What else did The Pope say?

Pope Benedict has created a huge controversy. Yet, much of what he said has gone unreported.

George Weigel, a senior fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the author of "God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church." Today, he wrote The Pope Was Right..

The Pope sent a message to the West:

"If the West's high culture keeps playing in the sandbox of postmodern irrationalism — in which there is "your truth" and "my truth" but nothing such as "the truth" — the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because the West won't be able to give reasons why its commitments to civility, tolerance, human rights and the rule of law are worth defending. A Western world stripped of convictions about the truths that make Western civilization possible cannot make a useful contribution to a genuine dialogue of civilizations, for any such dialogue must be based on a shared understanding that human beings can, however imperfectly, come to know the truth of things."

Weigel has written about secular Europe before:

"The demographics are unmistakable: Europe is dying. The wasting disease that has beset this once greatest of civilizations is not physical, however. It is a disease in the realm of the human spirit. David Hart, another theological analyst of contemporary history, calls it the disease of “metaphysical boredom”--boredom with the mystery, passion, and adventure of life itself. Europe, in Hart’s image, is boring itself to death."

Brett Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Today, he wrote Pope Provocateur:

"A Europe that cannot understand its own religion, except as a form of subjective irrationalism, cannot possibly engage another. A Christianity that voluntarily recuses itself from reason cannot sustain a belief in the goodness of its convictions, to say nothing of its truth. A West that abandons a critical dialogue between faith and rational inquiry ceases to be the West. It becomes, in a peculiar way, guilty of the same errors Benedict accuses Islam of making. This is the pope's teaching, and it requires no apology. Notice that he offers none."

We have spent days talking about the Pope vs. Muslims. Yet, the Pope said much more than that. He sent all of us in the West, and specially Europe, an important message.

Are we listening? Has anyone read his speech?