Ouch! Just imagine you write the top story on the front page of the New York Times — and it gets promptly denied. That’s what happened today. Time had the same story, too, but only on their Web site. In both cases, the journalists were trying to pin down what if anything comes now, after Pope Benedict has spoken so strongly about the shame of the sexual abuse scandal and his determination to bar pedophiles from the priesthood. The victims who met him felt very strongly that Benedict’s gesture was a promise of more steps to come. But what? We had a story examining this question yesterday but we were not among the few at a closed lunch with Cardinal William Levada organised by Time for a few U.S. journalists.

The story the NYT and Time took away from that session was that Levada, who succeeded the pope as the Vatican’s top doctrinal official, had hinted that the Catholic Church was considering changing its laws to pursue more abuse cases. More specifically, he was supposed to have said it was considering lengthening the statute of limitations on sexual abuse cases. Under current canon law, an abuse victim has to report within 10 years of his or her 18th birthday. Levada said some victims took longer to come to grips with the issue and should be able to report abuse and see it investigated even if it happened more than a decade ago.

We saw the NYT report on Friday evening and it didn’t seem watertight. We’d also been told that Time was going to post the transcript of Levada’s remarks, but it wasn’t posted late Friday evening. So we left it over for Saturday.

The first opportunity to check this was after the pope’s Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The chief Vatican spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi, gave a briefing and was asked right away what Levada had said about the reports. Here are the operative quotes from a lively session in Italian and English:

“This morning, Cardinal Levada told me they hadn’t understood it correctly. There is no change coming … Levada said the norms he spoke of were already in force.”

“He told me this this morning after reading the article in the New York Times.”

“He said we didn’t talk about anything new. The things we spoke about are already in force.”

Asked if Levada meant the journalists had misunderstood him, Lombardi said, “That is what I understood.”

So if the statute of limitations has already been extended, nothing new is coming there. Talk about changes to canon law were already in the air yesterday and I asked a specialist what he thought could happen. “I haven’t seen what law could be put into place that hasn’t already been put into place,”Mgr. Charles Guarino, a canon lawyer in the Rockville Centre diocese on Long Island, told me. “It’s already in the code of canon law in terms of what precautions need to take place and what responsibilities exist for seminary rectors and local bishops.” Guarino used to work with the pope when he was Cardinal Ratzinger at the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the job Levada has now). He focused especially on the U.S. sexual abuse cases and he works on those cases in the Rockville Centre diocese now.

Something else came out of the Levada lunch and Beliefnet’s blogger David Gibson zeroed in on it. He said the U.S. cardinal

bristled at a suggestion that some bishops had “aided and abetted” priest-abusers by not acting to remove them.

“I don’t believe that,” Levada said. “I know bishops who have said to me, if I had known then what I know now, I would have acted differently.” But he said the bishops who moved abusers around to other parishes or did not remove them from ministry were acting on bad advice from experts and psychiatrists.

“So it [the scandal] has been a learning experience for bishops,” the cardinal said.

“I personally do not accept that there has been a broad base of bishops guilty of aiding and abetting pedophiles … If I thought there were, I would certainly want to talk to them about that.”

Some critics have said the Church should not only remove pedophile priests but also the bishops that shuffled them around and tried to cover up the problem. In his comments above, Levada disputes the contention that many bishops did this. Guarino also did in his comments to me. So that doesn’t look like a place to expect changes either.

Another suggestion from critics has been that Cardinal Bernard Law, the former Boston archbishop who resigned at the height of the sexual abuse scandal, be removed from the senior post he was given in Roman exile. Law is archpriest of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, a prestigious post that is quite public. He has several other responsibilities at the Vatican, but they are internal.

What do you think about how the Church has handled this scandal? Should some bishops have to carry the can for it? Would you think Law should step down from his public post?

Much has been made of reports that the Vatican is holding talks with Saudi Arabia on building churches in the Gulf monarchy, the birthplace of Islam and stronghold of the conservative Wahhabi school of thought.

But it’s hard to imagine imminent breakthroughs, given broad-based scholarly opposition anchored in prophetic traditions and centuries of jurisprudence and commentary.

The IslamOnline (IOL) web site posted an article in Arabic polling prominent clerics on the issue, and offers some insight into the magnitude of clerical opposition such a prospect would generate.

The sheikhs rejected the idea as violating a basic Islamic commandment.

