Not every part of Benedict's message was congenial, however. He was quietly insistent that the State must not deny freedom of conscience to Catholics and other religious people. If it does, the Church enjoins passive disobedience. What the Pope means by "the legitimate role of religion in the public sphere" is the development of an idea he set out in the book Without Roots that he wrote with Marcello Pera: "A civil Christian religion that can shape our conscience as Europeans." Benedict's civil religion embodies the moral principles of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Such a minimalist civil religion, designed to allow space for religious freedom within our secular polity, has much in common with the Anglican settlement, with its self-denying ordinance not to make windows into men's souls; but the very notion of an established religion is now decaying fast. Christians, Jews and others fear that faith is now increasingly identified in public discourse with what the Pope calls "distorted forms of religion such as sectarianism and fundamentalism", especially in their Islamic varieties. But Benedict reminds us that reason without faith will also take pathological forms, whether totalitarian ideology or eugenics. Faith and reason need one another, declared the Pontiff, "for the good of our civilisation". 

It would be naive to suppose that such entreaties could alone deflect the course of the secular mainstream. No sooner was he gone than the political class wallowed in its own "religious" festival: the party conferences. But the national conversation has benefited from Benedict's call to listen out for the still small voice of God. Newman confessed that, "were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and in my heart, I should be an atheist". We all have an inner voice that we call conscience, and whether we believe its source is divine or not, we cannot and should not try to silence it.