Pope Benedict XVI (Getty Images)

Last Friday an Italian daily published stunning claims of a plot within the upper reaches of the Catholic Church hierarchy to kill Pope Benedict XVI, former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Italy is in an uproar over the story and the news has gone viral across Europe. No wonder--it reads like the prologue to a cheap paperback thriller, hinting at webs of palace intrigue:

The Italian daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano published an unsigned letter, written in German, which spoke of a Mordkomplott – death plot – against Benedict and quoted the Archbishop of Palermo, Paolo Romeo, as predicting that the Pontiff would die with in 12 months. The anonymous missive, dated 30 December and marked "strictly confidential for the Holy Father" claims to report comments Cardinal Romeo made on a trip to Beijing last year.

Colombia's Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos passed the letter to a papal aide last month. It was written in German, claims the reporter who broke the story in Il Fatto Quotidiano, because it was intended only for the eyes of the German-born pope.

As reported by Il Fatto Quotidiano the letter is  straight out of The Da Vinci Code, structured in 3 parts with titles: "Journey to Beijing," "Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone" and "Succession of Pope Benedict XVI."  The second part is the most scandalous, detailing an allegedly difficult relationship between the Pope and the Vatican's Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, who has allegedly criticized the Pope for paying more attention to liturgy than daily state business.

Spats between Vatican officials are nothing next to the later bombshell in which  Cardinal Romeo "prophesied" the Pope's death by November, 2012.

Cardinal Romeo spoke, said the anonymous letter writer, "as someone probably aware of a serious criminal conspiracy." Those who heard the Cardinal viewed the confidence with which he made these statements as evidence of  a planned "attack on the Holy Father."

Cardinal Romeo has flatly denied making statements referenced in the letter. The Vatican is also skeptical, spokesman Father Federico Lombardi telling the media that "it is so far removed from reality" that he didn't want to make any further comment.

It's your turn now, suspense novelists. Throw in a tormented American academic with a covert military background and lots of muscular prose and this is a million-seller. Not you, Q.R. Markham.

[The Independent]

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Today, Cardinal Edward Egan of New York, Giuliani's own bishop, essentially said that the former mayor, with his "well-known support" for abortion rights, forfeited his right to call the matter private by publicly accepting Holy Communion during a papal Mass this month.

Cardinal Egan’s scolding, in which he said he "deeply regrets" Giuliani's decision, is a result of what the prelate suggested was a violation of "an understanding" with the former candidate for the Republican nomination and the church, which Egan said teaches "that abortion is a grave offense against the will of God."

There is a long-running debate within the church over the issue of Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, which, along with euthanasia, is considered among the most egregious sins. Some conservative Catholics have argued that such politicians should not be permitted to take Holy Communion, because they are sinners and the act would amount to a corruption of the holy rite. More liberal members of the church have argued that the decision is a personal one, and have pointed out that John Paul II himself administered communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians in Italy.

But for Catholic politicians in America, where the issue has been especially treacherous (see John Kerry), the easiest way out of the debate has been to avoid publicly taking communion, or admitting to taking it. That was the Giuliani tactic while he was a candidate, as Egan’s claim about an "understanding" seems to reinforce.

Now Egan says he wants a meeting with Giuliani to "insist" the former mayor abstain from receiving the Eucharist.

Not all Vatican officials agree with Egan's hard line, though there is certainly precedent for it.

Benedict XVI himself once suggested that “excommunication” could be a viable option for pro-choice Catholic politicians who receive the Eucharist, before the Holy See issued a sort of clarification which explained that Benedict intended to say that a pro-choice position was "incompatible" with receiving communion. The pope has also written in an apostolic exhortation, "Sacramentum Caritatis," that the question of administering the sacrament to a public supporter of abortion rights is "not negotiable."

Benedict argued that “worship pleasing to God can never be a purely private matter,” and that “Catholic politicians and legislators conscious of their grave responsibility before society, must feel particularly bound,” to publicly introduce and promote laws which reflects values elemental to the faith. According to Benedict, those fundamental values include “respect for human life, its defense from conception to natural death, the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one's children and the promotion of the common good in all its forms.”

“These values are not negotiable,” wrote Benedict, in some of the clearest language yet on the topic.

Some liberal-minded theologians and Vatican observers have pointed to the pope's inclusion of the "common good" in the paragraph as the Holy See's attempt to water down the statement with an ambiguous requirement for lawmakers who wish to take communion.

In June 2004, Cardinal William Levada, whom Pope Benedict would later pick to take his place as prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, concluded that the matter of communion is a personal one, and that it ultimately falls to the politician’s pastor to determine the motives for his position.

“The practice of the Church is to accept the conscientious self-appraisal of each person,” said Cardinal Levada, adding that “the practice of the Church does not per se exclude such persons from the reception of the sacraments.”

That's the position Giuliani is apparently sticking to.

Sunny Mindel, Giuliani's spokeswoman, said Monday that the former mayor is willing to meet with the cardinal but added that his faith "is a deeply personal matter and should remain confidential."

