The second reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans echoed the motto of Benedict’s pastoral journey to the United States: “Christ is our Hope.”

“New hope that sees is not new hope,“ read Valencia Camp, a lector from the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. “For who hopes for what one sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait with endurance.”

The gospel, from St. John, told a story of how Jesus instructed his first priest to hear and to forgive the sins of the people. This was the foundation of the Catholic sacrament of penance.

In his homily, Benedict sounded all these themes once again and spoke at the same time to American Catholics and to the larger culture of many peoples in which they live.

As he did yesterday at the White House, Benedict praised the American Church, founded two centuries ago in Baltimore, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He praised the church –– and the nation at large –– for “bringing together wildly differing immigrant groups.” He spoke of Americans as always “A people of hope” whose ancestors arrived expecting to find “new freedom and opportunity, while the vastness of the unexplored wilderness inspired in them the hope of being able to start completely anew.”

But as he has done now several times since his arrival in the US, Benedict looked at the other side of the American ledger. This nation’s “promise was not experienced by all the inhabitants of this land; one thinks of the injustices endured by the Native American peoples and by those brought here forcibly from Africa as slaves” Yet said that here again Christian hope and forgiveness has inspired Americans to try to repair these wrongs.

Benedict then spoke for the third time in three days of a contemporary wrong, inflicted by members of the church itself.: the sexual abuse of children.

“No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse,” the pope said. “It is important that those who suffered be given loving pastoral instruction. Nor can I adequately describe the damage that has occurred within the community of the church great efforts have already been made to deal honestly and fairly with this tragic situation, and to ensure that the children –– whom our lord loves so deeply, and who are our greatest treasure –– can grow up in a safe environment.”

Benedict told the crowd: “Today I encourage each of you to do what you can to foster healing and reconciliation and to assist those who have been hurt.”