Throughout his five-year-old papacy, Benedict has endeavored to shape a new identity for the church as a "creative minority" in an increasingly secular Europe.
He saw the new forces of educational selection in postwar Britain as yielding a new "restless elite", a creative minority rising above "the stolid majority".
Benedict sees Christians "not as a minority in decline, but as a creative minority," said Andrea Riccardi, the founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio, a lay Catholic group active in interreligious dialogue that helped organize the pope's visit to Cyprus.
He appeals largely to devout and conservative believers, with the hope that they will form what he has termed a "creative minority" that will re-energize a more unified church.
The overture toward the Anglicans speaks to a central theme in Benedict's papacy: his desire to bring in traditional believers at all costs to help Catholicism become a "creative minority" in increasingly secular Europe.
As such, Spain represents not only the Catholic Church's past in Europe, but perhaps also its future: an increasingly secular country with a muscular Catholic opposition, or what Benedict has called a "creative minority," smaller in number but more ardent in faith.
Young's fictional narrator describes that on the one hand, the "stolid mass" or majority is not the greatest contributor to society, but the "creative minority" or "restless elite".
He says his party is not out of touch with creative, young, minority folk and aims to prove it with his #IVoteRepublican campaign.
But that is exactly the cry of ethnic minority creative types.
The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they're competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities, and where the idea of a single religious truth seems increasingly passé.
