One of the very intriguing speeches Pope Benedict delivered during his journey to the United Kingdom was delivered during a meeting with the representatives of British society including the diplomatic corps, politicians, academics and business leaders.

The setting was a very symbolic one: Westminster Hall in the City of Westminster. In this same hall hundred of years ago St Thomas More was tried. The life, and death of this saint and statesman provided the ideal milieu in which Pope Benedict could ask and answer five questions. Though addressed to the leaders of Britain, these questions, and more so their answers, have utmost importance in our pluralised and secularised societies.

Benedict's questions

Pope Benedict asked the following:

1. What should be the relationship between what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God?

ii. What should be the proper place of religious belief within the political process?

iii. What are the requirements that governments may reasonably impose upon citizens, and how far do they extend?

iv. By appeal to what authority can moral dilemmas be resolved?

v. Where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found?

Though I am presenting these questions in a separate way they and their answers are intertwined.

Benedict the bridge builder

The Pope tried to build bridges by pointing towards values common to the social teaching of the Church and to a pluralist democracy such as Great Britain. His list includes freedom of speech, freedom of political affiliation, respect for the rule of law, a strong sense of the individual's rights and duties, the equality of all citizens before the law, an emphasis on the duty of civil authority to foster the common good and an overriding concern to safeguard the unique dignity of every human person.

Quite naturally, the values are couched in different languages in the different traditions, but their essence is the same. Our tradition, for example, anchors the dignity of human person in their creation in the image and likeness of God.

Benedict the innovator

His words on the corrective role of religion are quite innovative.

The Pope was discussing the ethical foundation of political choices. Some would answer social consensus. This is quite naturally very important for the running of the state. However, is it enough?

Benedict rightly notes that:

"if the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident - herein lies the real challenge for democracy."

Social consensus could be tainted by a certain level of fickleness. Pragmatic and short-term solutions can be the result of such a consensus which goes one way to-day and can go a different way tomorrow.

The Pope takes an example from the recent global financial crisis.

"There is widespread agreement that the lack of a solid ethical foundation for economic activity has contributed to the grave difficulties now being experienced by millions of people throughout the world. Just as "every economic decision has a moral consequence" (Caritas in Veritate, 37), so too in the political field, the ethical dimension of policy has far-reaching consequences that no government can afford to ignore."

No to moral subjectivism

Instead of a subjective moral system the Catholic tradition proposes natural law and a set of objective norms that are accessible to reason. In this context Benedict speaks of the corrective role of religion.

"According to this understanding, the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers - still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion - but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles.

This "corrective" role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves. And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion. It is a two-way process.

Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person. Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century."

Within this context, faith and religion or secular rationality and religious belief are not enemies. On the contrary, they: "need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.

Religion, in other words, is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation."

I strongly recommend that you read the whole speech which could be accessed on http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2010/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20100917_societa-civile_en.html