"Everything else is postmodern chatter."

From Paul Marshall's review, for Wall Street Journal, of Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:

"When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines," Mr. Caldwell writes, "it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter." The book is not a polemic; it is at once nuanced and blunt, serious and witty, while also avoiding what Mr. Caldwell calls "the preemptive groveling that characterizes most writing about matters touching on ethnicity." He does not advocate positions but instead offers reflections on a mix of trends, misunderstandings and self-delusions.

He also ruminates on far more than the increasing radicalization of generations of Muslim immigrants. Just as Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790) predicted a dire fate for the mass insurrection then aborning, Mr. Caldwell looks with alarm at Europe's continuing rejection of itself. Without a rejection of the religion and culture that sustained Europe for centuries, he says, the immigration troubles might never have occurred, or at least would not have been so severe: His verdict is suicide rather than murder.

The author notes that even the prominent German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who is an atheist, has acknowledged that "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Yet much of Europe has discarded its historic religious underpinnings as irrelevant at best, harmful at worst. Even the memory of what a religiously ordered society was like has seemed to disappear, Mr. Caldwell observes. "A good definition of religion" for most modern Europeans, he says, might be "an irrational opinion, strongly held."

Read the entire review. Caldwell was interviewed by Jeremy Lott for the July 2009 issue of Catholic World Report. Cardinal Camillo Ruini, who for many years was Vicar General of the Diocese of Rome, has described two different stances taken toward religion in Italy in this way:

Coming now to the aspects of secularism on which there are profound divergences, or to the problems that have in fact been opened today, these are mainly focused, in the countries with liberal democracies to which I limit my remarks, on the public role that religion can or cannot exercise, and on the conditions under which it can possibly exercise it.

The spectrum of opinions and positions in this regard is broad and varied, but it seems possible to identify two basic orientations, I would say two sensibilities.

One of these tends to reduce the public role of religion, sometimes even to the point of suppressing it, and is justified by emphasizing, on the one hand, the personal, spiritual, and intimate character, rather than social and institutional, of authentic religiosity; and on the other hand favoring, in the life of a nation, the properly political sphere over the social.

The other orientation tends instead to favor, or in any case to accept without mental reservations, the public role of religion, maintaining also that the social and institutional dimensions are essential for religion, and insisting on the autonomy and irreducible relevance of the social sphere.

It must be clearly stated here that these differences of orientation today appear tangential compared to the distinction, which is commonly made in Italy, between Catholics and secularists, as also between believers and nonbelievers. Among Catholics, in fact, there are not a few supporters of a practice of religion concentrated on its spiritual aspect, who are quick to criticize the public role of religion and of Catholicism in particular, while among the secularists, especially after the emergence of the new and great ethical and anthropological questions, and after the renewed presence of the non-Christian religions on the world stage, there are many who willingly acknowledge such a role, and often hope for it.

That remark is from a recent book co-authored by Cardinal Ruini and secularist Ernesto Galli della Loggia, as reported by Sandro Magister.

• The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, with Jürgen Habermas.