PERSPECTIVE ON CATHOLICISM : A Holy Visit to a Troubled Nation : We need to hear John Paul’s message--and he needs a better understanding of the American mind.

John Paul II once said, “Dialogue is the search for what . . . remains common to people, even in the midst of tensions, opposition and conflicts.” In his long and triumphal life, which I have been studying nearly three years for a biography I’m writing of him, I’ve seen no other breakdown of dialogue comparable to his with the American people.

We particularly need to hear his message. And yet in conversations with friends, family and associates, my wife and I regularly find ourselves lonely defenders of John Paul against people who know only his views on birth control, abortion and gender equality, don’t like them and don’t want to hear more. It’s awkward for a journalist to defend or counsel a subject. Yet I sense he will have to learn to finesse the sex issues if Americans are to hear his full message.

The greatest political battle today is over the relative value of economic efficiency. Having established that the free market is the most efficient way to produce goods and services, we are forgetting that values of the human spirit should occasionally outweigh efficiency. John Paul II is the only world leader championing this cause. The core of his secular philosophy throughout life has been that no economic system be allowed to suppress other facets of human freedom. It’s at this point that my wife and I, with our respective Protestant and Jewish backgrounds, converge with this Catholic stranger visiting our country this week.

Here are seven facts about the Pope you probably didn’t know and might mull as you watch him on television:

* This Pope not only rejects the primacy of wealth and power as values, he also comes preciously close to devaluing them altogether. Unlike all other recent Popes, he didn’t follow a political track to the job. He was routed by fate from chosen careers first as a classical actor, then a contemplative monk, then a professor of mystical philosophy. He exercises religious authority because they gave him the job, not because he’s cantankerous. He’s impressed by the thoughtful, not the powerful.

* For 45 years, his overarching political cause has been to stop people from being governed as if they were economic units. On a previous trip to the United States, he accused our system (like communism) of “having subordinated man to one single conception and sphere of values . . . which reduce the meaning of human life . . . to the demands of production, the market, consumption [or] the accumulation of riches.” While he hasn’t yet written an encyclical specifically on corporate downsizing, he emphatically supports “the priority of labor over capital.” He opposes any system in which “the aim pursued is the perfection of the work rather than the perfection of the worker.”

* His view of human rights is Rooseveltian, not Gingrichian. In his first U.N. speech, he advocated “the right to life, liberty and security of person; the right to food, clothing, housing, sufficient health care, rest and leisure; the right to freedom of expression, education and culture . . . the right to property and work, adequate working conditions and a just wage.”

* Feminists might be surprised to find him their most vociferous prominent supporter on such issues as legal guarantees that employers can’t impede women’s careers for time they choose to devote to child-rearing and elevating the pay and prestige of domestic work.

* Environmentalists will find him an ally on pollution and despoliation. He even has a streak of Jeffersonian agrarian romanticism, born of defending Polish small farmers against communists. He went to the Amazon rain forest when it was still run by military dictators and death squads to protest the eviction of traditional small farmers for the profit of tree-clearing agribusiness.

* You can’t blame him for overpopulation. Italy, Poland and Ireland--all predominantly Catholic countries--have birth rates below America’s. Even faster-growing Catholic countries like Brazil and Mexico are way behind countries in Africa or Islamic countries like Pakistan and Iran.

* Public support for culture is among John Paul’s passions. As a priest, he wrote poems and reviewed plays under a pseudonym. True, he eschews the risque. But he would regard cutbacks in libraries, museums, theater companies and orchestras for lack of public funding as scandalous.

More important than any specifics, John Paul expounds a consistent vision of the primary values of humanity and community: that we are at our best when we subject selfishness and greed to the needs of our fellow man and that laws should be written accordingly.

Unfortunately, John Paul, a man without malice, doesn’t respect the American mind. For years he has accused us privately and even publicly of being greedy, superficial and hedonistic. He lumps us with our ads for overpriced denims and fragrances and the selfishness and expediency he attacks as a “culture of death.”

But most Americans are worried. They work more for less reward than a generation ago and are threatened by ever more distant bottom-liners with job losses and cutbacks in education, medical care and other services. Partly as a result, we’re turning on our most needy citizens with a vengeance. An audience here yearns to re-establish the disappearing sense of community the Pope values.

Many Americans agree with John Paul that true happiness can’t be acquired by running up the balance on a credit card. He could venture gently from that into the expedience in our personal lives that we are less ready to admit. When half the births in large cities are out of wedlock, we know something is wrong. The Pope sometimes builds fences on what could be common ground.

Scolding doesn’t work in a land begun not so long ago by religious rebels and inspired by the Enlightenment. The forward-looking optimism and joy at new discovery for which Americans are envied by the world may dizzy a man used to walking on ancient European stones that beg a humbler step. But we want and deserve reasoned arguments.

The Pope’s increasing demands to stop debate on controversial issues affronts Americans. We are used to debating the laws we abide by and don’t consider that disrespect for authority. John Paul’s attempt to end doctrinal confusion has, in our context, sometimes brought more.

The Pope and his American audience both need a way past the sexual dictums the public has heard and halted at. We need what he can tell us about the human spirit beyond the bottom line.