Though only 57,000 tickets are available for the pontiff’s mass at Yankee Stadium, the city’s official tourism company NYC & Co. is expecting “people from around the country, and international visitors, to come and experience the papal visit as well,” said agency spokesperson Tiffany Townsend.

In anticipation of the hordes, all kinds of businesses are whipping out pope-related products or deals to appeal to the devoutly Catholic. Or devoutly kitsch.

Souvenir merchants are peddling $5 pope baseball caps in Times Square. Banners proclaiming “New York Welcomes You” hang on lampposts in midtown around St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (Goya must have footed the bill for these since the canned food company’s corporate logo appears semi-discreetly below the image of his holiness waving.)

Uptown, one of the two remaining relics of Yorkville during its German heyday, the Heidelberg restaurant, is offering an $18.95 “Pope Special” meal of Weisswurst, Franziskaner, and Weissbeer—two sausages, German potato salad, sauerkraut and beer.

The 70-year-old Schaller and Weber butcher one door down has conceived a special sausage sandwich for the pontiff. Owner Ralph E. Schaller is rolling out the $5 dollar “Popewich”—a paddy made of vicewurst and bratwurst sausage between a pretzel—today.

Mr. Schaller hopes the pope’s arrival will be (an increasingly rare) opportunity for the German population of the city to rally around their national identity, especially the “older people who are proud of their tradition.”

Even the Archdiocese of New York is hoping to recoup the money it will spend hosting the pope through sales of officially sanctioned merchandise.

For $25 you can buy a trendy baseball T-shirt with Pope Benedict the XVI emblazoned on the back. If it were on the shelf of Urban Outfitters, it might be pseudo-subversive in the worn-out Che Guevara T-shirt sort of way, but it’s hard to figure out whom the church is trying to target with this stuff.

A plush white teddy bear wearing a shirt that reads:
“Pope Benedict the XVI/Christ our Hope/United States 2008,” can be snapped up for $20.

Who needs God’s love when you have a cuddly stuffed animal to keep you warm at night?

Selling papal memorabilia probably dates back to the days when the church sold indulgences, but the Archdiocese of New York only started doing it in 1995 when Pope John Paul II visited.

The church struck a decidedly modern licensing deal with a jewelry company to manufacture gold- and silver-plated re-creations of the Vatican Library's jewelry collection, to be sold exclusively at Macy’s for between $12 and $75.

But the church did have the good taste to reject pope-on-a-rope soap, pope sunglasses and a tall white liturgical headdress shaped like a miter called the “Vatican Visor” for their official line of merchandise, according to a Sept. 20, 1995, article in The New York Times.

"People were trying to get us interested in papal coffee mugs and foam rubber miters," the Rev. Leslie Ivers, director of the New York Archdiocese's office for the papal visit, told The Times. "These are things that we don't think are in good taste."

Standards must have relaxed since then, because a Pope Benedict XVI travel mug can be purchased on the official merchandise Web site.

Whether the city gets an influx of tourists to coincide with the pontiff’s visit is yet to be seen, it seems like there are already enough around to sustain the sector and buy some Pope 2008 gear.

We spoke to a few cops in Times Square last night about whether they had noticed more European or American visitors in town than usual, or any other overt signs of “pope tourism.”

“It’s springtime in Manhattan. This is what it’s always like,” one said of the mobs.

Ms. Townsend said hotel occupancy rates are up 12 percent from the same period last year.

The Mariott Marquis is projecting an occupancy rate in the high 90s to 100 percent in April, said hotel spokesperson Kathy Duffy. She was not aware of any specific groups related to the pope's visit at the 12 Mariott branches in the city, but “it’s looking like a busy weekend in any case,” with most hotels at 80 to 90 percent occupancy.

These are meaningful words - ones that seem to resonate with one of the most vigorously debated themes of the Benedict papacy: only by recognizing and embracing Europe's Christian roots can the continent's culture survive and develop. Without an explicit acknowledgment, the thinking goes, traditionally Christian cultures will lose their identity and their ability to stand up for themselves against competing forces.

In April 2005, soon after his election as pope, Benedict explained that the selection of his name was in honor of Italy's St. Benedict of Norcia, author of the monastic "Rule" that led to the Benedictine order which helped spread Christianity throughout Europe. "He represents a fundamental point of reference for the unity of Europe and a strong reminder of the unrenounceable Christian roots of its culture and civilization," the pope said during an address at St. Peter's.

This was not a new direction for the Vatican. Pope John Paul II and Vatican officials, first among them then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, argued that the preamble of the European Union constitution should include a recognition of the continent's Christian roots. They eventually lost that appeal to secular opponents, leading Pope John Paul II to say after the 2004 signing, "The Holy See has always favored the promotion of a united Europe on the basis of those values that are part of its history," and, "Keeping into account the continent's Christian roots means making use of a spiritual heritage that remains fundamental for the union's future developments."

