THE helicopter that carried Pope Benedict XVI into retirement left behind a Catholicism in crisis. So say his critics, his admirers and everyone in between.

The church needs “shock therapy” from its next pontiff, writes one observer. Catholicism faces its worst crisis “since the French Revolution,” argues another. “Not since the Reformation,” writes a third, “has the Church been so shaken to its core.”

Up to a point, the language of crisis is justified. To the trends weakening institutional faiths across the Western world — the rise of spiritual individualism, the influence of the so-called new atheism, the gap between traditional Christian sexual ethics and present-day realities — the Roman Catholic Church has added scandals, sclerosis and a communications strategy apparently designed to win the news cycles of 1848. In both Europe and America, Catholicism’s public reputation has worsened since Benedict assumed the papacy, and his nearly unprecedented abdication is a sign that the pope emeritus knows it.

But in assessing Benedict’s legacy, it’s worth looking back on the situation in the church in the late 1970s, when the man who was then Joseph Ratzinger left his academic career to become first an archbishop, then a cardinal and eventually the pope.