As for the interface between this unapologetically evangelical Catholicism and the principal questions of public life in the West today, the first, and perhaps most important, of Benedict XVI's contributions has been his challenge to the West to recover the full richness of its cultural patrimony. Here, as in so many other ways, Benedict XVI's magisterium is in dynamic continuity with that of his predecessor (which of course should be no surprise, as both men's thought emerges out of the great tradition of the Catholic Church). We remember John Paul II's insistence, during the 2003 debate over the preamble to the European Constitutional treaty, that the New Europe of an expanded 25-member European Union ought to acknowledge Christianity as one of the sources of contemporary Europe's commitments to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Benedict XVI has continued to press this theme while sharpening it in his gentle, scholarly way. The civilisation of the West, he regularly reminds us, is the product of the interaction of three great cultural forces: biblical religion, Greek rationality, and Roman law. Or, if you will, what we know as "the West" emerged from the mutually fruitful interaction of ancient Hebrew convictions about the God of the Bible (who comes into history as a liberator freeing humanity from the often bloody-minded whims and caprices of the pagan gods); the Greek conviction that there are truths embedded in the world and in us, truths that we can know by reason; and the Roman conviction that the rule of law is superior to the rule of brute coercion in public life.

Absent any of these three supports, the entire Western project in history begins to teeter, and may eventually collapse. Twentieth-century high-cultural post-modernism, with its principled epistemological scepticism and the metaphysical nihilism that inevitably follows the notion that, while there may be your truth and my truth, there is no such thing as the truth, followed readily from the abandonment of the God of the Bible in the name of human liberation: a 19th-century project Henri de Lubac analysed in great depth in the 1944 study, The Drama of Atheistic Humanism. So with the God of the Bible gone, the foundation stone of the Western  civilisational project labelled "Greek rationality" project began to crumble, with the first signs of decay being the irrationalism that shattered European political life in the two great mid-century wars. Today, the situation is perhaps even more perilous: for absent both biblical religion and the arts of reason (to which post-modernist scepticism and nihilism can hardly be said to contribute), the foundation stone of Western civilisation marked "law" has begun to crack and may, under the pressure of political correctness (which is itself a lame substitute for moral reason), crumble, such that mere coercion will be the order of the day in democratic law-making.

This unhappy prospect is the situation often described by Benedict XVI as the "dictatorship of relativism": absent agreed moral reference points that can be rationally known, defended, and deployed in public life, coercive state power is deployed to impose the canon of moral relativism–in the definition of marriage, in the resolution of debates over the life issues, in the legal understanding of religious freedom–on entire societies. When couples are declared incompetent to be foster parents because their Christian convictions compel them to teach the truth about men and women and the ethics of human love, the dictatorship of relativism is at work. When doctors are threatened with the loss of professional accreditation because they will not perform procedures that are immoral, or facilitate behaviours that endanger both health and morals, the dictatorship of relativism is at work. When the state imposes a definition of "marriage" that is incoherent in itself and that has no standing in the history of the West — or, even worse, when the state requires ministers of religion to cooperate in confecting such unions — the dictatorship of relativism is at work. In all these cases, democracy is threatened, because a false idea of freedom as personal wilfulness is being imposed by coercive state power and the virtues that make democratic self-governance possible are being attenuated.

The Evangelical Catholicism of Vatican II, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI thus brings a thicker idea of "democracy" to bear on public life than the thin concept of procedural democracy that dominates political science departments in the West's universities. Thin democracy is democracy unmoored from its historic moral-cultural foundations in biblical religion and Greek rationality. Democracy that enables genuine human flourishing in the 21st century — the democracy that can defend the West against other civilisational projects with very different views of what constitutes "human flourishing" — is one that has reestablished the link between forms of democratic governance and the cultural foundations of democratic civilisation: a democracy that understands that it takes a certain kind of people, possessed of certain virtues, to make democratic self-governance work.