For his part, Ratzinger acknowledged "pathologies in religion that are extremely dangerous and that make it necessary to see the divine light of reason as a ‘controlling organ'" in public life. As the first millennium Fathers of the Church had taught, "religion must continually allow itself to be purified and structured by reason". At the same time, there were "pathologies of reason" that had led to a loss of faith in reason. Thus, the prime cultural imperative of the moment was to recognise the "necessary relatedness between reason and faith and between reason and religion, which are called to purify and help one another", and which must "acknowledge this mutual need".

If his 2004 debate with Habermas and his lecture to the Italian Senate three months later give us, in capsule form, Ratzinger's analysis of Europe's cultural condition today, what role does he envisage for the Catholic Church in helping repair the damage that nihilism, scepticism and relativism have done to what he called, in the Italian Senate, "that which holds the world together"? 

Pope Benedict has sometimes been accused of being a nostalgic for the intact (Catholic) culture of his Bavarian youth, which was first destroyed by the Third Reich and then supplanted by a new Germany that eventually turned its back on both its Catholic and Lutheran roots. There is something to this, but Ratzinger is far too intelligent a man and far too sophisticated an analyst of the tides of history to imagine that any kind of rollback to a pre-modern (or pre-postmodern) past is possible. Rather, his first obligation, as he understands it, is to make Europe look closely at itself, in the unsparing but non-scolding way he did in the Italian Senate in early 2004: 

"At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralysed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.