This brings us to another of Benedict XVI's signature challenges to those who care about the future of the West: his distinctive understanding of how the Catholic Church might help the West meet the challenge of jihadist Islam, a challenge that is by no means resolved by the death of Osama bin Laden and that reflects a deep conflict within Islam itself about Islam's relationship to modernity. In Benedict's view, the Church will help facilitate a useful conversation between Islam and the West, and thus help shift the correlation of forces within Islam away from the jihadist radicals, not by being acquiescent and "understanding," but by posing challenges–politely, to be sure, but challenges nonetheless.

The Pope laid out these challenges in his 2006 Regensburg Lecture — an event that may take the gold medal for comprehensive media incomprehension (which would be no small accomplishment). Rather than the "gaffe" that it was immediately assumed to be, the Regensburg Lecture, and the Holy Father's subsequent exegesis of it in his Christmas 2006 address to the Roman Curia, correctly identified the two challenges facing Islam in the 21st century, within its own house and in its interaction with those who are "other". The first challenge is to understand religious freedom (which necessarily includes the right to convert to another faith) as a universal human right that can be known by reason and thus lays moral obligations on everyone. The second challenge for Islam is to find, within its own intellectual and spiritual resources, Islamic warrants for a clear distinction, in theory and in practice, between religious and political authority in a 21st-century state.

Benedict XVI also suggested that the Catholic Church might be of some assistance to genuine Islamic reformers interested in advancing these developments of Islamic self-understanding. Why? Because the Church itself had taken almost two centuries to find a Catholic understanding of religious freedom and political modernity that did not represent a rupture with, but a development of, classic Catholic understandings of the act of faith and the nature of political society. This process did not involve a wholesale, uncritical embrace of Enlightenment thought. Rather, it involved the recovery of classic Catholic notions of the distinction between sacerdotal and imperial authority, and the development of those ideas in light of the emergence of the political institutions created by the Enlightenment.

Retrieval and renewal, Benedict XVI proposed, was the way ancient religious traditions engaged political modernity without losing their souls. It remains to be seen whether the Pope's offer to reframe the Catholic-Islamic dialogue along these lines is taken up by Islamic scholars, legal authorities, and religious leaders. But an offer like Benedict's does seem more congruent with the demands of both faith and reason than a supine acquiescence, in the name of "toleration," to the agenda of those who would impose the social mores and cultural standards of seventh-century Arabia on Western societies.

Two other themes have been prominent in Benedict XVI's commentary on the contemporary challenges facing the civilisation of the West. The first is his distinctive papal environmentalism. While there is a sense in which Benedict is the first "green pope," in that concern for environmental quality is a regular feature of his public commentary, the full meaning of that papal environmentalism is often missed by the global media. For as the Pope insisted in the 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate, a truly humanistic environmentalism does not limit its concerns to clean air, water, and soil, nor does it deny to men and women the dominion over the natural world that is the gift of the Creator. Rather, a truly humane environmentalism will pay equal, if not greater, attention to what the Pope called "human ecology:" the moral-cultural environment of civilisation, which, like rivers and seas, belts of black earth and the jet stream, can be poisoned. And among the toxic wastes threatening the human environment of the West, the Pope relentlessly points out, are the practices of abortion and euthanasia, which a poisoned moral-cultural environment imagines to be technological "solutions" to situations in which the human protaganists have been dehumanised to the status of problems-to-be-solved. The decline of the family in the West is another facet of the ecological crisis of the 21st century, the Pope has taught, as is the demographic winter that Europe has brought upon itself by its own will.

Benedict's public commentary has also embraced economic questions where, like John Paul II, the Pope takes an anti-libertarian or anti-Benthamite view by insisting that the free economy, like democratic politics, is not a machine that can run by itself. The free economy, like the democratic polity, is bound by moral norms that transcend it. Those norms emerge from a careful and rational reflection on the dignity of the human person as an economic actor who is the subject, not merely the object, of economic processes.