1.....I must disagree. The most private thing about human beings is “religion” as what one’s “very soul,” one’s “self,” is most loyal to. Through the stages of one’s life, what one is most loyal to may change; but each of us is unique, and private, in the life-story of this loyalty.

2.....I must disagree. I am not so Protestant as to suspect that popes are up to no good no matter what they say. But I am Protestant enough to have counter-intuitive feelings and suspicions when a pope uses words such as “religion” and “private.”

3.....I must disagree. “Public” is the opposite of “private,” and official Roman Catholicism wants “religion” to be public in the sense that that church’s understanding of “natural law” and “moral truth” should apply to state (government) as well as church (“religion”). For example, I worry about the politics, not just the theology, of this speech’s assertion of “the right to life of every human being from conception until natural death.”

4.....I must agree. “Private religion” is an oxymoron: “we are social beings...who find fulfillment only in love – for God and for our neighbor.” The speech well details some of the current forces privatizing religion in America, inclining the public toward the drop-out mentality called “spirituality” (though he does not use this term). Robust religion requires “sound formation” of heart and mind, and it is made more difficult by our media “saturation with information.”

5.....I must agree. Religion is about the whole of reality and the whole of life; and to the extent that it is marginalized away from the center, it is diminished in status from a tool to a toy: “it loses its very soul.”

6.....I must agree. Forces and philosophies treating religion “as [exclusively] a private matter must be resisted.” Active resistance, not a passive attitude toward the drift into “the naked public square” (of which Richard John Neuhaus has long warned) and secularist-atheist public discourse. “Free speech is valued” in America, said the Pope, who praised us for “bring[ing] moral arguments rooted in biblical faith into...public discussion.”

7.....I must agree. Using “arguments from faith and reason” for our points of view, humanity must now honor “the dignity of the human person” and show respect for “the freedom of religion.” Freedom? True freedom is “a liberation both from the limitations of sin and for an authentic and fulfilling life.”

8.....I must agree. Humanity has “a deep thirst for God,” who intends us “to drink from the wells” of his “infinite love.” “Without God..., our lives are ultimately empty.” Devotion, worship, life should be eager “to gaze upon him who is the source of our joy.” What should center our lives, private and public, is “our deep yearning for intimacy with others and with our Lord.”

There's a touch of irony and good humor in the fact that this pope, warning against privatizing religion, is himself a very private, inwardly oriented, Christian. In street language, the more he goes in (in prayer) the more he comes out (in gentle and generous witness). The impression his visit to America leaves on at least some of us is well put in the theme of his visit, which appears in the Bible (First Timothy 1:1) as "Christ Jesus our hope."