This pope is Romantic, not reactionary

Catholics like Küng fail to understand the long intellectual tradition which the pope seeks to preserve and extend

Five years after succeeding Pope John Paul II on 19 April 2005, Benedict is confronting the worst crisis of his papacy. The ongoing abuse scandal undermines the church's credibility and reinforces all the usual stereotypes about the Vatican under his reign – a medieval theocracy ruled by an absolute autocrat who is reactionary and intolerant.

This view is not just bandied by atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. Besides these usual suspects, prominent Catholics are also using the abuse scandal as a pretext to attack the pontiff. In an open letter to all Catholic bishops published on Saturday, the Swiss theologian Hans Küng blames Benedict for the "church's worst credibility crisis since the Reformation". Essentially, Küng accuses the pope of restoring a reactionary vision of Catholicism that betrays the progressive reforms of the second Vatican council (1962-65) where both acted as periti – young theological advisors to the cardinals.

Not unlike much contemporary atheism, Küng's tirade owes more to ideology than to reason. His division of Catholicism (and other faith traditions) into a liberal, progressive and a conservative, reactionary wing is a modern, secular distinction that distorts the specificity of each and every religion. That's why Küng's pet project of building a "global ethos" is an abstraction from the unique character of diverse faith traditions – instrumentalising religion in the service of a dubious morality that amounts to little more than "being nice to each other".

This is a far cry from the universal ethical and other truths which all religions defend but on which they disagree with each other – for example, the status of love and the law in Judaism and Christianity. By denying real universalism, Küng's "global ethos" is entirely compatible with modern secularism and the "dictatorship of relativism" which Pope Benedict has consistently denounced. No wonder that Küng prefers a liberal Catholicism that emulates secular culture and in the process loses its unique, integral vision.

Worse, he also fails to understand the long, intellectual tradition which the pope seeks to preserve and extend – a kind of Romantic orthodoxy that eschews much of the modern Reformation and Counter-Reformation in favour of the patristic and medieval legacy shared by Christians in east and west. This legacy concerns the teachings on the church fathers and doctors like St Augustine, Dionysius or St Thomas Aquinas on the unity of nature and the supernatural against the modern separation of the natural universe from divine creativity and grace. In short, Benedict rejects the modern dualism of nature and grace or faith and reason – as spelled out in his controversial 2006 Regensburg address.

The pope's argument is that these modern dualisms have paved the way for the disastrous separation of reason from faith, an opposition that underpins the increasingly bitter conflict between the absolute reason of extreme secularism (and atheism) and the blind faith of religious fundamentalism. As such, Benedict's call to restore the "grandeur of reason" – whereby reason and faith require each other and are mutually augmenting – is far more radical and progressive than Küng's demand for more liberal dialogue.

In fact, the pope's intervention has already led to a much more intellectually vigorous and robust debate between Christians and Muslim – as evinced by the permanent Catholic-Muslim forum. This was initiated in response to critiques of the pope's Regensburg address in which he linked violence in Islam to the priority of God's power and will over divine reason and intellect. Küng blames Benedict for causing mistrust between Christians and Muslims, but the pope is right to insist that such trust is only authentic when based on a better mutual understanding of the real differences that exist between Christianity and Islam – the incarnation of God, the divine nature of Jesus and the Holy Trinity.

Nor does Benedict merely look back with nostalgia to the foundational creed and the councils of the early church. On the contrary, he links the patristic and medieval legacy to modern Romanticism with their shared emphasis on natural intimations of the divine and on human, artistic activity. It is this Romantic tradition that has helped sustain and create the high culture which the pope champions. That's what underpins his defence of traditional liturgy (including the Tridentine mass) against the onslaught of "sacro-pop" – "parish tea party liturgies and banal 'cuddle me Jesus' pop songs", as Tracey Rowland so aptly writes in her book Ratzinger's Faith.

Beyond the liturgy, Romanticism is also key to saving secular culture from itself. By rejecting both absolute instrumental reason and blind emotional faith, the Romantic tradition outwits the contemporary convergence of soulless technological progress and an impoverished culture dominated by sexualisation and violence. More fundamentally, it opposes the complicit collusion of boundless economic and social liberalisation that has produced laissez-faire sex and an obsession with personal choice rather than objective (yet contested) standards of truth, beauty and goodness – a concern shared by the archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in his seminal book Lost Icons.

Questions remain about how to translate Benedict's vision into a radical overhaul of the curia and relations between Rome and Catholic bishops. But far from being nostalgic or reactionary, this pope is an unreconstructed romantic who is bringing about an intellectual and cultural renaissance of Catholicism.