The Rev. Gerald Fogarty decided not to go to the pope's mass in Washington because he's busy teaching that day at the University of Virginia. The Rev. John Dufell considered joining him at Yankee Stadium, but he's got a couple of weddings to do, so he also passed. Paul Kane, a retired lawyer who goes to church in Georgetown, actually laughed at the idea, and Barbara Breshcia, who prays at St. Patrick's Cathedral several mornings a week, didn't even know the Holy Father was coming. Buttonholed on Fifth Avenue the week before Benedict XVI's arrival in New York, Breshcia was perplexed. "He's coming when? This week? Oh, next week. Is he coming to St. Patrick's?" Well, yes, and celebrating mass there, but never mind.

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The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a man of many faces. He’s an old-school 70’s leftie, a man who preached every Sunday in what the American religion scholar Martin Marty has called “greenish African-American pajamas.” He’s an intellectual, a professor who reads Hebrew and Greek, a gifted musician who can play a wide variety of instruments and a teacher who feels comfortable tossing around words like “hermeneutics,” as he did Monday morning in a speech at the National Press Club. And he’s an angry black man, a pastor who has spent his life fighting injustice everywhere he sees it. When a questioner asked him to explain the now-familiar sound bite-a snippet from a sermon in which Wright damned America for sending its young men and women to war--Wright did not flinch. He said that he had told Barack Obama that if the Illinois senator were to be elected President, “On November 5, I’m coming after you.”

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