Rumors of the death of Christianity in Europe appear wildly exaggerated. The World Youth Day events this week in Cologne are a powerful reminder of the mobilizing force of mainstream Christianity. More than a million young Catholics, predominantly European, will have assembled when the six-day celebrations end on Sunday. It is hard to imagine any political party or celebrity concert managing to gather numbers anything like these.

The ability of Catholicism to mobilize young people indicates the continuous importance of traditional religion and bodes well for the future importance of the church in Europe. Not all of those attending the World Youth Day will be fervent Catholics. Nor will they all agree with every single dictate of the papacy. But all will share a critique of contemporary Western society and endorse a higher religious vision about what is possible for humanity.

The new pope is commonly held to be reactionary, old-fashioned and authoritarian. If Benedict XVI is so out of touch, how can the church muster so many hundreds of thousands of young people to its cause? What is often ignored in liberal criticism of the papacy is that Western society can be seen as practicing and licensing a nightmarish culture of pornography, abuse and death. As such, the Catholic critique of modern culture is not unpersuasive. On issues like abortion, the erosion of marriage and the dissolution of the family, many of the young reject the secular values of their parents.

Before he became pope, one of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's primary points was the indictment of a "value-free" democracy. Speaking of the "dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires," he cogently argued that a purported respect for all things is in fact a respect for none. On the contrary, a genuine regard for the diversity of difference means that you value some things more than others. For the pope, a life without a hierarchy of values is a nihilistic endorsement of everything and nothing.

Drawing on his own experience of the rise of Nazism, the pope links contemporary liberal democracy with fascism. He argues that when liberals believe in nothing, fascism is not far behind. Goebbels, Hitler's chief propagandist, said as much when he wrote in his diaries that without objective values, there is only power and the sole proof of having power is to break all taboos and transgress all limits in order to better demonstrate supremacy. In part this helps to explain why Catholicism under Benedict XVI will try harder than ever to reinforce taboos against killing and exploitation - a radical alternative to the contemporary "totalitarianisms" of capitalism and liberalism.

In order to bear faithful witness to this alternative, Benedict XVI even envisages a break with the prevailing power structures of the state and the market. He imagines a consequent separation of the church from modern society. What mobilizes the young people in Cologne this week is this genuine idealism that permeates contemporary Catholicism.

Benedict XVI's pontificate will not be judged by the perspicacity of his critique but rather by the inclusiveness and transformative effects of his alternative. The challenge for this pope is nothing less than to oppose the violence of secularity in the name of a universality that is open to all. Meeting this challenge, however, requires a profound transformation of the papacy and the church.

First, the new pope must resist the temptation of further centralization, which is the definitive mark of modern Roman Catholicism. Centralized control, which is profoundly modern and secular, denies local autonomy and diversity. An increasingly authoritarian church risks imposing a secular "ideal-type" of blindly obedient believers. As such, it will fail to persuade others of the validity of Catholic beliefs and practices - precisely what conversion is all about.

Second, Benedict XVI has tended to uncritically equate democracy with relativism. This ignores democracy's potential for civic participation, which is crucial in resisting totalitarianism. Nowadays the challenge is to combine a model of inclusive democracy that is compatible with a hierarchy of values - exactly what Christian Europe needs in order to offer a genuine global alternative to the status quo. Such an alternative is both progressive and conservative because it seeks to preserve what is good and promote its radical extension.

(Phillip Blond lectures in philosophy and religion at St Martin's College, Lancaster. Adrian Pabst is a doctoral candidate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and a research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies.)

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