Cardinal Cahal Daly has been accused of "a form of incitement to hatred" by the Association of Irish Humanists. In a statement the group's secretary, Mr Dick Spicer, said Dr Daly's attack on secularism, bracketing it with Nazism as a threat to faith, was a form of incitement to hatred.
He said the cardinal should be more conscious of the consequences of fostering guilt by association. Such tactics smacked of the very totalitarianism he cited.
Mr Spicer was referring to a sermon given by Dr Daly at Knock on Sunday where he said secularism was "more anonymous and more subtle than either Nazism or Communism" as a threat to faith.
He said he believed that "today's secularism is seductive and persuasive. It is part of the air we breathe; it fills the airwaves whose sights and sounds greet our ears and our eyes all day long and all night long.
"It tells us, either directly or implicitly, that the church of Christ is dying, that intelligent people and young people have no longer any interest in the church."
Secularism, the cardinal continued "tells us that Christ's teaching belongs to a credulous and unscientific or superstitious and poverty-stricken past."
Mr Spicer said secular humanism was an ethical and moral outlook with nothing in common with Nazism. "The cardinal should perhaps study and learn humility from the sad compromises his own church made with Hitler's regime when it dissolved the Christian Democratic opposition to the Nazis in return for institutional autonomy," he said.
Such arrogant characterisation of people was one of the Hierarchy's failings and they could not escape their own responsibility for the problems of the Irish church. Scape-goating others was surely a questionable ethical practice.
