by Jennifer Gold
Excerpted from Christian Today
Anti-discrimination legislation is being used to limit freedom of religion "in unacceptable ways", says Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales.
In a lecture at Westminster Cathedral on the Church's future, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said the state needed to acquire a better understanding of the contribution and place of faith in British society.
He said: "Legislation on discrimination, much of it good in itself, is now being used to limit freedom of religion in unacceptable ways. The sad and totally needless conflict over the Catholic adoption agencies is one example.
"But that is a symptom of a wider prejudice that sees religious faith as a problem to be contained rather than a social good to be cherished and respected, and which properly and necessarily has a public as well as a private dimension."
The Cardinal called upon local authorities to give the voluntary sector a "greater and more autonomous" role in the delivery of public services and to see the Church as a "partner in the common good, not an adversary".
He went on to warn that secularism was based on an "impoverished understanding of what it is to be human" and therefore could never fully satisfy human needs.
"Many of the arguments of secularism seek to offer a new and liberated self-sufficient humanism. Yet, I think, they can only end in the death of the human spirit because they are fundamentally reductionist," he said.
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