Crucially, IOL’s correspondent said a source close to a Saudi government-appointed religious body said that the issue would be raised with a view to issuing a fatwa, or religious edict, reiterating the existing prohibition.

An earlier fatwa by the same body several years ago and signed by Saudi Arabia’s mufti Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh, among others, had upheld the ban on all non-Muslim houses of worship.

At the heart of the issue are spoken traditions of the Prophet Mohammed ordering the expulsion of the Arab peninsula’s non-Muslims and saying that no two religions are to co-exist there.

Past scholars have debated the extent of the hadiths’ application, and a significant number of scholars advocated an interpretation that covers the Peninsula south of the Levant, with some excluding Yemen.

Even relative liberal Taha Jaber el-Alwani said the issue is effectively closed to reinterpretation due to the volume of existing commentary and rulings, dating back to Islam’s first centuries.

The crux of the matter is a conception of the peninsula as a bastion of Islam, akin to a Muslim Vatican. Muslim scholars are fond of saying it’s as unreasonable to ask to build churches in Saudi Arabia as it would be to ask to build a protestant church in Vatican city… much less a mosque.

The issue is already marring Muslim-Christian dialogue prospects. The Vatican has been lukewarm in responding to calls by Muslim scholars for an interfaith dialogue, and Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said talks would need to address why some Muslim states limit church building while Muslims can build mosques in Europe.

That’s unlikely to overcome doctrinal opposition, especially since European mosque building is facing a raft of troubles, from petitions and protests, to clashes and court cases.

It’s illustrative to note that a Saudi quasi-parliamentary body recently refused to support moves by Muslim countries to have the U.N. draw up a pact on respecting religions, for fear it would require Saudi to recognise faiths it considers mere idol-worshipping.

The Vatican could be banking on King Abdullah’s reputation as a reformer at odds with an entrenched and conservative clergy. But it’s a tall order to expect Abdullah to defy centuries of doctrine, risking his standing with Islamic scholars for little in the way of tangible returns.

It looks like the building of churches in Saudi Arabia will remain a stumbling block in Muslim-Christian dialogue for the foreseeable future.

There was some speculation before his visit that Pope Benedict was going to read the riot act to Catholic educators for not keeping their universities and schools sufficiently Catholic. That was never really on the cards, because Benedict doesn’t like to come and berate people like that.

Also, the situation is complex, reflecting changes in the overall Catholic population and in Catholic academe. Reading the riot act would not have been very effective, anyway, because Benedict doesn’t really have the power to enforce changes in individual U.S. Catholic universities.

Instead, he opted for an approach that was actually more challenging to the Catholic educators than sitting through an outright rebuke would have been. He outlined a whole philosophy of what Catholic education should be and challenged them to live up to its ambitious goals. It was a counter-cultural message, one that sounds quite strange in such an individualistic society like America. He defended academic freedom, but freedom as the Church defines it — the freedom to follow the truth of Catholic doctrine. Freedom in this view is not simply “freedom from…” It’s “freedom to…” It’s not some free-standing concept (as modern society might see it) but a concept with a purpose.

“Divergence from this vision weakens Catholic identity and, far from advancing freedom, inevitably leads to confusion, whether moral, intellectual or spiritual,” he said at Catholic University of America in Washington.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne looked at the wider implications in his article “Disquieting Words for the Faithful.” As he wrote, “Almost any American who paid attention to his sermon had to be uncomfortable because all of us are shaped by the very forces he was criticizing. Benedict directly challenged an assumption so many Americans make about religion: that it is a matter of private devotion with few public implications … This is the thinking of a communitarian counseling against radical individualism.”

Here’s our news story on the education speech and the full text.

In the Washington Post, the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown, read between the lines and noted that the pope did not call for universities to dismiss theologians who disagree with church teachings. “At the same time, he says freedom can be abused by people who don’t teach the truth or who don’t teach Catholic teachings,” Reese said. “In a sense, he’s exercising his own academic freedom to criticize people he disagrees with, and that’s fine.”

Anyone who wants to spend money trying to commune with dead relatives has never had so much choice.

There's a growing array of satellite TV channels, Web sites, phonelines and even psychic churches which offer the services of mediums.

 But from next month, spiritualists will have to abide by strict new consumer protection regulations that are designed to give clients greater safeguards.

Some spiritualists want the government to rethink their plans to replace the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 with new rules.

They say it will lead to the bizarre situation where mediums will issue disclaimers before they get to work in an attempt to stay on the right side of the law.

