Western Revival

Here's an excellent article by Daniel Moloney from NRO today.

This is an excerpt:

Much of the chatter before the conclave suggested that the cardinals ought to elect a third-world pope, because the future of the Church was not in a secularized Europe but in the growing regions of Latin America and Africa. In his two homilies before the conclave, the future Pope Benedict XVI seemed to agree that the secularization of Europe was a real problem for the Church, that “a dictatorship of relativism” has taken control of Catholicism’s historic home. In so quickly rallying around the man who, more than any other in the Church, is identified with a developed and public critique of Western European mores, the College of Cardinals were sending a message: The Church is not giving up on the modern West. It seems fair to read this message too in the name taken by the new pope: that of St. Benedict, the patron saint of Europe, the founder of Western monasticism, whose followers preserved classical culture through the Dark Ages after the decadence and fall of Rome. Having seen the long shadows that a guilt-free Europe once cast, the new Pope Benedict can be expected to remind us all of the great responsibilities that accompany the historic freedoms we in the West enjoy.