'Dangerous atheists want to wipe out Christianity': Cardinal warns lack of belief fosters violence
PUBLISHED: 23:05 GMT, 16 May 2012 | UPDATED: 23:34 GMT, 16 May 2012
The country’s most senior Roman Catholic warned yesterday that secular atheists mean to wipe out Christianity in Britain.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said supporters of secular values do not tolerate dissent and warned their ambition to eliminate religious belief was ‘very, very dangerous’.
He warned that secular values had fostered the violence of totalitarian states and the purges and wars that killed millions in the 20th century.
The cardinal, who stepped down as leader of England’s Catholics three years ago, declared: ‘In the name of tolerance it seems to me tolerance is being abolished.’
His speech to an audience of Catholic thinkers in Leicester was the most powerful denunciation yet by a senior churchman of what many Christians see as a state-backed attempt to sideline their faith.
The cardinal condemned the Government for trying to hijack the meaning of marriage with its plans for same-sex marriage, denounced the equality laws that led to the closure of Catholic adoption agencies, and protested against the state-backed movement to ban the wearing of the cross by Christians at work.
He said: ‘Our danger in Britain today is that so-called Western reason claims that it alone has recognised what is right and thus claims totality that is inimical to freedom.
‘No one is forced to be a Christian. But no one should be forced to live according to the new secular religion as if it alone were definitive and obligatory for all humankind.’
He added: ‘The propaganda of secularism and its high priests want us to believe that religion is dangerous for our health.
'It suits them to have no opposition to their vision of a brave new world, the world which they see as somehow governed only by people like themselves.
‘They conveniently forget that secularism itself does not guarantee freedom, rationality ... or violence. Indeed, in the last century, most violence was perpetrated by secular states on their own people.’
The speech from the 79-year-old follows a series of complaints from senior church leaders over same-sex marriage, the attempt to refuse workers the right to wear the cross, and efforts to push Christianity to the margins of public life.
In the Church of England the leading role in the campaign has been taken by another former leader, Lord Carey.
Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor was scathing about the Government’s attempt to reform marriage by allowing same-sex weddings.
Christians, he said, ‘should not be anti-gay’. But he said the issue of same-sex marriage was not about prejudice against gays.
'It was, he said, ‘a more subtle issue, namely about democracy and the nature of marriage itself. On what grounds does a minority have the right to change the meaning of a fundamental institution for the majority?’
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