The secular world is convinced there is nothing more beyond this brief existence of ours than a planet spinning in a meaningless void.

But this, too, is a matter of faithsecular faith.

The guardians of this faith are in general arrogantly skeptical and cynical toward those who believe in an eternal and unchanging truth beyond this ephemeral existence of life on Earth.

But for the vast majority of Catholics as believers in the truth of Jesus Christ, the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger last week as Pope Benedict XVI was nothing less than a providential act. They believe the Holy Spirit guided the College of Cardinals to choose from among themselves a successor to the seat of St. Peter who would remain faithful to the legacy of John Paul II.

We may only guess how the papacy of Benedict XVI will unfold and influence the world beyond the Catholic Church. We know he brings to the job, as a theologian, an unbending conviction with which he defended the faith as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under his predecessor.

This stern conviction is already being mocked by the secular media, who describe him as an arch-conservative in conflict with the ethos of the liberal-progressive times we live in.

Labels such as conservative and liberal, progressive and reactionary, may be apt description for those engaged in secular politics. But such labels are redundant when applied to describe those who serve an institution that is 2,000 years old, and who nurture life from a perspective shaped by eternity.

In his pre-conclave homily, Cardinal Ratzinger reminded his peers what they are called upon to do by their faith. He said: "We should not remain infants in faith." According to St. Paul, this means being "tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery."

Then he spoke about Christiansand for that matter, non-Christianswho are "thrown from one extreme to the other: From Marxism to liberalism, even libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism ... towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."

Relativism is the creed that denies the objectivity of truth independent and autonomous of the limitations of human faculties. It declares there is no permanent truth outside of transient human experience.

Karl Marx wrote that "man's ideas, views and conceptionsin one word, man's consciousnesschanges with every change in the conditions of his material existence."

It was also Marx's view that religion is the opium of the people. Friedrich Nietzsche, Marx's younger compatriot, announced "God is dead" and viewed moralities as "nothing more than a sign language of the emotions."

Marx and Nietzsche were the forerunners of what now passes for post-modern relativist thinking. They laid the dragon seeds of Communist and Nazi totalitarian politics that soaked the 20th century in blood as never before.

But relativism as a creed still weighs upon our minds. It makes all human transactions into a utilitarian calculus of gains and losses, and reduces human life to being a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

It is against the meaninglessness of relativism that Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, stands as defender of truth in God, our Creator, while reminding us the "only thing which remains forever is the human soul, the human person created by God for eternity."

We are fortunate to have such a man in our midst when the fakes and the hypocrites surround us with their rubbish, denigrating life as post-modern philosophy.