My children are envious, thanks to Pope Benedict XVI. Some classmates are driving to New York with their family to see the pope. My children wish they could go, too. It’s the first time they have ever clamored to sit in a car 12 hours each way. I’ll remind them of this at some useful future moment.

Brigid, my child’s classmates’ mother, happened to get hold of tickets to Sunday’s Mass at Yankee Stadium. She tells me she was planning to give them to others who could use them when it occurred to her and her husband that nothing was keeping them in Milwaukee. So, just like that, she says, they decided to go.

It’s a little irrational, and it’s irrational that I briefly thought about doing the same. This seems a particular paradox if you’re talking about seeing the present pope, who’s made a point of anchoring Christian theology in reason. Yet, by news accounts, thousands of people will descend on New York this weekend to see Benedict, something that on its face doesn’t make much sense.

For one thing, he’ll be far off. Assuming you get into the stadium, you’ll see a pontifical speck around second base. And while 80% of American Catholics recently asked by a pollster said they were happy with Benedict’s reign, he still hasn’t the particular charisma — what’s the Latin for “snuggliness”? — of John Paul II. The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is, unlike his crowd-loving predecessor, less a star and more like a shy professor who can use the phrase, “hermeneutics of continuity,” and who’d plan to quietly retire to a little house with beehives in the backyard — exactly what he was until three years ago.

Then there are those hermeneutics: With John Paul II, we had a pope who could rebuke tyrants and draw youth by the millions. With Benedict, we have a one-man reading list. I’m in a monthly noon-time group studying Ratzinger’s 1967 “Introduction to Christianity” — actually, I was in the group. I’m not slow, but I couldn’t keep up with the reading. With Benedict, there’s a lot to keep up with. He’s been writing for years, on the most scholarly level, about the biggest things. This is the plainest way in which he’s a gift to Catholics: We say, “God is love.” He can write a book on the phrase.

You can get the books at the store. You can find the texts online. It has been said that Benedict is the first Internet pope, one whose favored tool, words, are most easily disseminated online. Who needs to see the guy when his essence is in print? I have several of his books at my home. I’ll get around to finishing them someday.

Therein might be why otherwise rational people pack four children and a fifth on the way into the van and take to the Interstate rather than the Internet: Books are ever present, but the pope is present now. For this weekend, he is as with us as any of the distractions that keep us from reading what he’s written, as present as any of the relativism and secularity that he warns us about.

Going to see him is a way, then, of saying to ourselves that this is worth paying attention to now, on someone else’s schedule and not our own.

“I’m looking forward to attending Mass with 50,000 people who are there for one reason, and that’s God, which is neat,” a Saginaw, Mich., man, Michael Shabluk, told his local paper. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

It isn’t, exactly — popes get around these days. Still, it is this particular moment in a lifetime, and that it is a rare one is a reminder that we ought to grab what moments we get to deepen our faith. In a heavily scheduled, reserve-in-advance world, that’s countercultural. Brigid tells me her family lucked out in finding last-minute lodging: They’re staying at a retreat house run by an order of sisters in Connecticut. It’s because her sister, of the sibling sort, is one of the sisters, of the religious sort. As it happens, they’re fairly countercultural, too: The Sisters of Life, an order founded by Cardinal John O’Connor in 1991. They’re young, they wear habits, and enlistment is booming. They take a particular vow to defend human life, something threatened these days not so much by any lack of knowledge as by a lack of faithful people capable of arguing against a culture of death. Doing that takes wits and resolve. Wearing archaic garb apparently helps young Catholics marshal such qualities.

Or so does driving 12 hours each way, assuming Chicago traffic is favorable. Brigid says they’ll drive at night so the kids sleep. Even if they do, I admire the lengths Brigid and her husband are going to. That they’re driving instead of flying makes it all the more strenuous, like a pilgrimage — middle-ages, really. That would be the middle ages when, despite war, pestilence, tyranny and every other kind of ill, people built lives centered on their Christian identity. Our ills today are different — less pestilence, more pestilential distraction. What could combat that better than going, literally, with difficulty, to hear the saving alternative? Those medieval types were onto something.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.