Author: Barney Zwartz
Publication: The Sydney Morning
Herald
Date: November 12, 2004
URL: http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Islam-could-be-new-communism-Pell-tells-US-audience/2004/11/11/1100131141348.html
Islam could be the communism of
the 21st century if the West does not reform its secular democracy, Australia's
leading Catholic has said in a speech in the United States.
The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal
George Pell, said secular liberal democracy was empty and selfish, and
Islam was emerging as an alternative world view that attracted the alienated.
In a speech in which he also attacked
his critics for suggesting that conservative Christians were a danger to
democracy, Cardinal Pell said communism had shown how the emptiness of
the secular approach could be filled with something darker.
"The small but growing conversion
of native Westerners within Western societies to Islam carries the suggestion
that Islam may provide in the 21st century the attraction which communism
provided in the 20th, both for those who are alienated or embittered on
the one hand, and for those who seek order or justice on the other."
Dr Pell told the Acton Institute
for the Study of Religion and Liberty last month that secular democracy
could not stop the rise of intolerant religion and in fact worsened it.
He said democracy was not a good in itself. Its value depended on the moral
vision it served.
"The past century provided examples
enough of how the emptiness within secular democracy can be filled with
darkness by political substitutes for religion."
Dr Pell said the "democratic personalism"
he advocated, based on the dignity of the person, was the last alternative
to secular democracy available to the West.
He said for a Catholic bishop to
speak this way inspired panic and derision in those with ideological convictions
about secularism. Their over-reaction was an attempt to silence opposition.
