Centre for culture and Catholic faith opens

The Bishop of Limerick, Dr Donal Murray, and the president of St Patrick's College, Maynooth, Mgr Dermot Farrell, opened an Irish Centre for Faith and Culture at St Patrick's College last night. Dr Murray hoped it would encourage dialogue between faith and culture within Ireland and help to promote cross-fertilisation with similar Roman Catholic centres in Europe. "Once deprived of faith, our culture would lose its vital component," he said.

He said moral relativism was a necessary consequence of failure to ask about the purpose of human life. The unity of faith and culture was clear, as both were concerned with the full truth about the whole human person. Re-evangelisation was the church's theme for 2000, he said.

The centre's director will be Father James McEvoy, professor of philosophy at NUI Maynooth. Cultural homogeneity had been replaced by cultural complexity, and the church needed to discern the right path to follow on questions of conscience, he said.

The centre plans to hold an annual conference, and to assemble a specialised library.