Time to move away from moral monopoly

Recently, in an important act of historical restitution, the Catholic hierarchy in France formally acknowledged the church's acquiescence in the Holocaust. The apology reminded us of how ineffective our system of values proved to be when put to the ultimate test.

It drew attention to the lessons of the Holocaust for a Europe that is still far from coping with the legacy of racism, prejudice and xenophobia. But it also, incidentally, acknowledged that religious ideologies have been little better than secular ones in protecting human rights throughout this terrible century.

It was somewhat surprising, therefore, to read the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell, in The Irish Times this week suggesting that the Holocaust was a logical outgrowth, not of religiously-inspired prejudice against the Jews, but of the French Revolution and the ideology of secular modernity that sprang from it. He wrote that the French revolutionaries had "prepared the foundations for the totalitarian systems which endowed with unqualified sovereignty the Nazi and Communist systems".

In some respects, this is true. The ideas on which modern secular democracy is based did contribute to the Holocaust and to the Soviet Gulags, and one of the many lines that lead from the French Revolution undoubtedly ends up in Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. But so too did many other ideas, specifically in the case of the Holocaust, those of Christianity. Long before the French Revolution, Christians of every denomination regarded Jews as the accursed race who had killed Christ. They marked them as a people apart and, from time to time, they killed them. And they did so for religious reasons: the Jews were an offence to the Christian moral order.

When totalitarian slaughter was being perpetrated, some leading Catholics, such as the Archbishop of Toulouse, Jules-Gerard Saliege, spoke out bravely against the extermination of the Jews. Others, like the entire German Catholic hierarchy, remained silent or issued actively anti-semitic pastorals.

Others still were active collaborators. Most German churches made their genealogical records available to the Nazis, a vital aid to the identification of those with Jewish ancestry. uhrer".

Now the point of recalling this is not to engage in grotesque competition in which the victims of religious bigotry and secular fanaticism are piled up in a macabre body count to see who has been responsible for more atrocities. The grim truth is that all ideologies and systems of thought have been capable of deadly distortion.

All have, at the very least, failed to stop their adherents from committing acts of inhumanity. It would make no more sense for me to attack Catholicism for the complicity of many of its members in genocide than it does for Archbishop Connell to attribute the Holocaust and the Gulags to the advance of secularism.

It's important to avoid such useless rhetorical battles because Dr Connell raises a critical question: how do we stop the majority from doing wrong? If a democratic majority makes the law, can it ever be wrong? And if it is wrong, how can the will of the majority ever be challenged without destroying democracy itself?

In asking this question, however, Dr Connell pretends that it is essentially a religious concern, a question that secular ideology does not ask. He defines secularism as conferring "absolute sovereignty on the people". The "final word in purely secularist terms", he says, is that "the sovereign can do no wrong", in other words the democratic will of the majority is unchallengeable.

To which the simple answer is "says who?" It is, surely, one of the basic aspects of secular democratic thinking that the rights of the majority are limited. Is there a single modern democratic State that believes the people can do no wrong? Is there a government in the developed secular world that the majority in any society is morally and politically free to disregard the rights of minorities? Is there any democracy in which the rights of the majority are not subject to the rule of law, to codes of human rights, to international treaties and conventions? And if there isn't, what is the point of setting up a secular straw man merely in order to knock it down?

Dr Connell, as an adherent to the idea of "natural law" - the notion that people have rights because of their humanity, not by the grace of any State or parliament - can rightly claim for that tradition a central role in the evolution of the secular ideal of human rights. He can say with complete justice that Catholic tradition, insofar as it has upheld that ideal, has contributed hugely to the public morality of the secular world.

Unfortunately, he chooses to suggest something different - that the idea of "the dignity of the human person" is a new, anti-secular approach to morality "opened up" by the present Pope. And that simply isn't the case. The idea of human dignity is, surely, a shared inheritance, not an exclusive property. It is inherent in all opposition to exploitation and injustice, whether it's that of the great Catholic friar, Bartolemeo de las Casas, upholding the rights of the Indians in 16th century Peru or the great Marxist agitator, James Larkin, urging the workers of Dublin off their knees in 1913.

JUST as both religious and secular radicalism have been warped into justifications for inhumanity, so both have also provided heroic examples of resistance to cruelty and the upholding of humane morality. Claiming a moral monopoly for either side will get us nowhere.

Neither does it get us very far to say, as the Archbishop does, that the only sure ground for "unconditional sovereignty in full accord with justice" is God. The deity may well be all-knowing and just, but the interpreters of his will are not. If God is to be proposed as the basis for modern politics, a simple question must first be answered: whose God? And if the answer is the God of the majority, then we end up right back where Dr Connell started: with the problem that the majority is often wrong.

It may be time to recognise that the debate between secularism and religious rule is increasingly unreal. In modern Ireland, with an educated population and a diversity of cultures, there is no alternative to secularism, in the sense of an open, tolerant, argumentative society that makes and tests its collective morality against the messy realities of life.

In those conditions, it is surely time for a recognition by the leadership of the church of what Father Liam Ryan has called "the secular world as a worthy part of God's and man's creation, a world entitled to exist and be interpreted in its own right. In short, a recognition that there are legitimate boundaries between the sacred and the secular. . ."