The specific reference in the Clinton statement is to the portion of the pope's statement in which he says, "Yes, Christ is the face of God present among us. Through him, our lives reach fullness, and together, both as individuals and peoples, we can become a family united by fraternal love, according to the eternal plan of God the Father. I know how deeply rooted this Gospel message is in your country."

By citing that sentence, and seeming to approve of it, Clinton seems to echo the Vatican's elemental message about Europe here in America. It's worth asking then if she believes that American culture must recognize those roots to keep its fundamental identity and shared cultural and human heritage safe from what the pope would describe as a devouring consumer society, secularism and religious pluralism.

The Clinton campaign writes in: "the ‘deeply rooted' phrase was a reference to the language the Vatican used regarding the Pope's visit to the states."

The pope will be bunking with the Vatican’s representative to the United Nations, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, who lives in a townhouse at 20 East 72nd Street—just a stone’s throw from the Ralph Lauren store and an Egyptian Shawarma vendor camped on Madison Avenue on most weekdays.

Compared to the Vatican’s headquarters in Rome, the five-story, 10,960-square-foot, neo-Rennaissance residence of Vatican City's permanent UN observer is pretty inconspicuous. The iron grille doors are marked by two Coats of Arms of the Holy See—the papal insignia of two interlaced keys topped by a crown—carved in gold. The ground floors are made of rusticated limestone and the top two levels of rock-faced stone.

Otherwise, it looks like your run-of-the-mill, $17 million, Upper East Side townhouse (PropertyShark valued the building at $16.9 million in 2007/2008, and tentatively estimated it would rise by $1 million in 2009/2010.)

Like much of the Vatican’s real estate portfolio, 20 East 72nd was donated to the Archbishop of New York.

The family of the late Hugh J. Grant, who served as New York City mayor from 1889-1892, transferred the deed for the single-family home to the Archibishop of New York on Jan. 13, 1975, city records show.

Built between 1892 and 1894, 20 East 72nd was one of three adjacent five-story townhouses designed by Rose and Stone architects—another, number 18, is currently being occupied by Spain’s UN Mission—according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 1982 Upper East Side historic district designation report.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has announced heavy security across the city during the Pope’s visit. Residents of the four co-op buildings on the same block as Mr. Migliore’s will have to be escorted to their lobbies by security.

On Monday morning preparations were already being made for the Pope’s arrival, but no one The Observer spoke to had been told about the special protocol.

“It’s going to be heavy, heavy, heavy,” said a driver named Herb who worked for the same family when Pope John Paul II came to New York in 1995 and stayed at 20 East 72nd. “Last time they had barricades at Fifth and Madison, the manhole covers and mail boxes were sealed, they had checkpoints to inspect packages before they could be delivered."

It sounds like quite a hassle, but Herb seemed unruffled by the interruption. “It’s not like it happens every day,” he said.

A parking attendant at a garage on the block said a few special agents had inspected the garage but they were not expecting any instructions until Wednesday or Thursday.

A construction worker at 7-9 East 72nd also said he was waiting to hear whether his crew would be able to work later in the week.

If not, he said, “it’s a day off."

The resignation is, as Cardinal Egan himself concedes, “a form letter,” a mundane bit of curial paperwork mandated by the Code of Canon Law. Pope Benedict XVI will take the letter under consideration, and will let Cardinal Egan know when Rome has chosen a suitable successor. Sit tight till we call.

Still, no amount of routine can quash the pervasive sense that Cardinal Egan’s departure, and the prospect of a new leader of the 2.5-million-strong tribe that is New York Catholicism, is a milestone.

As the chief authority in the archdiocese, answerable only to the Pope, an archbishop really can change things, and thus an imminent transition rekindles long-frustrated hopes. The next archbishop will finally hear our pleas, the thinking goes, and enact our agenda, and in the process restore the church to some dimly remembered but undoubtedly brilliant former grandeur.

What makes the current anticipation that much greater is that Cardinal Egan himself is so unpopular. Never an inspiring or even lukewarm persona in the best of times, Cardinal Egan still might charitably have been judged a cipher to much of New York until late last year, when he picked a nasty fight with his priests.

The dispute was touched off by an anonymous letter ostensibly written by a so-called “Committee of Concerned Clergy,” who ripped Cardinal Egan as an “arrogant and cavalier” churchman who had abdicated the public bully pulpit entrusted to him because of his “unnatural fear of the media.” It called on the priests to issue a vote of “no confidence” in his leadership and on the Vatican to replace him posthaste.

Most pastors would have tossed the letter in the trash and moved on. But, in the ensuing series of meetings and rebukes and letters of seigniorial self-justification, Cardinal Egan effectively confirmed every ugly tale told about him.

“Egan is all prelate,” said a former church official who came out on the short end of one of the cardinal’s power plays. “Which is why he’s such a shitty priest.”

