Views From the Outside

"He's a relic, a flashback to antiquity," Jon Meyers, a 40-year-old D.C. art director, said recently during a lunchtime errand downtown. The Vatican is an ivory tower, said Meyers, who calls himself "sort of Jewish."

On the next block, Lexa Lemieux, an atheist who works at a consulting firm, said she hadn't even heard the pope was coming and doesn't think he's relevant. How can he characterize birth control as wrong in such a poverty-stricken place as Africa? How can he think he knows what God wants? "I don't identify with the whole thing," she said.

Non-Catholics were much more familiar with John Paul II, who was in office nearly three decades. John Paul had a dramatic life narrative: actor, athlete, communism-fighter. Benedict, a shy Bavarian academic, is known for being the Vatican's guardian of morality and doctrine -- "not exactly sexy work," Winston said. "It's hard to understand the intricacies of his positions."

John Paul also made the office of pope more accessible to the general public through pop-culture-type events that experts say Benedict is unlikely to initiate, like the World Day of Prayer in 2002, when John Paul invited Shinto priests, rabbis and imams, among others, to ride a train with him through Italy to promote peace. Or when he drew hundreds of thousands of people in shorts and sneakers to a Denver park in 1993 for World Youth Day. In a YouTube world, Benedict's professorial style might be missed by many outside the faith.

Hoge, of Catholic University, thinks non-Catholics, like Catholics, should take the pope seriously as a moral leader, but "Americans basically don't trust this idea that 'I have the mind of God.' Americans don't trust that."

That sounds about right to the Rev. Patrice Sheppard of the Living Word Church in Southwest Washington, whose voice tenses a bit when she talks about money spent on the pope's visit. "They're not glorifying God; they're glorifying a man . . . that don't get me no closer to God."

Pop culture in general seems uninterested in the pope, save for generic pontiff appearances on "South Park" and such films as "Saving Grace," a 1985 comedy in which Tom Conti plays a pope who gets locked out of the Vatican by accident and thrust into the regular world.

One reason could be that non-Catholic America doesn't know what to do with this lofty, unique position and fears offense -- a la the Muhammad cartoon controversy.

That's precisely the reason why Washington Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl thinks non-Catholics in hyperactive, celebrity-obsessed America might pay attention to the pope: because he's not like any other clergy, no matter how mega their megachurch.

"The pope speaks not just to Catholics, but to the whole world. And his message is a message of understanding; it's a message of respect; it's a message of how do you build a good and just society. All of those currents will be part of his presentations," Wuerl said this week. "And I think they go through the hearts of most people."