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By Dennis Coday
NCR staff writer

Australian Bishop Geoffery Robinson has said he is “disappointed” in his fellow bishops, who last week issued a statement saying they had found “doctrinal difficulties” with Robinson’s book on sex abuse and reform in the Catholic church.

Robinson is in the United States on a book tour for Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus, which was published last fall in Australia is now available in North American through Collegeville, Minn.-based Liturgical Press.

Gas will be five dollars a gallon. Utilities are going up in price. Food prices are going up. Local government jobs and budgets are being slashed. Taxes for the rich are decreasing,maybe. The dollar is devalued. Does this not remind us of Marie Antoinette's famous statement?

Ever since his famous warning about a “dictatorship of relativism” shortly before his election three years ago, Pope Benedict XVI has been trying to kick-start a global conversation about truth. In particular, Benedict yearns for a new look at truth within the Western secular academy, that exotic region where Jacques Derrida’s relativist maxim “there is nothing outside the text” has, ironically, achieved the status of a near-absolute.

This weekend, in the enchanting Alpine setting of Lugano, Switzerland, a cross-section of prominent Western intellectuals is taking up the papal challenge. Organized by the Balzan Foundation, which each year awards the Swiss-Italian equivalent of the Nobel Prize, this unique gathering of scientists, philosophers, and eggheads of all stripes, most of them without any specific religious conviction, is titled, simply, “The Truth.”

I’m in Lugano covering the event. In effect, the two-day summit represents the most intriguing test to date of how Benedict’s effort to restore confidence in truth is playing among secular makers of opinion.