And so, just months away from slipping off into a comfortable retirement, Cardinal Egan instead treated the city to a full monty of his inner demons. And he continued to live down to his reputation, using heavy-handed tactics during delicate parish closings in February and ensuring that if New York Catholics weren’t anxious to see him leave before, they were more than eager to show him the door now.

BUT EVEN AS RELIEF OVER CARDINAL EGAN'S departure grows apace with perfervid speculation over his successor, it might be useful to ask a more far-reaching question: Can any cardinal of New York—the “Archbishop of the Capital of the World,” as Pope John Paul II once called the job—restore the glory days?

Other religions in the city may have had more prominence (Judaism) or more wealth (Episcopalianism) per capita. But none had the sheer size and clout and hard-earned respect of the Catholic Church. So are we witnessing the end of New York Catholicism as we knew it?

The short answer is yes.

“I don’t think the Catholic Church will ever occupy that prominent position again,” said Notre Dame’s emeritus professor Jay Dolan, the dean of American church historians. “It’s lost it.”

The longer answer may be: “Good.”

The reasons for the decline and fall of imperial Catholicism in New York are manifold and, at least for the foreseeable future, irreversible.

First off is the well-documented transformation of Catholicism in the wake of the upheavals of the 1960’s and the simultaneous reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Whereas close to three-quarters of all Catholics used to attend Mass weekly, that observance disappeared along with a compact enclave culture. If the “pray, pay and obey” descriptor of American Catholics was overdrawn before, it is, as they say, no longer operable, especially among the generation of Catholics that will come of age under the next New York cardinal.

Along with the spread of this so-called “cafeteria Catholicism” also came the breakdown of the political consensus that once lent the term “Catholic bloc” real heft. For more than a century, American Catholics have constituted the largest denomination group by far (now closing in on 65 million)—about a quarter of the voting electorate. And for much of that time, they voted reliably Democratic, especially in the big cities like New York.

Today, however, Catholics are as likely to vote Republican as Democrat, and, in fact, Catholics are often battling each other over almost anything. Once, Catholics presented a united and formidable front against a regnant and hostile Protestant society. Now, a culture of dispute and disagreement has displaced one of communion and consensus.

Moreover, there is really no one who could deliver the Catholic vote, even if it existed.

It is easy to see past churchmen, like the fearsome 19th-century bishop “Dagger John” Hughes, or the 20th century’s quintessential ecclesiastical operator, Cardinal Francis Spellman, as exemplars of what a real New York prelate was, should be and could be again. But those men reigned over a world that no longer exists.

Even the more recently departed Cardinal John O’Connor died in 2000, the year before the clergy sexual-abuse scandals broke, a “Long Lent” that has drained whatever influence the hierarchy had left. “Having your picture taken with a bishop these days is a liability,” said Mr. Dolan.

ALL OF THIS IS WELL KNOWN. What has often gone unremarked upon—perhaps because the trend is so tectonic, perhaps because the soaring infrastructure of New York Catholicism continues to fill our field of vision—is that the center of gravity in American Catholicism has been shifting away from traditional power sees in the Northeast and Midwest and toward the South and West. The migration largely mirrors the overall population migration in the country, but it is especially pronounced in the Catholic Church.

For example, while the Catholic population of New York grew in the past quarter-century from 1.8 million to 2.5 million, that 28 percent increase barely kept pace with the nationwide rise in the number of Catholics, and it pales in contrast to the huge spikes elsewhere.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, for one, has more than doubled, from two million to 4.4 million Catholics, cementing its pole position among dioceses.

On top of that, shortly after his election two years ago, Pope Benedict named the Archbishop of San Francisco, William Levada, to fill the slot that the Pope vacated at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome. Not only is Cardinal Levada the highest-ranking Yank ever in the Roman Curia, but he has a major say in picking bishops for the U.S. church, and has shown that he favors the people he knows from the West Coast.

Yes, the next Archbishop of New York will surely be made a cardinal in due course. But he may not have the cachet that was a divine right of his predecessors.

In church terms, New York and other urban centers in the Northeast look like the Rust Belt of American Catholicism, a “mature industry” focused on the painful process of downsizing. There is, of course, wealth and vibrancy in Catholic New York—the archdiocese remains America’s fourth-largest and comprises more than 400 parishes stretching from Sullivan County to Staten Island.

But much of that is dispersing to the suburbs, where the dynamics are far different than in an earlier era. Not so long ago, Catholic New Yorkers used to identify themselves by their parish rather than by their neighborhood. Now they often pack up their car on Sundays to drive to the church of their choice.

Moreover, the practice of the faith in New York fares poorly in comparison to other places. In 1980, for instance, New York priests baptized more babies (31,000) than they did in 2005 (28,000), despite the 28 percent rise in the Catholic population. That decline runs across the board: There were nearly 10,000 church marriages in 1980, and under 6,000 in 2005; there are fewer children under Catholic instruction today, and far fewer nuns to teach them, and the number of priests has declined from 2,700 to just over 1,500.

