The spirit of Saint Louis.

Papal visits can be a bit like a Rorschach test. Everyone sees what they want to see. John Paul II's January visit to Mexico and to Saint Louis initially seemed routine, only scaled back from his previous trips to accommodate his failing health and halting steps. In contrast, his mind and heart seemed in topnotch condition.

In Saint Louis, amid many messages, perhaps too many, the pope made a gesture that caught everyone's attention. He pleaded for mercy for a condemned killer scheduled to be executed on February 10. Governor Mel Carnahan said he was moved by the pope's appeal and shortly after the papal plane departed, he commuted the sentence of a death row prisoner, Darrell Mease, to life imprisonment. Thank goodness Mr. Carnahan is a Baptist, and not a Catholic.

Pollsters and pundits quickly pointed out that just as many of America's Catholics don't agree with the pope on abortion, they don't agree with his opposition to the death penalty either. Even so, it looked to be a teaching moment. Those Catholics, on the one hand, who are against abortion and those, on the other, who are against the death penalty had occasion once again to see the logic of the consistent ethic of life, first enunciated by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and implicitly given a papal benediction in word and gesture in Saint Louis. In any case, for Catholic and non-Catholic alike, there was amazement at the audacity and persistence of the pope's several direct appeals for mercy and a frisson of elation at a sign of compassion from the governor. Ask and it shall be given to you!

At a time when American public life is ruled by a mean-spirited vindictiveness, the pope and the governor showed how simple it can be to manifest a generous heart. The nation could use a few more such gestures.

Some people, no doubt, were disappointed that the pope met with President Bill Clinton. The pope received America's number one public sinner without berating him or wagging his finger (a gesture the pope reserves for Catholics). Of course, Clinton is a piker, morally speaking, compared to Augusto Pinochet or Kurt Waldheim, both of whom the pope received when they were heads of state. Even so, it was more than a little galling for the president, who seems to have forgiven himself, to use the meeting with the pope as his own bully pulpit. But the pope didn't seem to mind at all.

During his visit, the pope said he prays for Mr. Clinton and all American leaders - a benison the nation could hardly refuse, First Amendment complications notwithstanding. Clinton ought to be near the top of that prayer list along with the crew of the U.S.S. Impeachment now listing to starboard in the Senate. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr, both perpetrator and victim of this vindictive spirit, may need more than a few prayers, perhaps a thirty-day novena.

But back to the Rorschach test.What we liked was the pope's imperturbability in the face of the political meltdown in Washington over the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The pope knows, we all know, that it is not that important. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, it is not important at all. (In this case, the line between concealing an adulterous affair and obstructing justice seems inherently porous.) That's a very Catholic attitude.

There are, as we tried to point out a few editorials back ("Distracted Nation," January 15, 1999), many more important problems in the world than Bill Clinton; the pope talked about some of them in Mexico City and in Saint Louis. We can't say that his argument in the post-synodal statement, Ecclesia in America, is always compelling or necessarily full proof. (If neoliberalism has triumphed in the Southern Hemisphere, it is, in part, because the pope and his Latin American episcopal appointees have dismantled a powerful, if problematic, analytic tool - liberation theology.)

Still, the pope and a good many Catholics, north and south, know that most of these issues are more important than the partisan, puritan, and prurient interests at work in the effort to impeach the president. Mr. Clinton is an adulterer, a liar, a subverter of the law, and seemingly not all that repentant. Dare we point out that there are greater evils in the world than this? Abortion is one, capital punishment another, grinding down the lives of the poor still another. In a religion with serious moral standards, the distinctions between these and the obsession to find Mr. Clinton guilty are clear. In truth, Mr. Clinton is guilty of far worse sins (and unimpeachable offenses) than covering up adultery - he has several times refused to sign a partial-birth abortion bill, and as governor of Arkansas, he presided over the execution of a retarded man during the 1992 presidential campaign. No one in the House or Senate would dream of impeaching him for these.

The pope is right to be imperturbable. In Saint Louis he chose the better course, not to scold Mr. Clinton, but to beg for the life of a convicted murderer. If he hadn't, who would? Not President Clinton. Not House minority leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.). Not Catholics Henry Hyde or Tom Daschle, or any of those other important people in Washington.