Madrid, Spain, Aug 5, 2004 / 22:00 pm
Bishop Manuel Ureña of Cartagena, Spain, denounced this week in an interview the growth and spread of secular fundamentalism in the West, as well as the presence of Islamic fundamentalism.
Asked about the secular tendencies inspired by the French model and which seek to exclude religion from society, Bishop Ureña said they were “simply an attempt to deny us our freedom of expression.”
“I have spoken on a few occasions about what we might call religious and secular fundamentalism. Today in the West we are seeing the emergence of a secular fundamentalism. We know that fundamentalism consists of establishing an absolute truth. It’s about making a conviction, whether held by an individual or a group, into an absolute, and thereby imposing it on others,” he said.
Bishop Ureña said such imposition “can be done in a brutal way, as has happened in the past, or by cultivating and promoting it in a more civilized way, with white gloves, but with mechanisms that are equally perverse, even though they are hidden, and which seek to imprint this conviction in the consciences of everyone.”