FINALLY, AND PERHAPS MOST DOLEFULLY to the longstanding self-perception of New York Catholics, the Irish who were the architects of the golden age of Catholicism here and in much of the nation are giving way to a variegated, truly universal Catholic Church that will be more Hispanic than Irish, more devotional than dogmatic, more populist than hierarchical.

The Irish who dominated American Catholicism were able to do so for so long in large part because they got here first and staked their claim with a “bricks and mortar” Catholic infrastructure and a tribal pride that had been honed by terrible persecutions at the hands of the English. Irish Catholics were Mass-and-sacraments folk whose lives revolved around the parish. They derided the Italians as Catholics who went to church three times in their lives—to “hatch, match and dispatch.” Otherwise, Southern European Catholicism was all about street processions and popular devotions that the diligent Irish saw as kin to superstition.

Irish Catholics, on the other hand, brought their own priests with them—and kept bringing them. In 1900, two-thirds of the U.S. hierarchy was of Irish descent, and in 1970 the Irish still accounted for half of all U.S. bishops, according to Mr. Dolan of Notre Dame.

In that world, New York’s cardinal was king. No longer. The archdiocese has had only one non-Irish leader (a Frenchman who died in 1842), and the odds are strong for another Irishman to follow Cardinal Egan.

But times are changing. Much of the Irish “aristocracy” that supported New York Catholicism has moved to the ’burbs, and the same trends of disaffiliation that afflict the rest of the church are at work among Irish Catholics as well. For generations, New York Catholics wanted nothing more than to assimilate, and now they’ve gotten what they prayed for.

So is all of this such a bad thing?

“It’s a natural development that’s healthy,” argued Christopher Bellitto, a church historian at Kean University in New Jersey. “One could argue that the collapse in power is the salvation of the church.”

In the new era, New York Catholics—and their new leaders—will be gauged by the depth of their spirituality and the ability to get along with each other, rather than by their reflexive piety and parochial loyalties.

“It does call for an archbishop who can accept a different kind of a role,” said Monsignor Harry Byrne, who was ordained as a priest in New York over 60 years ago. “This is an entirely different deck of cards that we have, and they have.”

It won’t be easy to navigate this new world, but Monsignor Byrne, like many other veterans of the archdiocese, sees the challenges and changes as providential. “We can’t go back to the old days, but it is important to try to let the tensions co-exist peacefully,” he said. “The only thing without tension is a corpse.”

David Gibson is the author of The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World.

The cardinal’s Sunday mass used to be a press event when Cardinal John O’Connor was Archbishop of New York. New Yorkers never knew what the press-friendly O’Connor might say, either from the pulpit or in an offhand remark to reporters after the final blessing. But under Cardinal Egan, the Sunday buzz is gone. It’s not his style.

Like many of the faithful in the cathedral that day, the 73-year-old cardinal also appears to be just passing through, and many think that while his home address says Madison Avenue, his heart lies in Rome. After being in New York for more than five years, he has, by most accounts, failed to capture the imagination of the city—even as it has endured a good deal of crisis and soul-searching.

Instead, the cardinal has all but disappeared into the enormous public space carved out by his predecessors, who expanded the position of archbishop into the de facto spokesman for the city’s entire religious and spiritual community. Many priests and church observers think he is eager to move on.

Before he leaves, though, the achingly erudite and waxen-skinned cardinal is, for better or worse, reshaping and redefining the role of the Archbishop of New York. His supporters say that he is quietly repairing an archdiocese gutted by the financial negligence of his predecessor, Cardinal O’Connor. But his many critics inside and outside of the church say that he is aloof, sometimes to the point of reclusion, and that his resulting invisibility is stripping one of the city’s oldest and most venerable institutions of its heft.

“The archbishop has been the religious leader in New York for a very long time. I wonder if the cardinal really appreciates the value and importance of that position,” said the Rev. John Duffell, a Roman Catholic priest at the Church of the Ascension on the West Side. He added that the role of the religious community is to make room for a moral dimension in the public debate. “In my opinion, that role has been somewhat diminished in recent years.”

Several priests said that the tall and burly cardinal is counting the days to his 75th birthday, when he is required by church law to offer his resignation as archbishop. While the maxim that the church “thinks in terms of centuries” may be true when it comes to questions of doctrine and theology, it is decidedly not the case when it comes to personal ambition. Years and months matter, and age is a determinant in who exercises power in the Vatican hierarchy. A bishop must tender his resignation to the Pope at 75—although the Pope may choose not to accept that resignation, as John Paul II refused to accept Cardinal O’Connor’s. However, at age 80 a cardinal forfeits his all-important vote in the conclave that selects the pontiff.

When Cardinal Egan was 53 (sprightly in cleric years), he was already an accomplished scholar of canon law who had served as a judge on the Sacred Roman Rota, a Vatican Court, for 14 years. Before that, he taught theology at the Pontifical North American College in Vatican City and served as a priest in his native Chicago. He plays the piano, speaks several languages and is generally seen as a tenacious man who conquers adversity, a trait that some attribute to his beating a bout of polio at age 10.

