This secular, ‘lay’ character of the State includes by its very nature this balance between reason and religion that I tried to demonstrate earlier. Therefore it is also opposed to ideological secularism, which tries to establish a State run by reason alone, a State that is cut off from all historical roots and hence no longer recognizes any moral foundations other than those that are evident to that reason. Eventually it has nothing left but the positivistic criterion of the majority principle, leading to the decadence of a law governed by statistics.
If the nations of the Western world were to commit themselves entirely to this path, they would be unable in the long run to resist the pressure of ideologies and political theocracies. A State, even a secular State, has the right and even the obligation to rely on the moral traditions in which it is rooted and which shaped it; it can and must acknowledge the fundamental values that made it what it is and without which it cannot survive. There is no such thing as an ahistorical State based on abstract reason.
Pope Benedict XVI, Europe, p. 99