Psychics may have to tell clients that their service is simply entertainment or a sort of scientific experiment which has no guarantee of success.

The Spiritual Workers Association fears sceptics may bring malicious prosecutions.

They say they shouldn't be treated like other traders. They view their strong beliefs as more akin to a religion than commercial transactions.

But critics say it's high time psychics faced tougher controls. The British Humanist Association says there were only a few successful prosecutions for fraud under the old laws.

Should healers, mediums and fortune-tellers be subject to the same consumer rules as other traders?

Pope Benedict made so many positive comments about the positive role of faith in U.S. public life before and at the beginning of his U.S. visit that it was inevitable he would get around to a deeper analysis at some point. That point came in his meeting with American bishops in Washington on Wednesday. It was the kind of analysis we’ve come to expect from him — clearly expressed, intellectually ambitious and focused on his trademark issue of relativism.

“It is not enough to count on this traditional religiosity and go about business as usual, even as its foundations are being slowly undermined,” he warned the bishops gathered at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The “American brand of secularism,” he said, “can subtly reduce religious belief to a lowest common denominator.”

Here’s our news story on the speech and the full text, which is always useful to read if Benedict’s the author. He sets out his ideas over sentences and paragraphs that need to be read to the end to get the full flavour of what he’s saying.

P.S. The usual question and answer session, which he does off the cuff in German and Italian, was a bit more formal this time. He prepared his answers and read them out, with a German accent that some Americans have a hard time understanding. He has spoken off the cuff here, but most of what he says is pre-written. Before anyone out there in the blogosphere misunderstands, I mean all this just as an observation, not a criticism of his linguistic abilities. He is a fine linguist — I wish I could speak and read as many languages as he does. Wikipedia says: As well as his native German, Benedict XVI fluently speaks Italian, French, English, Spanish, Dutch, and Latin, and has a knowledge of Portuguese. He can read Ancient Greek and biblical Hebrew

The Washington Post carries an interesting story today examining how American Catholics are split when it comes to music — many older parishioners are partial to folk-style songs written in the 1970s, while many younger members want Gregorian chant and other older forms of music.

But a third style of music ruled the streets of Washington today, as thousands gathered to view the Pope’s motorcade. Several predominantly Latino church groups brought drums, tambourines and guitars to accompany energetic songs that would not have sounded out of place in a South American soccer stadium. Click here to listen.

There was a curious reversal of roles when Pope Benedict and President Bush spoke in the Rose Garden today during the pontiff’s visit to the White House. As we put it in a sidebar to the main story :

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, President George W. Bush praised Pope Benedict to the heavens on Wednesday by poaching some of the pontiff’s best-known lines when he welcomed him to the White House.

He also gave the scholarly pope a lesson or two about public speaking, winning loud cheers from the 9,000-strong audience in the Rose Garden, while Benedict elicited only sparse, polite applause for a speech without noticeably sharp edges.

“The speechwriter who picked out those phrases must be very familiar with the pope’s works,” said Rev. Gerald Fogarty, a Roman Catholic Church historian at the University of Virginia. “It was all there, starting with the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ quote from Cardinal Ratzinger’s speech before his election,” he said.

Does Bush sound more like the preacher than Benedict to you? Read the full story and the texts for Benedict and Bush. Or check out our video of the ceremony, which has the key section from Bush’s speech:

P.S. - Bush may have gotten the applause, but he praised Benedict at the end of the pontiff’s speech with the following comment: “Thank you, your holiness. Awesome speech.” Check out the video here.

Now here’s something new for us — a story that began with a post on FaithWorld last week, prompted a slew of comments and now features in an interview for the wire. Ed Stoddard’s post “Mormons have ‘fundamental’ PR problem” highlighted the confusion caused by the case of a breakaway sect whose Texas compound was raided this month. The post has over 130 comments so far. As the debate raged, Ed interviewed Quentin Cook, a spiritual elder with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to get the official view:

DALLAS (Reuters) - The mainstream Mormon church renounced polygamy over a century ago, but it says the breakaway sects that practice plural marriage are giving it a public relations headache.

Attention has once again been drawn to the issue by the raids this month on a Texas compound run by followers of jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs. More than 400 children were removed in the raids sparked by an abuse complaint and their fate remains in legal limbo.

Quentin Cook, a spiritual elder with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told Reuters in a telephone interview that his church of 13 million had to constantly contend with public misconceptions stirred by the actions of a few thousand polygamists who were not attached to it.