In Rome, he moved in the right circles and befriended Pope John Paul II, who, in 1985, sent him to New York as an auxiliary bishop. After a short stint in Bridgeport, Conn., he triumphantly returned to New York as archbishop in 2000, after O’Connor died. He was elevated to cardinal shortly thereafter.

More recently, however, many church observers have concluded that he is pining to return to Rome. Joseph Zwilling, the spokesman for the archdiocese, countered that the cardinal “has repeatedly said that he has no desire to go back to Rome. That portion of his life is finished. He is looking very much towards doing what the Holy See wants him to do.”

There is disagreement among priests and church observers about the cardinal’s true intentions. (Cardinal Egan declined to be interviewed for this article.) Some suspect that he feels like he is wasting time here; others applaud him for doing the valuable but unheralded work of securing the financial future of the archdiocese. Others still believe that he views the job as a final stepping-stone to a coveted post on the Vatican’s Supreme Court.

In any case, there is consensus that his goal is to get back to Rome.

“His home is Rome,” said one prominent priest, who said that he required anonymity to speak freely. “Even on public occasions, he sometimes rhapsodizes how wonderful it is to be in Rome, and I cringe and think, ‘You are talking to your parishioners in New York.’”

That inability to connect with New Yorkers was painfully evident in the weeks following Sept. 11, when, instead of consoling his grieving city, he led a bishop’s conference in Rome. “I lived here for almost 23 years and love the town,” he told The New York Times at the time in the lounge of an American seminary. During an earlier visit, when he went to claim his red hat at the 2000 consistory, Cardinal Egan stayed at the five-star Crowne Plaza Rome-Minerva hotel, which faces the Pantheon. His colleagues usually stay at the Vatican’s no-frills lodging or in national seminaries.

But despite his fondness for Rome and his ease with Italian, church experts said that his influence in Vatican politics and his role in the recent conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI are minimal.

“In Rome, the Archbishop of New York could be among the most important in the Catholic Church,” said John Allen Jr., the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and a biographer of the new Pope. “On that score, it’s difficult to see significant contributions he has made as an American Catholic leader.”

Indeed, he is not the kingmaker that Cardinal Francis Spellman was; he lacks the New York chops of Cardinal Terence Cooke and the enormous personality and populism of Cardinal O’Connor.

According to several priests, the relations between Cardinal Egan and his predecessor were not good. At a dinner in Rome in honor of Bishop Egan’s appointment as an auxiliary in New York, Cardinal O’Connor raised his glass and toasted “Chicago’s revenge on New York.” Some argue that even as he was suffering from the cancer that killed him, Cardinal O’Connor actively opposed the idea of Bishop Egan succeeding him.

One of the older priests in the diocese, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal from the cardinal’s office, said that the days of O’Connor—when the archbishop’s residence was a point of reference for all questions moral in the city—might not be gone forever. But “they are temporarily on hold,” the priest said.

Mr. Zwilling, who has been with the archdiocese since the days of Cardinal Cooke, who died in 1983, argued that Cooke also kept a low profile. He noted as well that O’Connor was criticized for being too outspoken when he arrived on the New York scene in 1984.

“The one thing I don’t think should be the case is for someone to be something that they are not,” Mr. Zwilling said. “[Mayor Michael] Bloomberg should not copy [Rudolph] Giuliani, and Benedict XVI should not emulate John Paul II. That’s a recipe for disaster.”

Some priests agreed with that assessment, noting that while Cardinal Egan clearly lacked O’Connor’s charisma, he had other qualities. The son of a businessman and a friend to C.E.O.’s like Jack Welch of G.E., Cardinal Egan helped cut the archdiocese’s deficit, increased fund-raising and focused his attention on the city’s more than 400 parishes. Some priests, like the Reverend John Flynn of the St. Martin of Tours parish in the Bronx, said that the cardinal has been enthusiastic about outreach in the borough’s poorer neighborhoods.

But other clergy complained about the cardinal’s cold attitude toward his priests, many of whom charged that Cardinal Egan refuses to meet with any priest alone and will only sit to talk if there is a third party present.

On the night that Benedict XVI was elected Pope earlier this year, Cardinal Egan met with a small group of reporters in a room in the North American College, which overlooks the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica from the Janiculum Hill. Dressed in simple black, he was uncharacteristically jolly, though his careful enunciation still carried a touch of condescension toward a press he generally doesn’t trust. At one point, he attempted to quell concerns over what some perceived to be the new Pope’s hard line, when he was a cardinal, in enforcing church doctrine.

“I think he’ll play very well as soon as people get to know him,” the cardinal said of the Pope. “Sometimes you make a judgment and it is hard to recede from it. This is a very unprepossessing, humble gentleman.”

After five years in New York, though, Cardinal Egan doesn’t hear many priests speaking about him that way.

