"Secularism denies the cultural importance of the Christian faith and marginalizes the Christians by trying to relegate faith to the private sphere, shutting it into consciences and sacristies". Today, those words were spoken by Msgr. Franco Perazzolo, from the Papal Council of Culture, while he presented the "Instrumentum Laboris" in the middle of the Plenary Assembly of the aforesaid papal ministry, in progress in Rome (until March 8th) on the subject: "The Church and the challenge of secularization". "Today explained the speaker the Christian religion has to face a serious and complex problem: man learned to manage himself in all the important questions, without taking into consideration the existence of God and His love plan". Before the "secularization drift", and before a secularism which the Pope said to be "different and maybe more underhand than the Marxist one", according to Perazzolo, "it is necessary that the pastors of the Church are convinced of the real power of faith, which is able to make the richness of human reason fructify, so as to overcome rationalist aporia. And they must be the first ones to be convinced of that". "The aggression of consumerism; the absence of moral judgement; the collapse of solidarity, suffocated by individualism; the marginalization of the poor and the weak": those are the most important challenges which the Christians must face in the secularized society, dominated "by soulless technology and bureaucracy".
