Indeed, the pope is a student of history as well as a theologian, and he undoubtedly understands that the repressive history of Catholicism at a time when it held sway over western Europe is one of the reasons why Europeans are more secular today than Americans. Secularism, ironically, is a positive word in Europe and is a dirty word only in the United States and Vatican City.

When Benedict said, in his speech to the American Catholic bishops, that any tendency to consider religion a purely private matter must be resisted, he was really expressing two ideas. First, he was saying that the church and its members must live out their faith by engagement in social issues--not only by personal piety. As a secularist, I have no problem with that--as long as the church's take on social issues does not prevent me from living by my standards. But Benedict also meant something else--that the Catholic Church in the United States will continue to try to impose its values on non-Catholics by attempting, for example, to outlaw abortion and embryonic stem cell research, as it once attempted (quite successfully) to outlaw birth control in many states.

The most revealing aspect of Benedict's statement was his assertion that to " the extent that religion becomes a purely private matter, it loses its very soul." It would have been more honest for him to say, "To the extent that religion becomes a purely private matter, it loses its political power." The Catholic Church, historically and in the present, wants power not only over the souls of its faithful but over others who do not share that faith. That is why the American Catholic bishops have formed a strategic alliance with right-wing Protestant fundamentalists on so-called "values issues"--by which they mean mainly matters of sexual behavior. This is a tricky business for the church hierarchy, because on many social issues--from immigration to poverty--the church's positions are much closer to those of liberal secularists than they are to the policies of the far religious right. But of course, we secularists want greater social and economic justice for all the wrong reasons, as far as the church is concerned. We believe that this life is all we have, and we want economic justice not because we long for heaven or fear hell but because we want people to have a decent life here on earth.

Souls--and this is true whether one believes in an immortal soul in the Christian sense or whether one simply attributes to the human brain those qualities that religion has attributed to a supernatural entity called a soul--are nothing if they are not individual. Power, by contrast, is exercised collectively. But then, who knows that better than the head of the most centralized enduring religion on the planet?