While British police continued to investigate a possible plot to kill Pope Benedict XVI during his trip to London, the Pontiff delivered a speech to the country’s political elite gathered at Westminster Hall in which he spoke of the need to balance religious faith and reason.

To let either exert undue control over the other, he suggested, is to give rise to either sectarianism and fundamentalism on the one hand or statist secular ideologies that can undermine the God-given rights and dignity of individuals on the other. Both extremes tend toward the dangerous and oppressive.

Here’s the gist of what he had to say:

“The central question at issue, then, is this: where is the ethical foundation
for political choices to be found? The Catholic tradition maintains that the
objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding
from the content of revelation.

“According to this understanding, the role of
religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they
could not be known by non-believers – still less to propose concrete political
solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion – but
rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the
discovery of objective moral principles.

“This “corrective” role of religion
vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms
of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create
serious social problems themselves. And in their turn, these distortions of
religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and
structuring role of reason within religion.

“It is a two-way process. Without the
corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to
distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way
that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person. Such misuse
of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place
and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the
twentieth century.

“This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the
world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious
belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and
ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.

“Religion, in other words, is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a
vital contributor to the national conversation. In this light, I cannot but
voice my concern at the increasing marginalization of religion, particularly of
Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place
a great emphasis on tolerance.

“There are those who would advocate that the voice
of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere.
There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as
Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might
somehow offend those of other religions or none. And there are those who argue –
paradoxically with the intention of eliminating discrimination – that Christians
in public roles should be required at times to act against their conscience.

“These are worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of
believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the
legitimate role of religion in the public square. I would invite all of you,
therefore, within your respective spheres of influence, to seek ways of
promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of
national life.”