On the plane over, Pope Benedict XVI was asked whether he thought Europe might have something to learn from the state of religion in theUS. Here is his reply as quoted in today's NY Times:

Certainly Europe cant simply copy the United States, he said. We have our own history. But he said the United States was interesting because it started with the positive idea of secularism.This new people was made of communities that had escaped official state purges and wanted a lay state, a secular state that opened the possibility for all confessions and all form of religious exercise, he added. Therefore it was a state that was intentionally secular. It was the exact opposite of state religion, but it was secular out of love for religion and for an authenticity that can only be lived freely.

This was an argument that John Courtney Murray urged: that the American experiment in religious freedom differed from that in Europe, especially in countries like France and Italy, where the separation between Church and State came after centuries of union or close association,was forced, and was justified by a conviction that religion had no public role, whereas the US political experiment rested upon an acknowledgment of the need of religion as in the second clause of the First Amendment. Murray was much criticized for thinking that the US constitutional arrangement exempted us from the condemnations of religious freedom issued by popes in the nineteenth century. Leo XIII, after all, had said that the Church would have prospered even more in the US if it had enjoyed the favor of the State.)The Pope's remarks echo comments made by him earlier as when, for example, he called the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes) and the Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis humanae) of Vatican II a "counter-Syllabus," a needed reveraal of the orientations embodied in Pope Pius IX's "Syllabus of Errors"--a position that infuriated Abp. Lefebvre and still rankles the latter's descendants. (The remark was made in Ratzinger's Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 381-82.)