FACTBOX: Quotes from Pope Benedict's U.S. visit

(Reuters) - During his first trip to the United States as leader of the Roman Catholic church, Pope Benedict has praised the role of religion in U.S. public life but warned against secularism, spoken out against poverty and repeatedly addressed the pedophile priest sexual abuse scandal that has shaken the American Church, including meeting with victims.

Here are some quotes and comments by the pontiff:

* "No words of mine can describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse," he said, referring the scandal during a sermon to 47,000 people at Nationals Park in Washington, a new stadium hosting its first non-baseball event on April 17.

"It is important that those who have suffered be given loving pastoral attention. Nor can I adequately describe the damage that has occurred within the community of the Church," he said during the stadium Mass.

He praised U.S. society but said not everyone had gotten a piece of the American dream.

"To be sure, this promise was not experienced by all the inhabitants of this land; one thinks of the injustices endured by the native American peoples and by those brought here forcibly from Africa as slaves," he said.

* "Faith becomes a passive acceptance that certain things 'out there' are true, but without practical relevance for everyday life. The result is a growing separation of faith from life, living 'as if God did not exist,'" Benedict told U.S. cardinals and bishops at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington on April 16, warning that U.S. society can quietly undermine Catholicism by reducing all faiths to a lowest common denominators.

"We have seen this emerge in an acute way in the scandal given by Catholics who promote an alleged right to abortion."

* "I come as a friend, a preacher of the Gospel and one with great respect for this vast pluralistic society," Benedict said at the White House after U.S. President George W. Bush welcomed him at a ceremony that included a fife and drum band in colonial garb and a 21-gun salute on April 16.

"Democracy can only flourish, as your founding fathers realized, when political leaders and those whom they represent are guided by truth and bring the wisdom born of firm moral principle to decisions affecting the life and future of the nation," the pope said.

* The sexual abuse scandal caused "great suffering" to the Church in the United States and also "for me personally," the pontiff said to reporters on the papal plane as it crossed the Atlantic on April 15.

"It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betrayed in this way their mission to give healing, to give the love of God to these children," he said.

"We will absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry," he said. "...It is more important to have good priests than to have many priests."

(Reporting by Philip Pullella, Tom Heneghan and Andy Sullivan, compiled by Patricia Zengerle)

(For more on religion, see the Reuters religion blog FaithWorld at blogs.reuters.com/faithworld)