P.S.

The Vatican finally has its translation of B16's hour-plus address to participants in the Verona Convention last week. Long, but well worth study. I won't go through the whole thing here, but he starts with a lovely discussion of the centrality of the Resurrection, and then addresses Italy's role in the world. For that, he opens with the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Western culture:

[Italy] is profoundly needy because it participates in the culture that predominates in the West and seeks to present itself as universal and self-sufficient, generating a new custom of life. From this a new wave of illuminism and laicism is derived, by which only what is experiential and calculable would be rationally valid, while on the level of praxis, individual freedom is held as a fundamental value to which all others must be subject. Therefore, God remains excluded from culture and from public life, and faith in him becomes more difficult, also because we live in a world that almost always appears to be of our making, in which, so to speak, God no longer appears directly but seems to have become superfluous, even out of place.
In strict relationship with all of this, a radical reduction of man has taken place, considered a simple product of nature and as such not really free, and in himself susceptible to be treated like any other animal. Thus, an authentic overturning of the point of departure of this culture has come about, which started as a claim of the centrality of man and his freedom.

Whoops! I forgot to be free! (We should make t-shirts.) This is the Regensburg thesis again:

It is not difficult to see how this type of culture represents a radical and profound break not only with Christianity but more in general with the religious and moral traditions of humanity. It is therefore not able to establish a true dialogue with other cultures, in which the religious dimension is strongly present, besides not being able to respond to the fundamental questions on the sense and direction of our life.
Therefore, this culture is marked by a deep privation, but also by a great and poorly hidden need of hope.

Although he wants us to see our situation clearly, he's not by any means gloomy. Read what follows and you'll see that he sees our time as a tremendous moment of opportunity. It's very rich. I'll just add parenthetically how interesting it is that the Pope here and elsewhere takes it as a given that it's a good thing to spread democracy (presumably he means, as Bush does, republican government --democracy as such being a bad thing) --it's amazing how often he makes explicit reference to it. Not that it's amazing the Church would be on the side of democratization, but that it seems to be part of the "programme" in some undefined way.

I'll stop there, although I don't promise not to go back to it later, especially since I'm trying to ignore political news, which is impossibly infuriating this close to an election. Here's your homework: find a possible oblique reference to Oriana Fallaci in the text.