Benedict XVI's first visit papal to the United States, deemed a triumph by many commentators, is being seen as signalling the moment when the US Church can begin to move on from the abuse scandal that has crippled it and robbed it of credibility in recent years. Pope Benedict, on his six-day visit to Washington and New York, delivered a message of hope, unity and renewal to the nation's 70 million Catholics, rushing between Masses and meetings with an energy level previously unseen over the course of his three-year pontificate.

In his first internal message to the American Church, the Pope took the nation's bishops to task over issues ranging from the clergy sex abuse crisis to the lack of support for their priests and the laity's selective adherence to church teaching. Speaking to nearly 400 prelates at Washington's Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Benedict echoed the sentiment of Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, that the scandals had been "sometimes very badly handled". Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told Vatican Radio that now the American Church could now return "with full enthusiasm [to making] its contribution to American society, a contribution of an educational nature, a pastoral nature, a spiritual nature, with full hope and dignity".

Repeatedly citing the role of the laity as "leaven" in the Church and the world, the Pope also noted in a brief question-and-answer session with the clergy that priestly vocations were the sign of a local church's health. While the message was more frank than many had expected, the broad swathe of reaction indicated that the papal appeal for the bishops to retake genuine leadership of the Church was "needed" after the most seismic crisis in American Catholicism's 400-year history.

The following morning at Mass in the capital's new baseball stadium, Pope Benedict urged the US Church's polarised factions to unite and repeated his assault on the scandal for the "damage" it had caused.

"It is important that those who have suffered be given loving pastoral attention," he said, calling upon the nationwide fold "to foster healing and reconciliation, and to assist those who have been hurt".

Later that day, in a move observers saw as a surprise, the Pope held an unprecedented private meeting with several victims of clergy abuse in the chapel of the Washington nunciature. All from Boston - the epicentre of the crisis - the group was accompanied by the city's archbishop, Cardinal Sean O'Malley, who presented Pope Benedict with a notebook containing the names of more than 1,000 other abuse survivors. During the 25-minute session, each victim had a chance to speak individually to the Pope, who listened to their stories and prayed with the group. In subsequent interviews, the attendees said they came away with hope that the Church's efforts to eliminate abusive priests would improve markedly. Following the session, Cardinal O'Malley told The Tablet that he "was still processing" the encounter, which he called "very emotional" and "very prayerful".

Expected to be reserved and austere, the Pope radiated a broad smile, intense energy and connectedness with his crowds during the events, some of which began early amid unprecedented security efforts.

Before 26,000 young people in the grounds of New York's seminary on Saturday, Pope Benedict "broke script" to walk along the edges of the large stage and reach out to the group he called the Church's future. Here the Pope unexpectedly made his most in-depth comment yet on his adolescence under the "sinister" Nazi regime in Germany whose "influence grew ... before it was fully recognised for the monster it was".

Amid a heated national debate on immigration reform, Pope Benedict made several notable appeals for the Church to "continue to welcome" migrants to "their new home".