TIME: For True Progress, We Need Faith
Saturday, Dec. 01, 2007
By JEFF ISRAELY/ROME

It's been nearly two decades since the defeat of the Communist atheist-materialism that had long been Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the Catholic Church. But if Pope Benedict XVI's latest encyclical, "Spe Salvi," is any indication, the spirit of Karl Marx is still alive and well in the halls of the Vatican.

Defeated, Marxism is no longer the incarnation of evil in our midst, but rather the perfect (vanquished) foil in Benedict's ongoing intellectually driven sermon that Christian faith is history's only true answer. But the Pope is not ready to declare victory. The Church's current foe, as he sees it, is still in the heart of Europe and still atheist in nature: a sort of post-Socialist, anything-goes brand of Utopia that Benedict calls "relativism" — and disparages as the root of everything from loose sexual mores to a breakdown of the traditional family to runaway capitalism. the rest