Pope Benedict's first visit to Washington, DC, although cordial, highlights the sharp differences between Catholic social teaching and the foreign and social policy of the Bush Administration. 

While the Pope was arriving in D.C., car bombs in Iraq laced the streets with flying shards of death, and the President continues to brandish the wounded U.S. military and threatened Iran. 

In domestic politics, the President, in the name of national security, continues to defend water-boarding and other forms of  torture, invokes imperial powers for the Presidency defends tax cuts for the affluent and maintains us in a conflict that has sapped the national economy and provides a legacy of war to endow the next Presidency. 

President Bush has attempted to woo church-going Catholics with sexual policies presumed similar to the bishops' preoccupation with abortion, stem cell research and anti-condom solidarity, ignoring the plight of the world's air and oceans that float the environmental legacy of future generations.  

Both leaders have reason for humility. Bush for botching the economy and espousing free trade as if it flows from our largesse and will be good for the poor. Pope Benedict for bringing a mantle of shame in the pedophilia scandal and for the way in which the institution discriminates against women .

Catholic social teaching reminds listeners that we are partners on the earth, challenged not to build walls to exclude the immigrants, but urged to remember the orphans, the widows and the aliens. For we were all once aliens in a foreign land, and we shall come to judgement measured by how much  we have cared for the hungry,  remembered those in prison, given drink to the thirsty and measure our good deeds measured by the number of  times we have worked for reconciliation, not by the number of people we have slain.

Rev. Bill Callahan