WASHINGTON - If Pope John Paul II was an international icon, his successor, Benedict XVI, remains largely undefined in the public eye in the United States, even as the Roman Catholic Church here experiences a wrenching transition.

This week provides an opportunity for Benedict to establish his public image and steady the American church, as he makes his first visit to the United States since ascending to the papacy after John Paul's death three years ago.

Benedict will visit Washington and New York from Tuesday through Sunday. He will celebrate Mass in two baseball stadiums, address the United Nations General Assembly, and meet with President Bush, Roman Catholic educators and other religious leaders. A visit to the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan is planned.

Pressures persist

The trip comes as the Roman Catholic church in the United States -- with the third-largest Catholic population in the world -- struggles against titanic pressures. Among them:

* A sex-abuse scandal that led six dioceses to file for bankruptcy and left others in dire financial straits as payouts to victims exceeded $1.5 billion.

* A demographic shift in American religion that has left the church with the largest net loss of members of any major faith.

* A fundamental threat to church orthodoxy linked in part to America's secular, polyglot culture.

It is against this backdrop that Benedict, who turns 81 on Wednesday, will introduce himself to America.

Within the American church, many conservatives have swooned for Benedict. They admire his embrace of the traditional Latin Mass, his challenge to Islamic extremism (which inflamed many Muslims but inspired dialogue with others), and his encyclicals on love and hope. For them, Benedict is not at all in John Paul's shadow.

"He's immediately established his own credentials as a spiritual, theological force," said Deal Hudson, director of InsideCatholic.com and a well-known conservative Catholic thinker. "He's shown he's a man of great learning and culture and not the least bit afraid of anyone."

To many non-Catholics, Benedict remains a mystery: A study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found 32 percent of Americans didn't know enough about Benedict to offer an opinion of him.

While his reputation as a cardinal was as John Paul II's hard-line theological enforcer, he has adopted a gentler approach as pontiff.

Those who tune in this week will discover a leader focused on what veteran Vatican observer John Allen calls "affirmative orthodoxy; a strong defense of traditional Catholic faith and practice ... but phrasing all that in the most relentlessly positive fashion possible."

"Benedict's diagnosis is that people are far too familiar with what the Catholic Church is against rather than what it's for ... and so I think his effort is to try to present a positive vision of what the Catholic Church represents," said Allen, Vatican correspondent for the independent National Catholic Reporter.

Aside from publicly reiterating Catholic teachings on issues such as abortion and the Vatican's longstanding concern for peace in the Middle East, Benedict's vision will probably be underscored in two places: his U.N. speech and his meeting with Catholic educators.

Benedict has called "the dictatorship of relativism" a grave crisis of modernity. At the United Nations, he is expected to argue that "what the world desperately needs today is a global moral consensus -- that is, a consensus on fundamental moral truths that are universal and unchanging that can serve as a basis for things like protection of human rights and human dignity," Allen said.

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