washington’s new baseball stadium, Nationals Park. That night he will address Catholic educators and attend an ecumenical gathering. Friday, he will turn to the New York leg of his visit.

Describing his regard for Benedict in an interview aired over the weekend on the EWTN Global Catholic Network, Mr. Bush said, “One, he speaks for millions. Two, he doesn’t come as a politician. He comes as a man of faith.” Mr. Bush approvingly portrayed the pontiff as believing that “there’s right and wrong in life, that moral relativism has a danger of undermining the capacity to have more hopeful and free societies.”

Mr. Bush is correct in viewing Benedict as a foe of moral relativism, inasmuch as he wrote against it as a church scholar and leader and has continued to do so as pope, according to the Rev. James Martin, SJ, acting publisher of America, the national Catholic weekly magazine. But Martin said any conclusion that Benedict resides on the political right is ill-founded and overly simple.

When Mr. Bush meets privately with Benedict tomorrow, “Is he going to like what he says on the Iraq war?” asked Martin. “Is he going to like what he says about forgiveness of Third World debt? Is he going to like what he says about social injustice?” Before he succeeded John Paul II, the future pope argued in writing that a preemptive attack on Iraq would not fit with the Catholic theory of the just war.

In such respects, Martin said, everything in Bendict’s background, suggests that he will frustrate purveyors of sound bites and snapshots but reward reflection and deep reading.

John Paul II had his scholarly side, but he was also a sometime actor and — as a bishop who jousted for years with the communist government of his native Poland — a longtime activist comfortable with the art of grand gestures on the global stage. The galvanizing image of John Paul II’s in the nation’s capital in 1979 — mobbed among the monuments by curiosity-seekers and T-shirt hawkers as well as the faithful — made as big an impression as anything he said.

Benedict, by contrast, has come across as unprepossessing and has invested his pastoral energies in words, so the challenge for his listeners this week will be to hear him out in all his subtlety, Martin said. “He grew up in academia and he still thinks and writes like a scholar. He does not write like a poet or a journalist or a novelist, so you’re going to have to have to get all the way through the book before you draw your conclusions” about his message to America, he said.

These days, according to Keating, of PC, papal audiences are not what they were with John Paul II. “They’re not rock shows any longer,” Keating said. “They’re more like academic lectures.” So when Benedict speaks in an array of forums over the coming five days, “we’re going to have to read carefully. It really counts what he says.”

Many observers of Benedict expect that, in one forum or another, one topic that he will address is what Martin called “the greatest crisis the church has ever faced in this country,” the scandal of sexual abuse by priests, and related problems from declining religious vocations to money woes.

“We don’t need scolding,” said the Rev. John W. O’Malley, SJ, a Georgetown University theologian. “There have been problems and we need to hear about them. But people need solutions and they need encouragement” about how to press ahead.

For example, said O’Malley, there is much hope among priests and lay Catholics alike for the pope to inspire those who persist in their faith in the face of church closings and the consolidation of shrinking congregations and for educators who seek common ground among non-Catholic faiths.

“A word of encouragement would be welcome,” O’Malley said, “and a word of congratulations and a recognition for the difficulties these institutions face.” There is also a desire for the pope to acknowledge in some way “the vibrancy of parish life” at a moment when financial pressure is making it “harder and harder to, for the parish church isn’t just a place to go to be serviced on Sunday.”

jmulligan@belo-dc.com