The Vatican is obviously feeling insecure, and it has good reason to.It isn’t exactly flavour of the month, as demonstrated by the large-scale defections from its churches, disobedient congregations that use contraception and fail to persecute their gay friends, not to mention the pope’s trip to Sydney was overshadowed by rows about his Church’s failure to control child abuse and lack of sincere contrition for it even now.
Anyway, his ’oliness feels particularly threatened by secularism, referring obsessively to its “dangers” at every opportunity.
In Australia, for World Youth Day, the Holy Father, said: “In the name of human freedom and autonomy, God’s name is passed over in silence, religion is reduced to private devotion, and faith is shunned in the public square.”
His sentiments were backed up by the usual suspects. Newspaper editor Paul Kelly (what is it with newspaper editors and religion?) said in the Sydney-based The Australian that “secularism is a problem”.
Mr Kelly claimed that secularism not only wants to push religion into being a strictly private affair, but also seeks “the creation of atheism as the de facto established religion to drive real religion from the public domain.”
Supporting him in this complete fantasy was Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (what is it with Prime Ministers and religion?).
He even mentioned it in his welcoming speech to the “youth” who had gathered, albeit far fewer of them than had been anticipated.
Mr Rudd sermonised: “Some say there is no place for faith in the 21st century.
I say they are wrong.
Some say that faith is the enemy of reason; I say, also they are wrong.”
The prime minister went on to praise Christianity’s role in developing education and providing for the poor: “And I say this, that Christianity has been an overwhelming force for good in the world.”
Not to be outdone, the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, got on the bandwagon in a speech to the Lambeth Conference earlier this week. He opined, according to The Times, that just about all the ills of society are caused by a lack of religion.
Obesity, loneliness, divorce, isolation, materialism – all because we don’t go to church any more, apparently.
And yet still the increasing number of naughty non-believers won’t come into line, and won’t listen to the “faith leaders” with their inflated opinion of themselves. Indeed, a poll in the Catholic weekly The Tablet last week indicated that a good half of practising Catholics completely disregard Vatican teaching on contraception.
And nor would they dream of discussing the issue with a priest.
They know instinctively that the Vatican is wrong on this as on so many other things, and they are increasingly prepared to say so.
The Vatican, in the mean time, listens to no-one.
All the might of the Vatican can’t halt the secularisation of society. If they had any sense they should embrace secularism, because — despite what the Vatican and its supporters say — secularism is not about imposing atheism on everybody by force.
Secularism simply means that democracy and respect for human rights are prime.
Of course, the Vatican’s own definition of secularism (which is, naturally, real secularism) would see the Pope assuming once more the role of Big Brother, telling us all what to do and when to do it.
But we can disregard the self-serving Vatican when considering democratic secular rule. Under it, religious people would be free to worship.
Indeed, under proper secular and human rights structures religious people have a legally protected right to observe their religion in any way they want (as long as it doesn’t infringe other people’s rights).
It is the fact that a secular society finally rules out any kind of theocratic structure that really aggravates Ratzinger.
True secularism would prevent the Vatican from running the show in the way it used to do in so many places, either on its own or in concert with (usually corrupt) political allies.
You can imagine how they would regard secularism as a threat to that.
All this simply reinforces the value of and urgent need for secularism.
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