Sacrifice, Law & The Catholic Faith: Is Secularity Really the Enemy? (Alison, 2006)
It is and always has been a proper part of the Catholic Faith, and the life of the Church, that it tends to generate a relatively benign secularity; that far from the “secular” being our “enemy”, it is in fact our “baby”. And a fragile baby, one whose birth and development is well worth protecting. Nowadays our contemporaries are inclined to use the word “religious” as though it were synonymous with the word “sacred”, and the word “secular” as though it were synonymous with “common”, “normal” or “profane”. Nevertheless, to regard those definitions as fixed is, I’m afraid, the result of a mixture of historical ignorance, cultural tone-deafness and the fact that thinking in dichotomies is a great deal easier than anything more subtle.