The recent attempts of a number of US bishops to harm John Kerry's presidential campaign, combined with George Bush's scandalous and shameful appeal to the Vatican to pressure US bishops further to that end should remind us that the Catholic Church has not been a friend of democracy. In fact, the European enlightenment was primarily a fight against the church and the church has continued that fight up to the present (with a brief seeming capitulation at Vatican II undone by the current pope).
It has always been amusing to me in all the commentary on Islam's failure or inability to come to terms with modernity that there is next to no comment on the Catholic Church, which until the 1860s was running a sizable slab of Italy in which it kept its Jews in ghettoes and seized their children if a well-meaning servant baptized them. It has never apologized for that (no, not in the Pope's recent Holocaust 'apology'), nor did it stop due to a change in conscience but simply because the Italian nationalists took over the papal states.
So let us not be naive about the liberality of our own religious traditions. Many call for an Islamic reformation. Anyone who knows even the slightest bit about 17th century Europe would cringe at the thought of an Islamic reformation in the nuclear age. What we need is an Islamic enlightenment (and of course there have been such movements in Islam before), and to defend the enlightenment in the west and elsewhere against its persistent enemies in the Vatican, the White House and elsewhere.