We can safely assume that Benedict XVI will follow in the shoes of those fishermen who advocated peace rather than war. But when it comes to ending witch hunts and reversing anti-liberal politics, the incumbent Pope appears to be more Pius than Benedictine. Less than a full month into his pontificate, Benedict XVI has presided over the forced resignation of Father Thomas Reese, a distinguished journalist, author and intellect, as editor of the Jesuit magazine America.

The magazine, nearly a century old, is based on West 56th Street and is one of three influential, intellectual Catholic periodicals published in New York. (The others are Commonweal, edited by lay Catholics, and First Things, written by Father Richard John Neuhaus.) The Jesuits who write for and edit America are a vital part of Catholic intellectual life in New York. One former editor, Joseph O'Hare, went on to become the president of Fordham University; another, Father George Hunt, runs the Archbishop Hughes Institute on Religion and Culture at Fordham.

Father Reese was, during the recent Papal funeral and conclave, perhaps the most visible priest in the United States. Smart, amiable and articulate, he was much in demand during television coverage of the events in Rome. His assessments of the deceased Pope and his successor were reverent, witty and thoughtful.

Here let me declare my interest: I've been a regular contributor to America since 1996, when the magazine lowered its standards of scholarship and intellect to admit a lowbrow from the pews. I was recruited by Father Reese's predecessor, Father Hunt, a literary critic and student of John Updike's work. Father Reese kept me on when he succeeded Father Hunt. I consider Father Reese a friend.

As a journalist and as a Jesuit, Father Reese believes in discussion and inquiry, as opposed to rote recitation of the party line. Three years ago, he published a sharp exchange of views between two German cardinals: Walter Kasper, who was president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and the inevitable Cardinal Ratzinger, who was then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The pieces were inside-the-Appian-Way stuff, not meant for the average layperson. But it was clear that Cardinal Kasper disagreed profoundly with his colleague, so much so that Cardinal Ratzinger had no choice but to defend himself without conceding that the two men were at odds.

By presenting both sides of a theological dispute, Father Reese served his church, his vocation and his magazine well. So well, in fact, that earlier this spring-during his final days as chief enforcer of Catholic doctrine and tradition-Cardinal Ratzinger decreed that Father Reese would have to go. As luck would have it, Benedict XVI happened to agree.

Editorial changes at a magazine like America, even with its storied history of editors and writers, usually are not the stuff of front-page stories in The New York Times. But this one was, and rightfully so. Father Reese's forced resignation sent a message-not only to the Jesuits of the United States, not only to those of us in the pews who support the church with prayers and money, but to the great Catholic universities and colleges. These institutions of inquiry and debate could be next. If they are viewed as insufficiently orthodox, if they invite a speaker on campus who is not pro-life regardless of the topic under discussion, they risk being stripped of the right to call themselves Catholic. They might as well close.

These institutions of Catholic higher education have produced an intellectually inquisitive laity that wishes to ask questions and foster discussion. American bishops, often far removed from the lives of the people they serve, have discovered that they cannot simply dictate belief anymore. What's more, these leaders have squandered their claims to moral authority by covering up the church's sexual scandals. Is there a Catholic who didn't cringe upon hearing Cardinal Bernard Law call down God's wrath upon the Boston Globe for publishing its exposé of priestly predators?

This sort of behavior has done little to persuade today's Catholics that they ought to accept the word of their bishops on questions of morality. Last year, several bishops attempted to intimidate Catholics who supported John Kerry, a pro-choice Catholic, by suggesting that they were unworthy of receiving Holy Communion. They were ignored.

American Catholics who prefer discussion to browbeating, inquisitiveness over inquisition, owe Father Tom Reese their prayers and their thanks. He has mine.

A piece of treacherous language has made its way into our public discourse. Where once words such as "religion," "Christianity" and "Judaism" were heard, public figures now speak of "persons of faith" or "people of faith," "the faith community" and "faith-based." Moreover, anything "faith-based" is axiomatically good, and anyone who questions the presumption is axiomatically bad.

These expressions divide us into believers and nonbelievers, with the believers or persons of faith enjoying not only an alleged numerical majority but a moral superiority as well. It follows that anyone living outside the community of faith is a bottom-dwelling, life-hating, secular pederast destined for pain eternal in the land of Tophat.

Saints and sinners are being lined up and divided everywhere. Have you seen Robert Novak on TV telling all who will listen the whys of his becoming a Roman Catholic? Woe to him who cannot claim membership among the faithful.

The term "people of faith" has come to be used interchangeably with the word "American." If there's a politician left in the United States who doesn't season his speech with tremulous references to the "peoples of faith," I can't recall his name. The Democrats-who are supposed to have a weakness for killing the unborn and sexually assaulting the underage-have given up their advocacy of vice and perversion; they, too, now speak in deferential tones of the "people of faith," whose votes they seek to corral by pious faces and reverential references to "the God of us all."

The expression "people of faith" conveys the idea of a holy (or not-so-holy) alliance of religions, united for good against the disorganized forces of anarchic relativists, secularists, and people of little or no faith. They have values-a good thing. The rest of us (few in number though we may be) stand for what is destructive of hearth, community and country-a bad thing.

