See here — Logos, the journal of the Catholic Studies program at St. Thomas University in St. Paul – for an English-language summary and analysis of the January 2004 discussion held between then Cardinal Ratzinger and the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Habermas’s status in Germany as *the* public intellectual meant his declaration that “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization” caused a stir in European intellectual circles. (The author of this piece, Virgil Nemoianu, notes that the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor has made more nuanced but similar remarks, but Habermas’s resolute secularity makes the words more startling when he utters them.) Also striking is Ratzinger’s assertion, made in a connected First Things essay, that “democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”