Positive Secularity, Please!

So asks Pope Benedict XVI. Zenit News covers the story here

Details:

In a letter to the president of the Italian Senate, Benedict XVI called for a "positive secularity" that omits any kind of hostility between religion and the state.

The "positive secularity" of which the Pope speaks guarantees "to each citizen the right to live his own religious faith with genuine freedom, including in the public realm."

The Holy Father expressed his proposal in a message sent to Marcello Pera, who is also honorary president of the Magna Carta Foundation, on the occasion of the Freedom and Secularity meeting organized by this institution in Nursia, Italy, last Saturday and Sunday.

(snip)

The Holy Father clarified that secularity must become "a commitment to guarantee to all, individuals and groups, respect for the exigencies of the common good, [and] the possibility to live and to express one own religious convictions."

According to the Bishop of Rome, the fundamental rights of the human being "are not created by the lawmakers, but are inscribed in the very nature of the human person, and refer back, in the last analysis to the Creator."

"Therefore," he added, "a healthy secularity of the state seems legitimate and advantageous, in virtue of which the temporal realities are governed according to norms that are proper to them, to which those ethical instances also belong that have their foundation in the very existence of man."

The Holy Father appeals for a Foolish sort of reasonableness: a recognition that the State recognizes, not creates, human rights--including the right to religious expression according to one's conscience. Far too many Reasonable pundits welcome religiosity only if the religious keep it to themselves and leave the public square only for the factually verifiable. In other words, they long for the broadest interpretation of the "keep your rosaries off my ovaries" principle, even religious people become marginalized in their own society.

The Pope's request for a "positive secularity" implies a recognition that the state does not equal society. More than a few Reasonable promoters of the Absolute Individualist agenda would gag at this. In spite of their love of all things libertine, many of these elites strongly advocate a Nanny State that most Fools would rightly call totalitarian. So in questioning the benevolence of such a libertine Nanny State as the summit of society, the Pope has once again gored their sacred cows.

Expect mouth-foaming rants of the usual nonsense about the Catholic Church intruding on the sanctity of elected government soon. The Reasonable dare not surrender the Dictatorship of Relativism without a fight; how else can they hope to hold sway over the Foolish unwashed masses?