"Believing in Doubt"

Austin Dacey has an op-ed, "Believing in Doubt", about Deus caritas in the New York Times.  The piece is certainly respectful and civil -- not at all a screed or Dowd-esque hack-job (we can overlook the author's use of worn-out cliches about the "enforcer") -- but I wonder if the author has misunderstood PB16's claim and new document?  (Or, perhaps, he wrote an op-ed in response to something else he understands the Pope to have said, at another time, and the new document simply provides a good occasion for getting into the Times.)  The author writes:

The pope has used the term "relativism" to describe not only non-absolute standards, but also uncertain ones. The alternative to certainty, however, is not nihilism but the recognition of fallibility, the idea that even a very reasonable belief is not beyond question. If that's all relativism means, then it is hardly the enemy of truth or morality.

I'm not sure where the Pope has so used the term "relativism"; in any event, I would be very surprised if either Cardinal Ratzinger or Pope Benedict XVI doubts or ever denied that, on all kinds of matters and in all kinds of situations, it is certainly the case that there is room, between "nihilism" and "absolut[ism]", for "recognition of fallibility."  Dacey writes:

The important contrast is not between absolutism and relativism, as the pontiff would have it, but between secular values and their traditional religious alternatives. He can accuse secularists of believing in the wrong things. But that's not the same as believing in nothing.

Again, I wonder if Dacey is talking past the Pope.  It seems to me that nothing in this Pope's complaints about the "dictatorship of relativism" suggested that, in every situation, the relevant moral norms are absolute, or that the application of the relevant norms is easy, or that living well does not require living with doubt and close-calls.  Obviously, the Pope knows that many of today's secular liberals believe in something.  His worry, maybe, is that they believe in stuff like the "mystery passage."

UPDATE: Be sure to read Fr. Lorenzo Albacete's reflection, "For the Love of God," also in the Times, on Deus caritas.