“Sometimes, you only get one chance to make a first impression. This is Pope Benedict XVI’s big chance,” says Sun-Times religion columnist Cathleen Falsani, who recommends he speak “words of solace,” of “love. Just . . . love,” He should be grateful for such advice. Mine would be that he just make sense.

Another advisor, Bob McClory, wants the pope to say he doesn’t know what’s wrong with the church and so to call a bunch of meetings to find out.

Bob the grizzled veteran – Medill-Northwestern, Chicago Reader, National Catholic Reporter, and the nation’s flagship Catholic liberal organization Call to Action fill out his credits – and Cathleen the still-fresh-faced columnist with ten or so years reporting and writing under her sash both want Benedict XVI to chill and stop clinging to a creed outworn or at least frayed at the edges.

“It is time for change,” McClory wants the pope to say, “not just for you but especially for me.” He cites Pew Forum statistics on Catholic backsliding – so does Falsani – and urges a halt to “assertions of doctrine with the expectation that they will be believed and observed if they are repeated often enough.” No more speaking papal truth to media power, some might call it.

Ah, but what of the Pew assertions, as teased out of the report by Christianity Today, that while 10% of Protestants in the U.S. are former Catholics, 8% of Catholics are former Protestants? That creed outworn is looking good to those former Protestants, apparently.

McC would have the pope wonder if “the Spirit [is] leading [the one, true church] in a new direction.” He wants the pope to say he knows from nothing in the matter. But one does not have to be an infallibility freak to see this as a bad idea. The leader of the free spiritual world should say he doesn’t know what’s going on? In whom would this inspire confidence?

He wants the pope to call “a series of international conferences, dialogues and debates” about “ordination of women, homosexual acts, marriage after divorce, stem cell research and artificial birth control.” O frabjus day! This would be Call to Action writ large. Truckloads of experts would hold forth, including members of the “laity with informed views.”

Hey! That’s me. What am I talking about? One of the meetings could be in Chicago. I could take the Green Line down there every day for who knows how long, joining in on the rap sessions, getting excited as the new day dawned for Holy Mother Church, the spawn of a thousand committees. And all of it with coffee and rolls and lots of happy chatter before, during, and after.

Call to Action could organize it. It’s true that Catholics United for the Faith and the Mindszenty Foundation, to name two probable recalcitrants, might not be interested. McC concedes that these conferences “will most certainly stir up hurts and resentments long festering in the body of the church and lead to confrontations among the most opinionated.”

Hurts and resentments? I’ll say. But not to worry: “[T]he time for forced polite silence, so characteristic of dysfunctional families, is over.”

This will be one big sensitivity session, with riot police waiting outside the door.

McClory wants the pope to stir things up. He wants democracy in the church and has written a book about its “coming democratization.” Comes the revolution, it will happen. And then what?

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Rev. Patrick Brennan, a Catholic pastor, has to go. Yes, he’s doing a great job at the parish he headed since 1994, when it was 10 years old, but it doesn’t matter. Rules are rules: it’s two six-year terms for a pastor, plus sometimes an extension.

He has served his two terms, at Holy Family, on Palatine Road in Inverness, and is halfway through a two-year extension that ends in June 2009, Chi Trib reports. Priests have to go where they are most needed, says the chancery. “Extenuating circumstances” might change things.

Rev. Michael Pfleger, for instance, is going strong at St. Sabina after 25-plus years. Can’t stay there indefinitely, Cardinal George told him, but apparently let it go at that. Not Brennan, however? Situations differ. Not enough extenuation, apparently.

A little history, please. The (still functioning) Assn. of Chicago Priests twisted Cardinal Cody’s arms in the mid-’60s to get this six-year-tenure rule, not from some high-flying motive as getting priests to go where they are most needed but as an antidote to the one-man rule in rectories throughout the archdiocese.

Pastors had in effect lifetime appointments, this in the days when every bishop was a king in his diocese and every pastor a baron in his parish. Curates – used to be assistant pastors but that changed to associate pastors in a spurt of collegial terminology – welcomed the change. It meant that if they got stuck with with a dictator they had to put up with him only for a few years.

More recently some who helped force the rule and had gotten comfortable in their rectories have wanted to change it. The late Bob McLaughlin comes to mind. He was at least in the middle of the ’60s push, and it’s he who made a big fuss when Cardinal George said he had to leave his cathedral roost. (McLaughlin was more a hanger-on, genial as all get-out, while young Turks hit the ramparts vs. Cody and some old-timers.)

That said, we have virtual founding pastors here – Pfleger and Jack Wall of two parishes risen from the dead: St. Sabina and Old St. Pat’s. Wall left St. Pat’s when his terms were up, to head the Extension (home-mission) Society, but Pfleger stays as our day’s version of the old-time irremoveable rector.

But consider the chancery’s explanation why Pfleger stays but Brennan (so far) can’t: “there would have to be extenuating circumstances” and each situation is evaluated on its own merits. That’s a non-answer, of course, which is just the one the chancery wants to give. Brennan is a sort of virtual founder, being Holy Family’s pastor for most of its young life.

Pfleger has said he will set up shop across the street if forced to move, telling 400 supporters, “You [church leaders, read Cardinal George] are going to have to have the balls to fire me.” And of course he would, taking his well-heeled congregation and its $40G-a-week donation with him, not to mention fomenting unrest to beat all. He would make it a mistake for George to even show up in that neighborhood. He wanted his very excitable followers to “snuff” a gun dealer. Would he stop at an eminence?

On the other hand, there are good reasons, as opposed to merely expedient ones, to let Pfleger stay – while peppering him with a thousand ecclesiastical cuts. Same with Brennan and others who have carved themselves a place in the hearts of their parishioners.

The old days when a pastor had authority are gone. Now pastors earn authority, even if they have a head start by virtue of their high pecking order in still-dominant church (clerical) culture. Most of them earn enough to keep people coming and praying and obeying and paying. A few don’t. But some hit home runs, and they should stay, nay, be encouraged to do so.

It’s an age when people shop for the Catholic parish of their choice. How else do Old St. Pat’s, St. John Cantius (near NW Side), St. Sabina, and Holy Family-Inverness grow so big? My writer friend Julie, for instance, schleps from Northbrook to Inverness, having found in Brennan balm for her soul. He’s a winner, has the touch. He’s what we hear about so much as the beau ideal of today’s priest, pastoral.

But chancery apparatchiks have a rule – as apparatchiks do everywhere, especially in a leadership vacuum – whereby Brennan cannot stay in Inverness for four more years, until he’s 65 and takes emeritus status. At 61 he’s (desperately?) needed some place else, more than at the parish he took over in its callow youth in 1994, they say. Really?

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Jim Bowman is the Religion Editor for the Chicago Daily Observer