U.S. Politicians Will Try to Ride Pope’s Vestment Tails : Religion: As pontiff visits America, Democrats and Republicans will try to latch onto messages of morality.

With a string of diplomatic initiatives behind him and the U.S. presidential election looming, Pope John Paul II will be standing squarely in the intersection of politics and religion when he visits the United States this week.

Never far from controversy and often in its vortex, history’s most traveled Pope is scheduled to arrive in Newark, N.J., Wednesday for a five-day trip that will take him to the United Nations and to pastoral visits with Catholics in New York, Newark and Baltimore.

On his fourth visit to the United States and second to the United Nations, he is expected again to raise issues of overarching importance to him: the sanctity of life, the dignity of humans, the importance of families, the imperatives of peace and the dangers of a “culture of death” whose symptoms are abortion, euthanasia and contraception.

While the message is as old as the church itself and certainly a hallmark of John Paul’s 17-year pontificate, the Pope’s words are expected to take on added interest and currency.

Church commentators and Vatican watchers expect members of the religious right as well as conservative Republicans--and Democrats determined not to cede moral high ground to opponents--to try to align themselves with papal pronouncements, at least those that fit the growing rhetoric over “traditional values.”

President Clinton plans to greet the pontiff when his airliner, Shepherd I, arrives at Newark International Airport. Vice President Al Gore will bid an official farewell on Oct. 8. Members of the Republican-controlled Congress even made inquiries about a papal address to a joint session of Congress, only to discover that, as a matter of policy, the Pope does not address national legislatures.

Informed papal observers expect John Paul to follow up on recent Vatican initiatives at U.N. conferences in Cairo and Beijing by hammering home his views on such issues as the role of women and the need for social and economic justice for the poor.

“He’s an international moral superpower. This is a bully pulpit to speak from,” said Father Thomas J. Reese, a respected Vatican watcher at Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University in Washington. The Pope’s arrival will fall 30 years to the day after Paul VI became the first pontiff to address the United Nations.

Originally scheduled to address the United Nations last October, John Paul postponed that trip on doctor’s orders to give his broken right leg more time to heal. With trips to the Philippines and Africa under his belt since then, the 75-year-old Pope appears to have recovered nicely.

“Everybody’s expecting to see a Pope who is very much engaged,” said Gabe Meyer, associate editor of the National Catholic Register, a conservative Catholic newspaper published in Encino.

On his 68th trip abroad, John Paul will celebrate Mass at New York’s Central Park, Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, N.Y., and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore. He also will recite the rosary in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and meet informally with Jewish and Protestant leaders in New York. In Baltimore, John Paul will address seminarians and talk with the leadership of Catholic Relief Services, a humanitarian agency.

If the Pope is physically stronger than a year ago, so is his diplomatic hand, according to some observers.

The Vatican, after nearly isolating itself last year at the U.N. Conference on Population and Development in Cairo by categorically opposing abortion and contraception, took a decidedly more moderate tack at the recently concluded U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in China. It earned the plaudits of the Clinton Administration and other governments when it chose not to engage in the abortion fight again, although the Vatican’s position remains unchanged.

Moreover, the approach of next year’s U.S. elections and the fact that, for the first time, a majority of Catholics last year voted Republican, have prodded the Clinton Administration to be more attentive to the Vatican’s concerns.

In the midst of a developing presidential campaign, the Pope’s remarks on the role of women, the importance of the family and the issues of peace and war are likely to be followed as closely by politicians as by the faithful.

So-called family values have taken on special meaning in U.S. politics, with members of the religious right and conservative Republicans seeking to block publicly funded abortions, reinstitute prayer in public schools and defeat legal protection for homosexuals.

“I think many of the things he will say will resonate with people concerned about the breakdown of American families,” Reese said. And when it comes to sexual morals and values, “there’s nothing more conservative in this country than the parents of a teen-age daughter.”

Even Democrats are speaking more frequently about family values. At the recent U.N.-sponsored women’s conference, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton decried forced abortions and sterilization in some countries, eliciting applause from the Vatican and other religious representatives in attendance. She played down the Administration’s continued support of publicly funded abortions that are “safe, legal and rare.”

Catholic scholars such as Reese warn that Republicans and social conservatives in the religious right will be mistaken if they think the Pope’s remarks will fit neatly into their political litany.

“When the Pope speaks about family values, he’s speaking out of a tradition that is 2,000 years old that is not based on public opinion polls nor on the Republican strategy to win elections,” Reese said.

Added Msgr. Francis J. Maniscalco, spokesman for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops: “The Pope is not a political leader. He’s a moral leader. . . . When you look to try to get the Pope’s message to fit into a political platform, the edges don’t fit.”

While conservatives may be attracted by papal pronouncements on such things as the importance of families, a longstanding Catholic moral “option for the poor”--which the Pope is certain to reaffirm--may not go down as easily.

Some expect the Pope to raise a proposal to allow families of Third World migrants working in developed countries to become citizens, a stance unlikely to win support from social conservatives in the United States.

There are other differences. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops has challenged GOP efforts in Congress to cap family welfare expenditures and, like the Pope, has opposed capital punishment.

The religious right sides with Catholics on abortion, said Helen M. Alvare, an official with the bishop conference’s Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities in Washington. “But there’s not another issue on which we’ve worked together.”

Nor are many Republicans likely to concur with the Pope’s alarm over the West’s consumer culture, which he feels is undermining moral values.

But so far as Reese and Tom Fox, editor of the liberal National Catholic Reporter based in Kansas City are concerned, the Pope has some explaining to do himself--at least to Americans, whose democratic and pluralistic society has been difficult for the Pope to grasp, according to some observers.

“Let’s face it,” Reese said. “There’s been a lot of criticism of the church because of its stance on abortion and its stance against women priests.”

The forthcoming papal trip offers the pontiff an opportunity to underscore his support for women--short of ordaining them as priests--as he did in July in an unprecedented letter to the world’s women. In it, the Pope offered a ringing defense of equality for women that surprised even some Catholic feminists.

He called for equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancement, equality for spouses when it comes to family rights, and laws to protect women from sexual violence and exploitation.

Still, Fox despairs that even the Pope’s messages on women, the need for social and economic justice for the poor, and the right of migrants to go to developed countries will not get through.

“I think his moral authority within the Catholic Church in the United States has been so compromised by the positions he’s taken on the sexual and gender issues that much of his moral admonitions will fall flat among Catholics,” Fox said. “It’s kind of unfortunate.”

In the end, however, it will be the pontiff who will set the agenda and the tone. They will be essentially religious and pastoral in nature.

“He will be talking . . . fundamentally from a religious perspective, not a political perspective,” said Rabbi Jack Bemporad of the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.

“It’s unfortunate that people think of him primarily in political terms,” Bemporad said. “The way he focuses on a problem is, ‘What is the right thing, and how do we get people to do the right thing.’ I think he’s going to confront people and say: ‘You have an obligation that is worldwide which involves all human beings. How do you set up structures that are not destructive of the best elements of human life?’ ”