Fr Patrick [left] and his fellow panellists. Photo: CCCMR
On 27 January 2025, Fr Patrick McInerney participated in a multifaith panel to speak on the role of religion in society to a group of tertiary students from The Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity (ISGP), a Bahaʼí-inspired educational and research organisation. This was one of numerous seminars the students participate in to raise consciousness about the importance of engaging in action and discourse directed towards social change. At the request of friend and partner of the Centre, Parviz Deamer, Director, Australian Bahaʼí Community, the students were hosted on our premises at the Columban Centre for Christian-Muslim Relations in Blacktown, Sydney.
Fr Patrick and his fellow panellists, representing the Buddhist and Hindu faiths, shared on religion’s role in providing a transcendent quality to life, its constructive and destructive forces in contemporary society, and how different religions work together for peace and justice.
Students were curious about the strengths and limitations that Western neo-liberal ‘secular’ framework has on religion’s capacity to express its role. Fr Patrick emphasised that we are a diverse or pluralist society, with a variety of religions (including no religion) and secular worldviews. He emphasised that we are not so much a secular society but a pluralist society with a secular form of government. The government is not allied with any religion, as in the UK, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, for example. The Australian government is neutral regarding religion. All religions are thereby equal, which enables the flourishing of our multicultural, multi-religious society.
Participants at the Panel. Photo: CCCMR
Nonetheless, the secular and religious are autonomous but related spheres, he continued. When they work well together, they enable human flourishing. When they don’t work well together, when there are “culture wars”, when one is in ascendancy over the other and imposes on the other, then society does not flourish. For example, radical secularism would try to eliminate religion from the public sphere; or a theocracy would impose itself on a secular world. Fr Patrick also made the distinction between the secular concerns with the material, the observable, and the measurable, while religion is more about the transcendent, the “big questions” Whence? Why? Where to? Moreover, religion and its transcendent quality allow for forgiveness, mercy, compassion, freedom, and fraternity.
As Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 2009, #19 teaches: "As society becomes ever more globalised, it makes us neighbours but does not make us brothers. Reason, by itself, can grasp the equality between people and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity. This originates in a transcendent vocation from God the Father, who loved us first, teaching us through the Son a fraternal charity."
Related links
- Read more from the current Columban Interfaith eBulletin.
