Religion and culture must be in respectful dialogue so both may inform each other, the head of the Catholic Schools Partnership has said.
Fr Michael Drumm was speaking this week at the annual Greenhills Ecumenical Conference. ‘There will always be a certain tension between religious faith and culture,’ he said, noting that ‘some people reduce culture to religious faith and so withdraw into a fundamentalist ghetto where everything outside is seen as a threat.
‘Others,’ he said, ’empty culture of all religious reference so that religious belief amounts to nothing more than personal whim and traditional superstition.
‘A true dialogue between faith and culture allows one to inform the other and calls individuals, families, communities, and indeed, our schools and colleges, to an ever greater commitment to human maturity,’ Fr Drumm told the gathering.