"Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as if they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen as a liability rather than as a source of hope. There is a clear comparison between today's situation and the decline of the Roman Empire. In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice it was already subsisting on models that were destined to fail. Its vital energy had been depleted." 

Having held the mirror of reality up to faces that might have been reluctant to gaze into it, for fear of what they could find there, the man who became Benedict XVI then urged his audience of Italian political leaders to reject Spenglerian gloom and to refuse to concede that the West was "rushing heedlessly toward its demise". Rather, he proposed that men and women of conscience adopt a vision of possibility drawn from Arnold Toynbee, in which "the energy of creative minorities and exceptional individuals" can lead to a revitalisation of culture that will allow "the inner identity of Europe to survive throughout its metamorphoses in history". 

The Catholic Church, Benedict XVI believes, can be one of those "creative minorities" in 21st- century Europe and indeed throughout the West. To be that, the Church must regain a clear sense of its own identity, primarily through a resacralisation of its worship. It must recover a firm grasp on the truths it proposes, putting behind it the "liberalism" in religion that John Henry Newman deplored. It must raise up a generation of bishops and priests who are persuasive evangelists and witnesses, according to the model established by John Paul II. It must demonstrate, not so much by argument as by sanctity and beauty, that it offers the men and women of today a path on which they can encounter "that which holds the world together." 

And to do all of that, the Church must purge itself of its corruptions, a point on which Pope Benedict has been insistent for years, most recently in regard to the appalling defaults of Irish Catholicism. This will take some time, given the density of clerical culture and the fact that popes are not, pace media distortions, absolute monarchs who can effect massive institutional change at the click of a finger. It will probably take more time than Anglophone cultures will like, given the still-languid, Italianate ways of the Vatican. No one should doubt, however, that Benedict XVI understands that, for the Church to become the "creative minority" of his imagination, it must be a credible minority that lives the truths it proclaims and deals decisively with those in its midst who betray the trust given them. 

Benedict's vision of the Church in Europe's future has nothing to do with the rebuilding of a mythical ancien régime. He has shown himself sympathetic to the desire of some Catholics to worship according to the old ways, but he has no truck with the restorationist political fantasies that are at the root of the Lefebvrist movement. As he sees the Catholic future, in Britain and elsewhere, the public task of the Church is to form alliances with those who understand that the democratic project requires a far more secure moral cultural foundation than that offered by pragmatism or utilitarianism. And in the Pope's mind, those alliances should be built in a genuinely intercultural and pluralistic way, formed around the truths we can know to be true as a result of putting various religious and philosophical traditions into vigorous conversation.

That is the proposal of the man who will beatify Newman and challenge Britons to lift themselves out of the slough of secularist despond. If that proposal gets drowned out by a cacophony of media scandal-mongering (itself amplified by the usual Vatican communications incompetence), and by the antics of the New Atheists (to which British and American editors seem curiously addicted), Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, will not be the loser.