Anyone wondering what the pontiff will have to say when he visits the U.S. next month need look no further than the current issue of the New York Sun, which has this tantalizing preview:

Pope Benedict XVI will use his trip to America next month to present Catholic educators with a powerful challenge, one whose effects could ripple from Notre Dame, Ind., to Tarrytown, N.Y., prominent Vatican watchers are predicting.

The expected message: Become more Catholic, or else.

In one of just a few major addresses planned for his six-day visit to America, Pope Benedict is scheduled to speak about education at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., before an audience that should include the president of every Catholic college and university in the country, plus representatives from every archdiocese, which oversee Catholic primary and secondary schools.

In what university officials said was the first convening of such a group in 29 years, the address will insert Pope Benedict into an ongoing debate in America regarding how Catholic colleges, universities, and even primary schools should assert their Catholic identities — even as Catholic enrollment declines.

Educators said the pontiff’s service as a cardinal in the years before he was elected pope, in 2005, suggest he will enter the debate on the side of increasing so-called Catholicity.

The pope will encourage Catholic educators, but also emphasize the importance of “promoting and strengthening” their Catholic identities, Catholic University’s president, David O’Connell, predicted.

“Doubtless, I think, there will be a challenge there,” the president of Franciscan University in Ohio, Terence Henry, said of Pope Benedict’s speech. “He may challenge Catholic universities to get back to the spirit of why they were founded. They were not founded to be another Penn State or another Ohio State.”

A professor of moral theology at Marquette University who has sparred with the Vatican, Daniel Maguire, said he also expects the pope to land on the side of change, though he scorned the prospect. “Anybody should know what the pope is visiting universities for,” Mr. Maguire said. “His business is to control theology.”

Pope Benedict’s position on a lightning rod question that inflamed the Catholic academy in the 1990s, a papal law declared by Pope John Paul II in 1990 that exerted tighter controls over Catholic colleges and universities, is seen as especially indicative. The pope, who in 1990 was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was a strong supporter of the order, known as Ex Corde Ecclesiae, several sources said.

As criticisms of the law mounted, with skeptics charging that the church was attempting to muzzle academic freedom, Cardinal Ratzinger made a rare 1999 visit to America, reportedly his first in eight years, to defend the order, newspapers reported at the time.

The bitter debates of the 1990s have faded from public view in recent years, but a divide over how tightly the Vatican should control universities — and how closely they should align themselves, in classrooms and dorms, with the church’s teachings — has persisted.

Universities have seen internal battles over questions such as whether to display crucifixes and how to deal with student-generated entities such as gay and lesbian support groups and condom distribution campaigns.

In New York, protests have erupted over universities’ choices of commencement speakers. Conservative Catholics protested the decision of Marymount Manhattan College in 2005 to make Senator Clinton the commencement speaker, citing her support for abortion. The same group, called the Cardinal Newman Society, protested Marist College in Poughkeepsie’s decision in 2003 to name Eliot Spitzer, then the attorney general, its commencement speaker.

The Society has also made its battle proactive, heralding the creation of about a dozen new, more conservative Catholic colleges in the last 30 years in a book, “The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College.”

Schools in the guide, such as Franciscan University in Ohio, often require several courses in Catholic theology and ban co-educational housing, as well as groups that promote homosexuality.

Father Henry, of Franciscan University, described the conservative colleges as “springing from the heart of the church,” and said others are “cholesterol in the heart of the church.”

There’s much more to read, so check it out.