At the gates of the conclave: the power of the “periphery” in dark times

Secularism has died. Ratzinger himself, being a cardinal, met with the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas at the Bavarian Catholic Academy in 2004 to conclude that we live in a post-secular society. A conservative Catholic and a liberal atheist with a Marxist background recognized that secularism had ceased to be the normative principle for regulating relations between religion and politics. Power should then direct its efforts, not to privatize…