Is Europe sick?

In a review of the short book of Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, a short book, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and Marcello Pera (president of the Italian senate), Maximilian Pakaluk of National Review Online statest that

...There’s obviously something the matter with Europe...Europe cannot bring itself even to admit, never mind do anything about, the fact that its own culture has been rejected by, and is incompatible with, that of radical Islamism.

Because European society stands for acceptance and tolerance, and the enemy seeks to destroy it for that same reason, it is

...wise to look to the foundations of this tolerance. Ratzinger and Pera agree that Europe is crippled by relativism...and...[i]f relativism is the justification for tolerance, then Europe is in quite a predicament — for cultural relativism, posing as multiculturalism, does not permit criticism of a militant Islamic culture, which is a culture that Europe simply cannot uncritically accept...“[The West] is paralyzed because it does not believe that there are good reasons to say it is better than Islam. And it is paralyzed because it believes that, if such reasons do indeed exist, then the West would have to fight Islam.” While Pera points out the fallacies of this complex of attitudes, Ratzinger argues that Europe can rid itself of these misconceptions only through an acknowledgment of its Christian roots.

Because the state is just one element of society, its work depends on

... the belief of its citizens in the dignity of the human person, a belief that finds its roots in faith and religion. The destructive tendency of the last century has been for the state to establish itself as society’s highest authority, and to reject this prior belief. The result has...been...what Pope Benedict calls the dictatorship of relativism.

Europe would recover from this sickness by establishing a civil religion:

Over the centuries, the West has grown in its understanding that the state must respect and protect the freedom of conscience of its citizens. It now seems to believe that this freedom can be guaranteed only if Christianity is renounced, and relativism embraced. But there is no reason why this must be so — on the contrary, few institutions are as forthright in defense of the freedom of conscience as the Catholic Church. For Europe, there need be no contradiction between acknowledging a dependence on Christianity and recognizing the freedom and tolerance the state must show in questions of religion. The roots of Western belief are Christian: It is this specific faith that has informed Western society’s belief in the transcendent value of the human person. Cut off from these roots, the West will find it hard to avoid sinking deeper into a nihilistic, and deadly, relativism.