Read the full interview here.

Just heard an interesting idea from Delia Gallagher, a Vatican analyst for CNN, who said that Pope John Paul was the pope of the television age but Pope Benedict is the pope of the Internet age. John Paul was good for the dramatic gesture and sound bite, which was just right for television, while Benedict speaks in lectures you should really read from start to finish. Thanks to the Internet, you can do this and more — something that was just not possible when John Paul was globe-trotting around.

As an example, just take Benedict’s comments on the flight over the Atlantic. We covered them in a text report. But we also also have some video of him on the plane, declaring (with his strong German accent) that he was “deeply ashamed” because of the scandal of U.S. priests sexually abusing minors. We’ve read about these in-flight Q&As with the Vatican press corps in the past, but how many have you ever seen? Here’s our clip:

It also used to be that only journalists on the flight had access to all of the pope’s comments. Now, The National Catholic Reporter has produced a rush transcript of his full in-flight Q&A. Here’s the link.

Even before Pope Benedict arrives in Washington, there is plenty of speculation about the effect of his visit on U.S. politics. A lot of this is just filling airtime and column space in the media because we don’t even know yet exactly what he will say. Anyway, for those who like to parse every statement for its political implications, below are a few issued on Tuesday before the pope arrived.

Do they seem balanced to you? Or too obviously aimed at recruiting the pope for one view or the other? Leave your comments below.

– The White House

Asked whether Bush and the pope were likely to discuss the child sex abuse scandal, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters:

“I won’t rule it out but I don’t think it’s necessarily on the president’s top priorities for his agenda for talking to the pope. They’ll talk about … their shared values of human rights and the importance of fighting extremism and also promoting religious tolerance.”

“The pope has expressed, as we did, our concern about the Catholics and Christians who are being targeted in Iraq among other innocent people. So I think they’ll talk about that.”

Asked whether they would discuss the war in Iraq, she said:

“Obviously there were differences years back, but I do think that they share an agreement that in order to stabilize the region and promote human rights and justice that having our troops there has been helpful …. but I’ll let the pope make those comments if he wants to.”

“They have established a good relationship, a strong bond, so they can have very frank and open discussions with one another. But I think their shared values are stronger than any disagreements on policy they might have.”

– Senator Hillary Clinton

“We are blessed to receive a visit from His Holiness, Pope Benedict, to the United States this week. Not only is he the spiritual leader of America’s great Catholic community, he is a strong and effective voice for the cause of peace, freedom, and justice as well as the fight against poverty and disease. His visit to the United States this week should be a very
impactful one. I particularly appreciate his going to Ground Zero with some of the families who lost loved ones there. I hope that his message about economic justice and global
development will get an appropriate hearing both in our country and in the government. I also applaud Pope Benedict’s example and leadership on addressing global warming, making the Vatican a model in conservation for all to emulate. His apostolic journey
is built on the theme of Christian hope, and, as he has said, the Gospel message is ’deeply rooted’ in our country. We all pray that he will have a safe and successful visit to America, and that everyone will find inspiration in his presence and his words.”

– Senator Barack Obama

“On behalf of our family, Michelle and I want to extend our warmest welcome to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI as he arrives for his historic apostolic journey to the United States. As committed Christians, we join millions of Americans — Catholics and members of all faith communities — in offering our prayers for the success of the Holy Father’s visit. At a time when American families face rising costs at home and a range of worries abroad, the theme of Pope Benedict’s journey, “Christ Our Hope,” offers comfort and grace as well as a challenge to all faith communities to put our faith into action for the common good. It will not only be Catholics who are listening to the Holy Father’s message of hope and peace; all Americans will be listening with open hearts and minds.”

UPDATE: Senator John McCain weighed in later in the day with his statement:

“Pope Benedict’s lifelong dedication to virtue and the  authenticity of his principles serve as a guiding example to  people throughout the world. When His Holiness travels to
America, his visits are historic in scope and remind us of the profound contributions to America’s cultural values that he and the Church he leads have made. He is the most influential  advocate for peace and faith in the lives of millions of  Americans, and for millions more the Holy Father is a calming, spiritual presence to be welcomed and respected.”

Our report on his comments on board his Alitalia flight, “Shepherd One,” over the Atlantic is posted here . The National Catholic Reporter’s John Allen has an analysis pouring some cold water on the more heated speculation– see Behind the Scenes: Watch for political fallout from pope’s visit