The Visit

This is an excellent piece in the Telegraph on the Holy Father's visit to the UK.

Every president and prime minister should read it.

Secularism is at the heart of Benedict's concerns. By this the Pope does not mean the delimitation of Church and State, the sacred and profane – which is intrinsic to Christian culture as well as political society since the Reformation – but the amnesiac eradication of one of the principal roots of Western civilisation and the deliberate marginalisation of all religion to the private sphere. In its stead has come a society that thinks its existential despairs can be ameliorated by limitless consumer goods, or worse, by a state that racks up fathomless amounts of debt so as to throw money at problems that may have no material resolution...

Finally, Benedict has set himself against another tenet in the liberal creed, that of relativistic multiculturalism, thereby inviting upon himself the murderous attentions of what purports to be a religion of peace. Anyone looking at the raging, bearded faces we regularly see in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Luton and Walthamstow can surely agree – as did Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah – that parts of Islam have a major problem with the synthesis of religion and reason which has become normative in the West.

There cannot be a "dialogue" with Islam until there is meaningful reciprocity of such religious freedoms as the right to open places of worship or to convert without fear of death. To underline that, Benedict used St Peter's Basilica to receive the Italian Muslim convert Magdi Allam into the faith. Let's hope that this serious man's message about the West in the world manages to come across clearly, despite all the efforts that will be made to obscure it by liberals whose ears have long been closed.