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On Catholic education, the pope will stress the idea that "the Catholic identity of Catholic institutions of higher education serves both the church and the wider culture," said George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative Washington think tank.

Paradoxical vibrancy

Emphasis on orthodoxy may seem odd in the United States, where Catholics tend to be dogmatically lax. The Pew study found that 51 percent of American Catholics support abortion rights, in stark conflict with Vatican teaching. And nearly 60 percent support the death penalty, contrary to church teaching.

Many Catholics have simply left the church: One-third of Americans who were raised Catholic are now former Catholics, according to the Pew study. (The crisis of lost followers has been masked by huge growth among immigrants who are disproportionately Catholic, so the percentage of Americans who are Catholic has remained about 25 percent).

Yet compared to Europe, where traditionalism seems under siege, the United States is a vibrant religious garden.

"Both for this pope and for an increasing number of senior people in the Vatican, the biggest difference is that the U.S. is not a post-Christian society, whereas Europe, Western Europe at least, they perceive as being thoroughly caught in the net of post-Christian depression," Weigel said.

"Religious communities in America have a capacity to shape our cultural life, our social life and our political life in a way that can only be dreamt about now in virtually all of Western Europe."

Nevertheless, the Catholic Church's credibility in the American religious marketplace took a major hit with revelations of systemic cover-ups in many dioceses of the sexual abuse of children by priests. Benedict must address what Allen called "the deepest trauma in the life of the Catholic Church in the United States in its more than 200 years of history."

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