Religion as a human phenomenon is as riddled through with potential for both good and evil as any other phenomenon.

My hope that the Church will emerge as a strong leader in society is just that a hope. What I described in The Catholic Moment is not a prophecy but the outline of a possibility. There are no guarantees that my hopes expressed in The Catholic Moment will ever be realised.

Determined secularists view these as residual inconsistencies that they have not yet go around to extirpating and that may not be worth bothering about... Form the secularist perspective it may be that the essential battles have been won and excessive zeal in pressing a final mopping-up operation might only excited further public hostility.

My eyes are wide open to the conflicts within the Church, but I don't think you can call it schism.

One would like to believe that people who think of themselves as devout Christians would also behave in a manner that is in according with Christian ethics. But pastorally and existentially, I know that this is not the case, and never has been.

Respect for the dignity of others includes treating them as rational creatures capable of being persuadad by rational argument, even in the face of frequent evidence to the contrary.

All my life I have prayed to God that I should remain religiously orthodox, culturally conservative, politically liberal and economically pragmatic.