Melanie Phillips, looking out from her vantage point in an increasingly beleaguered Great Britain, sets new Pope Benedict XVI's mission in a profound context: the building conflict between withering Europe and ascendant Islam.
[O]nly if Christianity manages to retake the lost continent of Europe and revive its abandoned faith that the moral relativism behnd whose banner Europe is marching steadily towards the cultural precipice will be defeated -- and with it the colonising ambitions of Islam to fill the void.Posted by Alan at April 20, 2005 08:59 PMAnd this of course is the great paradox. For it is only if a muscular Christianity is thus revived that the values of the west -- the liberal values of freedom, tolerance, democracy -- will be saved from extinction under the twin onslaught from both within and without. In other words, it is only through the arch-traditionalism represented by the new Pope that the freedoms prized by those 'liberals' who denounce him will be preserved. It is the former head of the Papal Inquisition, no less, who ironically offers the best chance that western liberalism -- and the freedoms that have been so foolishly squandered and abused -- might survive.