One of the best writers at the New York Times, Dan Barry, has composed a thoughtful, honest and unfailingly down-to-earth essay this Sunday on his experience as an American Catholic.

Some Catholics, I know, will question whether he is really all that Catholic to begin with.

But I others will recognize his voice as, in some way, their own:

For many years a framed document adorned the dark-wood stairwell in the house of my wife’s childhood. It was a papal blessing from John XXIII — “Good Pope John” — honoring the 1959 wedding of my mother- and father-in-law and mystically connecting a ceremony in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., with a place far, far away: the Vatican.

Thirty-one years later, my wife, Mary, and I were married in a church whose very name, Our Lady of Sorrows, seemed to emphasize the tribulations over the joys that awaited us. A family friend, a nun with connections, presented us with our own papal blessing, this time linking a wedding in suburban New Jersey with the spiritual Emerald City of our Roman Catholic faith.

Today that document, framed in silver, is piled among yellowing college textbooks and other outgrown possessions in a storage room in the basement, a few feet from the washing machine; loads of our dirty laundry rinsing and spinning and emerging cleansed, year after year, all under the benevolent gaze of Pope John Paul II. Then to the dryer, for some meditative Gregorian humming.

Let me say at the outset that I am your classic stumbling, grumbling, trying-to-sort-it-all-out American Catholic. I consider myself a practicing Catholic because I dearly need the practice. My family and I attend Sunday Mass with some regularity, though not always at the same parish — in case anyone is taking attendance. Our older child goes to catechism class, as will our younger child when she is of age. I have eaten enough stale crumb cake at after-Mass socials to earn penance for at least a few of my many venial sins.

In other words, for all you nativists out there, I’ll use one of your terms to explain: I am proud to be a mackerel snapper.

Then why is our papal blessing not on display? Is it because the document might clash with a haphazard interior design that includes a W.C. Fields movie poster? Is it because we worry that in some circles our faith might be considered a bit — uncool? (You actually attend Mass? Really?) Or is it because, quite frankly, we feel virtually no connection to the papacy?

As the Thursday night players used to shout in the church basement of my Long Island parish long ago: Bingo!

Pope Benedict XVI plans to visit the United States this week, a tour that will include touchstones in my own life — ground zero, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Yankee Stadium — and will attract throngs of American Catholics. Still, beyond the fact that I’m not much of a throng guy, I will not be among those craning their necks for a glimpse. I feel a palpable papal disconnect.

I was 7 when Paul VI became the first pope to visit the United States, in 1965. I remember the nuns and teachers at SS. Cyril and Methodius School being in the kind of tizzy reserved then for the Beatles, and my mother hunched before our black-and-white television set, just as she was after the first Kennedy assassination, only this time she wasn’t crying.

I must have lost track of the second papal visit, that of John Paul II in 1979; back then I was a student at St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York, more concerned with the Bonnies basketball team’s visit to Niagara than with the pope’s visit to Manhattan. Less than two years later, though, I was sitting in a dusty old van, taking a lunch break from my post-graduate job installing lawn sprinklers, when the radio shouted that His Holiness had been shot in Rome.

The sandwich-eating ditch digger next to me, someone who was not Catholic, wisecracked about the news, but I didn’t laugh. Instead, I felt as though I had somehow suffered collateral damage. This was the first and last time that I sensed true closeness to the pope. A would-be assassin had nearly killed the head of the church — my church — and I was wounded.

Pope John Paul II more than survived; he rallied. But as the years passed, that intense feeling of connection, of solidarity with Il Papa, faded. By the time the pontiff returned to New York, in 1995, I was just another reporter in the city, and his visit was just another assignment.

The disconnection I feel may be rooted in the good old American distrust of monarchs and frippery. And, unlike American Catholics of 150 years ago, I do not feel the sting of prejudice that would cause me to embrace the pope in defiant declaration of my faith.

Since the day my in-laws first displayed their papal blessing nearly 50 years ago, much has happened to wear away at the authority of the pope. There remains great awe and respect for anyone charged with managing a 2,000-year-old institution and spiritually guiding more than a billion people around the world. For stumbling, grumbling worshipers like me, though, obedience to the pope has morphed into a respectful taking of his pronouncements under advisement — a cafeteria-like approach that drives more rigid Catholics to the brink of saying the Lord’s name in vain.

And peace be with you.

As Peter Steinfels, the Beliefs columnist for The New York Times, recently noted, there is nothing particularly new in this tension. He wrote that many American Catholics “honor the pope yet disagree with papal positions, whether about using contraception, restricting legal access to abortion, ordaining married men or women to the priesthood or recognizing same-sex relationships.” I would add to that list disgust, more than mere disagreement, with the way the church has handled the priest scandals of the last decade.

But what does all this mean?

It means that I got my Catholic Irish up when I read recently that the Rev. John Hagee, a Texas televangelist, uses code language for the Catholic Church when he speaks of a “false cult system” and — what was it again? Oh, yes: “the great whore.” The good reverend says his words have been misconstrued, and I don’t want mine to be: It would be my humble honor to share a dinner of solidarity with the pope — a dinner, even, of mackerel.

But all this also means that I read the parish bulletin and the gospels, not papal encyclicals or L’Osservatore Romano. That I mutter more about the priest’s aimless homily or some action by the local bishop than about anything the pope has said or done. That on Sundays, though hardly every one, I try to concentrate on the Gospel and on the celebration of the Eucharist as best I can with a distracted 10-year-old and a squirming 4-year-old. That I never once ask myself: What would the pope do?

I am just an American Catholic shirt in a pile of human laundry, rinsing, twirling, praying that things don’t spin out of balance.