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Troubled by the total secularization of European life—reflected, most recently, in the battles over European unification and the continental chorus of criticism accompanying Professor Rocco Buttiglione’s reiteration of the Church’s teaching on homosexuality—the cardinal now suggests that the United States may perhaps offer the better model of Church-State relations for a desacralized world.

I guess you would prefer the post-Christian European model, with churches a museum pieces and any speach condemning abortion or homosexual activity is outlawed. Frankly, I prefer the United States, where for the moment at least, the Church has legal freedom of cult, and the Church still has some orthodox vibrancy left to pass on to future generations.

Frankly, I prefer the United States, where for the moment at least, the Church has legal freedom of cult, and the Church still has some orthodox vibrancy left to pass on to future generations.

Oh, I'm sure you prefer the "orthodox vibrancy" of Amchurch. You fit right in.

I guess you would prefer the post-Christian European model, with churches a museum pieces and any speach condemning abortion or homosexual activity is outlawed. Frankly, I prefer the United States, where for the moment at least, the Church has legal freedom of cult, and the Church still has some orthodox vibrancy left to pass on to future generations.

This is the same logic that praises unwed motherhood because at least they didn't have an abortion. The key phrase is "for the moment at least". America has been slavishly adopting the European model one modernist idea at a time. Obviously, Ratzinger believes that it is the state which makes religion possible, when it is God that makes all possible as Christ said to Pilate.

I guess you would prefer the post-Christian European model

No. I--and, I suspect, LOTI--prefer Christian monarchy, the last significant example of which (the Austro-Hungarian empire) was destroyed thanks in part to the United States in 1918.

Modern Europe is indeed a mess, but that is largely a result of the abolition of monarchies and rejection of traditional political and social values which began with the French Revolution and was virtually completed by World War I, though Rome's apparent surrender to the modern world at Vatican II made things worse.

Traditionalists (or, in my case, their non-Catholic sympathizers) are sometimes accused of claiming that everything was perfect before the Council. Please note that as a monarchist I am obviously aware that the world's problems did not begin in 1962. But Vatican II, with its implication that the Church to a certain extent approved of the great upheavals of the 18th and 20th centuries, did not help, to say the least. And now we see a prominent Cardinal claiming that the American system is preferable to the old European ideal of a Catholic state, a position which Leo XIII condemned.