Abstract
This article analyses how European democracies are tolerating - if not promoting - the proliferation of denigrating messages towards those citizens who live their religion, especially Catholicism, and demand the presence of this experience in the public sphere; suffering discrimination that is systematically protected by political institutions, reaching levels of hate crimes that would never be admissible in relation to gender, race, disability or sexual orientation. Religiously motivated hate crimes against Catholicism have become the norm, legitimising affronts towards a religion that is caricatured as colonialist and followers who are labelled as privileged exploiters, all of this being the product of a self-interested confusion between the phenomenon of secularisation and that of secularism. Thus, from the legal-political premise of the secularity of the State, any manifestation of a Catholic believer who, with absolute respect for democratic values, proposes his or her principles as propositional values for society and public life, is demonised as fundamentalist; An attitude that, for the sake of social peace and as a manifestation of a secularism that has become an ideology that seeks to eradicate from the public sphere any link to God in human lives and their structures, is paradoxically tolerated in relation to objectively fundamentalist religions or in relation to positions that are viscerally hostile to religion. We consider that this treatment is applied to Catholicism in order to silence its moral influence, since, in addition to being a fundamental agent in the historical process of institutionalisation of temporal power, it constitutes a bulwark against any abuse of political meddling in people's lives. In short, in order to establish the State's single way of thinking, the aim would be to delegitimise the Church's evangelical message in its denunciation of any kind of state interventionism, dependence and control that violates the full development of freedom and human dignity.
Translated title of the contribution | Secular reduction of religious secularity |
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Original language | Spanish |
Pages (from-to) | 421-454 |
Number of pages | 34 |
Journal | Cauriensia |
Volume | 16 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2021 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Catholicism
- Citizen
- Common good
- Community
- Democracy
- Hate crimes
- Person
- Pluralism
- Religion
- Secularisation
- Secularism
- Secularity
- State