21st-century economic life should thus value the entrepreneurial creativity built into humanity by God the Creator. 21st-century economic life should also think of the fruits of economic activity as what we might call "profit-plus". Thus, in Benedict's vision, business, making its own distinct contribution to the common good, will sustain private and independent sector philanthropies that educate and empower the poor, that care for those who are unable to care for themselves, and that give expression to a  vibrant culture of life in a  society of solidarity. (Implicit in this view, of course, is the judgment that the social welfare responsibilities of society are not exhausted by, and indeed ought not be dominated by, the state — a judgment sustained by the bedrock Catholic social-ethical principle of subsidiarity.)

What chance does this Catholic challenge to the 21st-century West have to be heard? It has been mounted in an intellectually impressive way by two popes in whom the Second Vatican Council, and indeed the entire Leonine reform, have come to full flower. If it has the wit and will to seize them, the Church has unprecedented opportunities to get its message out, through the new media that have broken the chokehold of the mainstream global press (much to the fury of Ms Polly Toynbee and other cultured despisers of orthodox Christianity). So both message and medium would seem to be properly aligned for Evangelical Catholicism to advance the "New Evangelisation" of which John Paul II and Benedict XVI have spoken so often. Yet there are two major obstacles to the flourishing of the New Evangelisation that should be identified.

One is the phenomenon that the international constitutional legal scholar, Joseph Weiler (himself an Orthodox Jew), dubbed "Christophobia" during the 2003 debates over the European Constitutional Treaty. It was on raw and ugly display in the months preceding Benedict XVI's visit to the United Kingdom last September, and while the Pope's self-evident humanity and decency–as well as the power of his message — drew a lot of the poison out of the air (for the moment, at least), the broader problem of Christophobia remains. This irrational and, let it be said frankly, deeply bigoted refusal to concede that Christian moral ideas have any place in the public square (even when "translated" into genuinely public language) is evident throughout the Western civilisational orbit. It is evident in the attacks on Christian orthodoxy and classic Christian morality that are now a regular feature of the European Parliament and other EU bodies. It is evident when the Star Chambers known in Canada as "human rights commissions" lay severe monetary penalties on evangelical Protestant pastors who dare teach publicly the biblical understanding of marriage. The measure of its potency and its potential for wickedness may be taken from the remark of a senior member of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States, a man of deep learning, who has said privately, "I will die in my bed; my successor will die in prison; and his successor will die a martyr." The formulation was deliberately provocative, but it does not take an especially lurid political imagination to construct scenarios in which precisely such a history unfolds. The pressures from the dictatorship of relativism — which is one political expression of Christophobia — could become that severe. And in those circumstances, the public impact of the New Evangelisation will be severely impeded, even halted, because Evangelical Catholicism will have become an underground religion. 

This fate is not inevitable, although its possibility may illustrate in our own time what Hans Urs von Balthasar called (as only German-language theologians can name things) the "theological law of proportionate polarisation": the more God's presence is felt within history, the more opposition that Presence elicits; the more vigorously the Gospel is preached, the more those forces determined to deny the divine love will intensify their efforts. This is the rhythm of salvation history: it is evident in the intensifying opposition to Jesus as he goes up to Jerusalem for the last time; it is described in spectacular world-historical imagery in the Book of Revelation. Yet we know, in faith, the way the story will end. And so we can live within history with an eye to the vindication of God's purposes in the end of history and the coming of the Kingdom in its plenitude.

And because of that, we can, here and now, take heart from what Edmund Burke taught this country two centuries ago: that the immediate triumph of evil here and now is possible only if good men do nothing. Burke's dictum has an unintended but unmistakable implication for the Catholic Church of the 21st century in the West. For if Christophobia is one major obstacle to the flourishing of a New Evangelisation that will be a culture-healing presence in all of society, so is ecclesiastical pusillanimity: a timid response to the challenges of Christophobia and the dictatorship of relativism, married to a less-than-fervid embrace of the New Evangelisation, both born of an internalised sense of marginality to the tides of history as they are flowing in the 21st century. This is the timidity from which Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have been calling the Church throughout the Western world. This is the timidity to which the antidote is the courage to be Catholic: vibrantly, compellingly, evangelically Catholic, not out of some cranky wish to recreate the old regimes (however we imagine them), but out of an apostolic passion to bring the Gospel to the world-and in so doing, to create conditions for the possibility of free and virtuous societies.