1.   By restoring indulgences to so prominent a position, the pope is making penitence a theme of the millennium celebration.

2.   In a message on Wednesday to a related conference in Rome, the pope made an ardent plea for reconciliation.

3.   In January, the pope made McCarrick a cardinal.

4.   In his visit to St. Louis, the cardinal said, the pope was effectively making a countercultural statement against the American obsession with youth and beauty.

5.   Later in the day, though, the pope also made his most critical reference yet to the American economic embargo of Cuba.

6.   Meanwhile, Catholics and Jews alike hinted that the pope might make a full-throated apology during the Jubilee, going further than the bureaucrats could afford to.

7.   On Saturday the pope made clear, as he has in the past, that clerical celibacy was not open for discussion.

8.   One prominent Roman Catholic priest thinks the pope should have made it clear that the children of the Church in need of forgiveness included popes, cardinals and clergy.

9.   Regional conflicts in the East would flare up, and popes would make appeals for new crusades, stretching to an almost comical number.

10.   So many of the steps the pope makes this visit will be on diplomatic eggshells, tuning out the claims and counterclaims of sovereignty, religious rights and nationalism.