Five years ago to the day, you and your fellow cardinals filed into the Sistine Chapel to elect the successor to Pope John Paul II. That evening, the chimney from which white smoke blows when Peter's successor is chosen, played false; for a moment, people gathered in St Peter's Square thought the unprecedented had happened - a Pope elected on the first ballot.

But it was only after the fourth ballot you were asked whether you accepted "your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff" by the Vatican's secretary of state. Soon after, the world was informed, "Habemus papam, Joseph, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Ratzinger".

Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of your pontificate and last Friday was your birthday, your 83rd. Didn't the choir sing your 'Happy Birthday' well? Born in 1927 on Holy Saturday, the day meant a great deal to you as you grew up celebrating your birth in the shadow of Easter Sunday - in its blinding light. Between the fifth anniversary and tomorrow's 83rd you generously chose to spend time with us in Malta.

Welcome, then, to this tiny island that hosted, long ago and for a short while, the apostle Paul, that zealous oppressor of post-Resurrection Christians (the story of the Church has ever been thus: Calvary and Resurrection, followed by Calvary and Resurrection). Had he not experienced that dramatic, life-changing Damascene moment when he was thrown off his horse and heard that seemingly incomprehensible, mystical question, "Why are you persecuting Me?" - would Christianity have spread to Europe the way it did? What if?

The persecutor turned pro-selytizer as seamlessly as the chrysalis metamorphoses into a butterfly. His mission led him on to Rome, which is why you are among us, and martyrdom.

Down the centuries, millions of Catholics met, and wherever the Church is persecuted today - Sudan, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Pakistan, countries across the Middle East - continue to meet, a similar fate; bishops, priests, nuns, laymen are gunned down, butchered, raped, torched, invisible witnesses shining in the reflection of their crucified risen Lord. Nobody apologises for their slaughter; they rarely make the headlines; the media see to that.

In a sense, 1927 was not such a different world from ours, the one you were born into. Europe was approaching the abyss even as the revolution in Russia was ferociously annihilating millions of Russians, including, ironically, the Children of the Revolution; and this side of Russia the Nazi regime in Germany was replacing God with another Super Man.

Stalin, Hitler and, later, Mao made themselves the final arbiters of life. Today's secular world is following in their footsteps in the matter of abortion, eugenics and euthanasia. How the civilised world, then, threw up its hands in horror over these scandalous practices; and how today's world is aiding and abetting these crimes and calling them 'human rights'!

The world's most horrendous century belonged to the great secular religions - Fascism, Communism, Nazism, its saints, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, Hoxha, Castro, Kim Jong-il, Goebbels, Eichmann, Beria, Yezhov, Dzerzhinsky... the list of dystopian utopians is endless.

That scenario, when man was no longer regarded as being in the image of God, but mirrored only himself and his self-perfectibility, when the State banished God from the public square - as it is once more trying to do - you have often spoken and written about. Man's dignity, you keep reminding us, has as its basis, a transcendence that comes solely from his creation in his Maker's image.

Replace that with the dotty theory that man's sole belief in himself is all that matters and the consequences of this heresy are there for all to see. Examine closely the 20th century and the 100 million men, women and children who perished on the sacrificial altar of godlessness, and consider this: under the New Religion of secularism a larger number than that, since 1967, have perished in abortions, sorry, through reproductive healthcare - 50 million in the United States alone.

Your book, Milestones - Memoirs 1927-1977, published in 1997, ends with the death of the archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Julius Döpfner, and rumours that you were among the candidates to succeed him. "I did not take them very seriously," you wrote, "because my limitations with regard to health were as well-known as my inability in matters of governance and administration. I knew I was called to the scholar's life and never considered anything else."

Your ways were not God's ways, which is why, having expressed your reservations, you wrote your letter of acceptance. "Interiorly I was still very unsure, and in addition I had a huge burden of work that was nearly crushing me... it was in rather poor health that I approached the day of consecration."

Still, behind you, as you took up the office, there were happy memories of Traunstein and Freising, Munich and Bonn, Munster and Regensburg - and your encounters during the Council with Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou, Gerard Philips, "to name only a few prominent names... (but) the theological and ecclesial drama of those years" did not "belong in these memoirs".

You were, unbeknownst to you or anybody else for that matter, taking the first steps in the direction of the Chair of Peter, by which time you would have had more than 50 books published, of which The Ratzinger Report, an exclusive interview with the Italian Journalist Vittorio Messori on the state of the Church, became what was described as "a publishing sensation".

According to John Allen Jnr, the not always reliable Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, the book made you "a hero among Catholic conservatives, who wondered if anyone in Rome saw the crisis as they did, and a lightning rod for the Church's liberal wing..." Public discussion of the book was intense.

Later, in 1996, you would publish another interview in book form, this time with a lapsed Catholic, German journalist Peter Seewald, Salt of the Earth - The Church at the End of the Millennium; and four years after that, God and the World - A Conversation with Peter Seewald, a conversation held between the two of you in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino.

That conversation ran to 450 pages, returned Seewald to the faith and, there, in the haunting beauty of that monastery, whose sixth century founder was Father of Western Civilisation, it is tempting to conjecture that the name you would adopt when you became the Supreme Pontiff was even then exercising the Holy Spirit.

There would also be your great dialogue with Jurgen Habermas, a neo-Marxist, on the subject of The Dialectics of Secularisation - On Reason and Religion.

The last was a remarkable encounter with a philosopher who once described himself as "tone deaf in the religious sphere", and surprised people by stressing the need for "a secular society to acquire a new understanding of religious convictions, which are something more and something other than mere relics of a past with which we are finished".

Secular society has proceeded to do anything but that; instead, it has descended into diatribe and decided in great part to go for the Church's jugular, through yours.

But before today's society was, the Church was; at the end of each assault it was the dog that died. But Marcello Pera's warning that this one is a war and will not go away, at least not for some time, was timely.

For the sex abuse scandal, which, all evidence to the contrary, they have monstrously and in self-defeating mode tried to pin on you, may yet turn out to be this society's last mighty and futile attempt to destroy the Church's credibility and competence. It will fail, we know that, but it will not do so without ghoulish attempts to bring down the only barrier between us and a new barbarity.

You stand for everything they wish to see destroyed, not least when you tell the world that when it reneges on the culture of life and chooses instead the culture of death it is committing moral suicide; when you stand up for the unborn child and earn the wrath of those who claim there is no such thing, only the mother's body and a vengeful alien inside it; when you speak out against embryonic stem cell experimentation and are accused of speaking against progress - even when it is now shown beyond any doubt that adult stem cell research has brought about cures that the embryonic brigade has lamentably failed to match.

You stand for everything they wish to see destroyed when you speak out for the dignity of the elderly and interfere with an agenda driven by a demographic shambles caused by a refusal on the part of families to generate; when you criticise the "dictatorship of relativism" and a relativistic intelligentsia expresses itself against you, paradoxically, in absolute terms; when at Regensberg you cited an unflattering reference to Mohammed and Bright, and not so bright intellectuals in Malta and abroad hummed and hawed - in fact, your ability to speak truth led to the first substantial and formal attempts at ecumenism by Catholic and Muslim leaderships.

The modern world fears you because you speak the truth. Its reaction has been to revile you and speak all manner of evil against you. Two thousand years ago the God-Man warned this would be the case; that this would ever be the case.

May our constant prayers, loyalty and affection strengthen you in your faith, confirm us in ours and support you in your years... Gute Heinkehr!