Cathal Barry
A prominent priest-sociologist has warned that a number of anti-Catholic media commentators are damaging the public’s opinion of the Church.
Jesuit Fr Micheál Mac Gréil told The Irish Catholic that he was “very worried about the atheistic proselytisation going on in Irish society today”.
“I believe that proselytising is now not on the side of religion but on the side of atheism and humanism. Some people who were reared in pious families have ended up agnostic or atheist or anti-religion.
“People are becoming compulsively alienated to what they were in the past and they are transmitting that alienation to others. They should keep it to themselves but campaigners usually don’t,” he claimed.
While Fr Mac Gréil doesn’t expect a major drop in the percentage of people who declare themselves religious in the next census, he warned that such proselyting might have had an impact on how people filled out their census forms.
Projected
“A lot of people are Catholic. They mightn’t go to Mass every Sunday but I would be surprised if there is any major drop,” he said, cautioning that religion “is being projected as something negative and that may affect peoples’ identity with it”.
“If the Catholic Church did what they are doing we would be accused of proselyting but there is a form of proselytising going on that is very serious and that is going to have an affect on the people,” he said.
Fr Mac Gréil said the results of the census will be a “measure of how the media have been influencing people”.
He accused certain commentators of “seeking out all that is negative about religion”.
“You can notice that today. Very few people tell a lie about the Catholic Church but they don’t tell the whole truth. They don’t see the good,” he said.