Scottish Catholic Observer

Bishop Egan addressed the mayor and members of Portsmouth City Council during a civic Mass at St John’s Cathedral yesterday, the first since his recent Episcopal installation.

“Each one of us, in our own way, seeks truth, goodness, love and happiness, which is why, as long as human beings exist on earth, spirituality and religion will never go away,” the bishop said. “Catholics see faith and reason as in a mutually-enriching dialogue, each essential to the other. If you deny the role of reason in religion, you end up with a dangerous fundamentalism. But if you deny the role of religion in human reasoning, you end up with a dangerous relativism, that dissolves the very foundations of our value-systems and ethical decision-making.”

The bishop defended council traditions of wishing people ‘Happy Christmas’ and praying before council meetings in the face of those who seek to ‘remove it from public discourse.’

“If we allow secularists to banish religion from public life—and thus to stop a gathering of civic leaders in church like this—then we’re allowing them, however well-intentioned, to impose upon public affairs a dangerous relativism that will increasingly diminish,” he said.