The people of faith are sympathetic to the Republican Party and its objectives. Democrats, intimidated by the religiosity loose in the country, have come to accept the premise that the test of public policy is how a measure is greeted by the faith community. At the rate the faith juggernaut is moving to govern the nation, the once-red-hot liberal patootie, Hillary Rodham Clinton, now a wifely Mrs. Hillary Clinton, will soon be campaigning against Roe v. Wade. Judging by who Ms. Clinton was in the days of yore as against who Lady Clinton is nowadays, you would have to agree that faith can pass miracles.

Hillary is not alone. Can you think of a single person of stature in public life who dares to challenge the people of faith? Maybe a shock jock here or there has the onions to take on this coalition of the altogether too godly. Nobody else does.

The closest thing we have to organized opposition to the religious domination of public life is Americans United for the Separation of Church and State-but though their geeky hearts are in the right place, I wouldn't want to speculate on the location of their heads. Battling the appointment of faith-based judges and preventing public buildings from being festooned with Bible quotations is well and good as far as it goes, but it isn't far enough.

Somebody or something has got to start battling religion itself. God is the enemy-meaning the God locked up by organized religions and guarded by ministers, priests, rabbis, popes and mullahs.

This is not a struggle to be carried on in the law courts and the legislatures. Religionists are crawling in everywhere, swarming the schools, movies, medicine and research labs. Their intent is to install a faith commissar to oversee every major social institution. We don't need lawyers here; we need fumigators. We need people in HAZMAT suits to go in and smoke 'em out.

We need people to stand up in public against the Christo-Islamic alliance's assaults on relativism. It's been more than a generation since anyone with access to a significant pulpit stood up for relativism. The clerics have made "relativism' into a dirty word instead of what it actually is: a term for the application of reason to public affairs.

Turn your back on relativism and you get absolutism. Show me a true believer and I'll show you a bigot. Absolutism is at the heart of every religion-our dogma or nothing. The absolutist foundations of every faith preclude compromise, adjustments, deal-making, pragmatism, the changing of opinion, the admission of new evidence-all the tools necessary for running a complicated, polyglot, poly-religious, poly-ethnic, poly-cultural modern, science-based, technology-dependent society. The absolutism that underlies religious faith closes the door marked "Reason" and opens the door labeled "Holy War."

There was a time when the evangelical Calvinist form of the Christian religion was so prevalent that it could run American society with some success-but that was 200 years ago. Even then, people of non-faith tried to beat off the religious prohibitionism that strove to close the country down on Sundays, to suppress music, dancing, baseball, Sabbath smooching and the joy of life and replace it with on-your-knees worship and clerical rule. The coming of large numbers of Roman Catholic immigrants touched off the public-school wars of the 19th century. Religious absolutism being what it is, the fight over whose dogma and morals were to be inculcated into the students had to be resolved by kicking all religion out of the schools. That never completely happened, but at least God was pushed into the corner with the elimination of school prayer and the exile of religious symbols and activities. Recently, though, God has been making a comeback-and God help us all if He is successful.

The alliance among the various religions embraced by the people of faith is a tenuous one; in the end, every religion hates every other religion. The day before Benedict XVI was elected, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article about how Islam was converting people faster than the Catholic Church-which, rousing itself from a certain evangelical torpor, was starting to say, "No more Mr. Nice Guy! We can't let the towelheads get ahead of us." (The language used, of course, was more decorous, but the meaning was there.)

The triumph of absolutist faith over relativism, of religion over secularism, will start up a new era of religious strife, if it hasn't already begun. The history of religious contention in the West does contain instances of peace, moments when religions signed truces and stopped the warfare, but social peace didn't prevail until religion was booted out of the marketplace, driven out of the halls of power and sealed up in private homes and places of worship. Religion in private may be a good thing; religion in public is a menace.

In the U.S., with a growing Muslim population, a super-energetic Jewish population and an increasingly crazed Christian population, it is but a matter of time before the "people of faith" coalition falls apart and we get down to some good old-fashioned religious throat-slitting. Religions are tolerant only when they lack the power to be otherwise; turning the country over to one of them or all of them combined is daft. Historically, the people of faith have a war-crimes record longer than your arm.

A good guess would be that only a minority of the population is infected with virulent forms of faith. But it's an organized minority, awash in money. We of little faith and less zeal are neither organized nor rich nor eaten up with a need to proselytize, and therefore we are without defenses against God's putschists.

To stop them, we don't have to pass laws. It's not vital to get "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance. What is vital is that we, the faithless, raise a hullabaloo every time the people of faith play the family-values card, every time they claim that their faith puts them at the head of the line, every time they presume to decide what we should see, hear and do. What is vital is that we bray, honk, whinny, oink and screech at every public assertion that superstition trumps science, that they've got a god and that those of us without one are no damn good.

Shout out the facts: They put "in God we trust" on the money, and every year it's worth less than it was the year before.