Church historian and all-around religion and church observer Martin Marty is underwhelmed by popes’ homiletic effectiveness, as in this from his latest “Sightings,” a bi-weekly email-or-RSS-delivered essay (sign up for it here):

Pope Benedict XVI has expressed grave concern over the decline of church participation in Western Europe. His trip to the UK last week provided opportunities for him to address it. [However,] most commentators in religious and secular communications found almost nothing that he said or did which might help reverse the downward trends.

The fact that large crowds appeared at several of his appearances did not impress them; throngs line up for popes as celebrities. I’ve asked after each of Pope John Paul’s travels, which often drew masses of young people: did his Pope-mobiled words and gestures, eloquent though they be, lead any young man to enter the seminary ranks with intention to become ordained? Did mass attendance swell a month or a year later? Maybe the answer is yes, but it’s hard to find evidence.

To which I must retort with the apt and useful expression I heard from the late Chi Daily News man, Bill Mooney (see also here): “Compared to what?”  (Response to question, Do you love your wife, delivered with excellent dark humor.)

For one thing, popes are executives, and how many of them move crowds with oratory or showmanship?  Donald Trump, Lee Iacocca, and best of all, Robert Townsend, the Avis Car Rental exec who fired his p.r. people in the belief that his execs and managers are supposed to be able to explain things to media etc.  His ‘Up the Organization was about “How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits.”  Who else?  Tell me.

They pay salesmen a lot in big companies, or little ones.  How about the guy whose commissions made him the highest paid in a medium-size operation, so that to keep him they had to offer him a piece of the action — a sort of upper-level profit-sharing?  Smart guy, smart owner.

In the religion business, where sales is called preaching or evangelism or proselytizing, Fulton Sheen was top of the list when a monsignor and even when a bishop.  But when he became an “ordinary” of a diocese, that is, its chief executive, he did not do near as well, resigning after three years.  It’s a gift to be simple, says the Shaker hymn, and it’s a gift to execute, another to orate.

In any case, what difference did Sheen make, or does any preacher, good or bad?  Well, you never know, as Marty says we don’t know what difference John Paul II made with his rock-star-like tours.  Sister Mary teaching first grade and her sister Lucy with little kids of her own to care for have more to say about what happens than pulpiteers or traveling evangelist, we suspect. Who the heck knows?

And now that I have finished orating in print, that may be Marty’s point anyway, or close to it.

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By the bye, I hear nice things about The Lutheran Hour, where Rev. Ken Klaus has given no small spiritual boost — Marty’s suspicious about “being spiritual”; he might expand on that position later on — to an all-out Catholic friend, though 6 a.m. Sunday (WGN-AM) is a challenge.