Melanie McDonagh: We can learn a lesson from the openness of secular America

He may have fewer regiments than Gordon Brown, but it hasn’t done Pope Benedict XVI any harm with the Americans. The impact made by the papal visit to the US has been rather remarkable, right from the start, what with the President meeting him off the plane and thousands singing Happy Birthday on the White House lawn.

The red-carpet reception is the more interesting, because Benedict is not John Paul II, who might have been invented to appeal to Americans. He’s a war-era German; he’s shy and cerebral; and this is the first papal visit since hair-raising child abuse scandals were exposed in Boston.

But the Americans, famously, do God. As Mr Bush told the Pope: “America is a place where faith and reason co-exist in harmony.” The theme of the visit, Christ Our Hope, is one they take perfectly seriously.

An obvious measure of the place of religion in the national psyche is the way the presidential hopefuls lined up to associate themselves with Benedict. Barack Obama declared: “It will not only be Catholics who are listening to the Holy Father’s message of hope and peace; all Americans will be listening”; Hillary Clinton, a Methodist, opined that the US was “blessed” to be hosting the Pope. And even those parts of the papal agenda that could get up people’s noses – the reservations about Iraq, the prospect of prayers for the perpetrators at Ground Zero – haven’t got in the way of a blitz of media coverage.

Read the whole article.