The excellent papal commentator and writer David Gibson has zeroed in on an important theme of Benedict’s visit thus far — one that, perhaps, has been overshadowed by all the headlines about the sex abuse crisis.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Call Pope Benedict XVI a “cultural Catholic” and you’re likely to get puzzled looks if not angry rejoinders. Cultural Catholics rank right down there with “cafeteria Catholics” in the opinion of those who argue that only a deep experience of Christian faith and a tight embrace of church teachings can make one authentically Catholic.

To a great extent that would also be the perspective of Benedict, whose Augustinian view of man’s fallen state and need for grace, discovered in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, is almost Lutheran in its theology and evangelical in its expression. But Benedict is also, of course, a thoroughgoing Catholic, by birth and upbringing. And he recognizes that Catholicism is a culture as well as a religion, and that a strong cultural identity can cultivate faith in the present generation and pass it along to the next, as it has for centuries. (“Never!” Joseph Ratzinger once exclaimed to an interviewer who asked if he had ever thought of converting to Protestantism. The man who was to become Pope Benedict XVI had been so infused by “the Baroque atmosphere” of his native Bavaria, he said, that “from a purely psychological point of view I have never been attracted to it.”)

Thus it should come as no surprise that Benedict has made recovering a distinctive Catholic culture a principal theme of his first visit to the U.S., which concludes this weekend in New York. The theme has been evident in the liturgies, which stress Latin in the prayers and Roman styling in the vestments. But it has also been underscored in Benedict’s remarks, calling for stronger Catholic education from parishes to universities and for a more powerful Catholic presence in the public square as a way of “cultivating a mindset, an intellectual ‘culture’,” as he said at Thursday’s Mass in Washington, “which is genuinely Catholic.” When asked during a Wednesday encounter with the nation’s bishops how to redress a “a certain quiet attrition” by Catholics who drift away from practice, Benedict lamented “the passing away of a religious culture, sometimes disparagingly referred to as a ‘ghetto,’ which reinforced participation and identification with the Church.”

It is not only American Catholic assimilation that is to blame for the lack of a distinctive Catholic culture these days. Just as American Catholics were finally achieving the American dream, in the 1960s the church itself began de-emphasizing or even dropping rites and obligations that marked Catholic life, such as fish on Friday and even Mass on Sunday.

One recent survey showed that while 77% of American Catholics said they were proud to be Catholic, 68% also said you could be a good Catholic without going to Mass every Sunday. And 56% of Catholics under 40 say “I could be just as happy in some other church.” They don’t see anything wrong with gay marriage, and church teachings against birth control are a nonstarter. “Young Catholics see these specific moral teachings — especially regarding sexuality and marriage — as peripheral to the faith, and well-educated young Catholics see them as even more so,” according to “American Catholics Today: New Realities of Their Faith and Their Church,” a recent book by William V. D’Antonio. Or, as pollster John Zogby once put it: “If the church were a brand of cereal, we could find our grandchildren eating Unitarian Krispies as they get older.”

In the Christian ideal, God has no grandchildren; faith must be ever new. But then how does the church encourage Catholicism as a culture while keeping the faith fresh and alive?

Read on for some of Gibson’s answers to that question.