The rise of secularism in Britain has created an "unfriendly climate" for people who hold religious beliefs, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor has said.The Cardinal said atheists had become "more vocal and aggressive" and that the Catholic Church had borne the brunt of liberal hostility.
He said: "Religious belief of any kind now tends to be treated more as a private eccentricity than as the central and formative element in British society that it is."
But he said aggressive secularism had united Christians and, to a lesser extent, the believers of all three monotheistic faiths.
The Cardinal made his comments in an essay for a book published by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a liberal think-tank close to the Labour Government.It is a theme the Cardinal has returned to repeatedly amid clashes with the Government over gay adoption, faith schools and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.
The Cardinal said in his essay that multiculturalism and the privatisation of religious belief had increased the "oddness" of belonging to a particular religion.But he said that even though Catholics were now integrated into British society their beliefs were still not accepted by a liberal cultural establishment.
He said: "Over the past 40 years, social prejudice against Catholics has largely disappeared, and Catholics have been fully assimilated into the mainstream of British life. "Intellectual and cultural acceptance is another matter; and there is a widely perceived conflict between religious belief (and the Catholic Church in particular) on the one hand and the prevailing notion of what it means to be a 'liberal' and tolerant society on the other."
The Cardinal said this conflict was partly because of a "dislike of absolutes in any area of human activity" and a revulsion for "absolutist" approaches to ethical problems. "But as the ongoing debate about faith schools has demonstrated, the intolerance of liberal sceptics can be as repressive as the intolerance of religious believers," he said.
The conflict with liberal opinion, he said, was focused mainly on abortion and the family - "two issues on which the Catholic position is characterised as intolerant and (even worse) 'reactionary' ".
He said: "Many other Christians, as well as Jews and Muslims, broadly share the Catholic Church's position on these issues, but I think it is fair to say that the Catholic Church bears the brunt of 'liberal' hostility on both fronts."
The Cardinal said it was right there should be tension between Christians and a secular society. This was especially the case when "liberal society showed signs of degenerating into the libertine society" and a widespread rejection of authority risked undermining British values.
The Cardinal said Britain's acceptance of diversity in family life posed a "grave risk" that marriage and family life would be undermined.He said: "The vocal minority who argue that religion has no role in modern British society portray Catholic teaching on the family as prejudiced and intolerant to those pursuing alternatives.
"Catholic teaching is clear that all unjust discrimination is wrong, but this teaching cannot accept the relativistic acceptance that all approaches are equivalent."The Cardinal said it was more essential than ever to have a tolerant public sphere as individual rights "increasingly come into conflict with the rights of religious groups to act according to their conscience and beliefs".
But he said Britain still had a pervasive Christian ethos and a tradition of genuine tolerance and appealed to Catholics not to withdraw from the debate.
He said: "The task of British Catholics - together with our fellow Christians and all believers of goodwill - is not to opt out of the debate or to fall back on anathemas, but to work by reasoned argument, and, above all, by the example of our own lives, to strengthen the many features of British society we believe to be good and to correct those we believe to be wrong."
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor has often warned about the growing intolerance of secularism. Earlier this year he organised a series of lectures at Westminster Cathedral because of fears that religion was being pushed to the margins of public debate.
Speakers included Tony Blair, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mark Thompson, Catholic director general of the BBC.
The book, published by the Institute for Public Policy Research, is entitled Faith in the Nation and has a foreword by Gordon Brown.
It includes essays from Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks, Dr John Sentamu, Anglican Archbishop of York, Ramesh Kallidai, secretary general of the Hindu Forum, Dilwar Hussain, a research fellow at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, and Sikh journalist Indarjit Singh.
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(Source: TSE)