Contradictory Americans

American Pope Highly Unlikely Given Views of Church Leaders By Alan Cooperman and Daniel Williams:

The bias stems from conflicting views of the United States in Europe in general and in the Vatican in particular. The United States is regarded with derision for its coarse consumerism, with admiration for its spirituality, with fear for its power and with envy for its clout in world affairs.

Moreover, the American church often baffles the Vatican, which regards it as something of a maverick, U.S. church leaders say. American Catholicism has been in the vanguard of interfaith dialogue and feminism within the church, and it has a highly educated and sometimes disobedient laity...

"I think that many people in Europe -- and that would mean, therefore, many people in the church -- see the United States as the center of materialism in the world and consumerism generally," [Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington] said....

Cardinal Edmund Szoka, a former archbishop of Detroit who is now in charge of Vatican City finances, said U.S. Catholics send more money than any other nationality -- close to $100 million -- to defray the Holy See's expenses, support its charities and sponsor its missions.

The United States also boasts more Catholic colleges and universities than any other country. Catholic Charities USA is the largest Catholic-run charity in the world. And some U.S. church leaders maintain that on any given Sunday, there are more Catholics in the pews in the United States than in all of Western Europe...

Yet Vatican officials are also painfully aware that the United States accounts for nearly 70 percent of all the requests for marriage annulments in the Catholic Church each year. Of the 67 million Roman Catholics in the United States, more than 6 million have obtained civil divorces and remarried without an annulment, making them ineligible to take Holy Communion.

Polls have shown that a majority of U.S. Catholics disagree with the church's teachings on sexuality, particularly its ban on birth control. And the United States is failing to produce enough priests to serve its flock.

Few issues in recent years have generated as many misunderstandings and recriminations as the scandal over child sex abuse by U.S. priests. Vatican officials at first suggested that the scandal was exaggerated, and some still think that the U.S. bishops overreacted to public pressure in 2002 by instituting a "one strike, you're out" policy toward child sex abusers in the priesthood...

Underlying some of the arm's-length attitudes toward the American church is a longtime European opinion that the United States has no culture and is given over to fads. "America has not given a major intellectual contribution to the universal church," argued Vittorio Messori, an Italian journalist who interviewed the pontiff for a book on his teachings.

Moreover, the aggressiveness of U.S. liberal movements scares Vatican officials -- whether they are campaigns inside the church for the promotion of priestly marriage and equal rights for gay men and lesbians, or campaigns outside the church in favor of abortion.

"There are so many groups with perverse ideas," said Karl Romer, secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family, the Vatican department in charge of promoting traditional families.

On the flip side, the Vatican admires the vibrancy of parish life and the practice of faith at large in the United States. Because the United States lacks a history of anti-clericalism, it is more fertile ground for Catholic teaching than is Europe.

"I am always impressed by the spirituality of the people," Romer said.

I think it's unfair that they won't choose an American, but at the same time I'm relieved. We've already got too much spirituality.