Sydney Catholic leader warns against secularism and threats to religious freedoms

Archbishop Anthony Fisher uses Christmas message to chastise government for going ‘backwards’ in preventing ‘discrimination against people of faith’


Paul Karp and Australian Associated Press
@Paul_Karp

Sat 22 Dec 2018 18.30 EST First published on Sat 22 Dec 2018 17.12 EST

Catholic archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher used his annual message to warn against people who want Jesus ‘put away with our Christmas decorations’. Photograph: Jeremy Ng/AAP

The Catholic archbishop of Sydney has used his annual Christmas message to condemn the perceived erosion of religious freedoms in Australia.

Archbishop Anthony Fisher took aim at “hard-edged secularism” which excludes faith from the public domain.

While Christmas is a time for coming together and celebrating the birth of Jesus, the archbishop said, the holiday season is becoming “one of the few occasions when the public expression of religious faith is tolerated”.

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“A year ago there were promises of new measures to ensure religious freedom is protected in this country,” Fisher said in his Christmas message, released on Saturday.

“A year later and governments have done nothing about this. Indeed, we’ve gone backwards, and discrimination against people of faith has become more acceptable in some quarters.”

Earlier this month, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, announced plans to establish a religious discrimination act.

The act would make it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the basis of their religious belief, in the same way that race, sex and sexuality are protected attributes in federal discrimination law.

However, the government stopped short of agreeing to the Catholics’ demand for a religious freedom act, which would create a positive right for religious institutions to discriminate in employment where such conduct is consistent with their “doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings”.

The archbishop warned against people who want Jesus “put away with our Christmas decorations, with no claim on the year ahead”.

“A hard-edged secularism would exclude faith, and the faithful, from public life. Root out Judeo-Christian heritage from law and culture, and confine faith to an ever-narrowing field of private life,” he said.

“We’ve witnessed moves to make the celebration of the sacrament of confession illegal, to defund church schools, to charge an archbishop with discrimination for teaching about marriage, and to deny faith-based institutions the right to choose what kind of community they will be.

“The Christmas message of hope and healing is religious freedom writ large, not for exclusion or power, but for love and service.”

Catholic leaders have refused to adopt a recommendation by the child abuse royal commission to break the seal of confession to reveal child sexual abuse, even if priests face the prospect of criminal charges.

After the recommendations of the Ruddock religious freedom review leaked, Morrison promised to remove exemptions that allow religious schools to expel LGBT students.

Labor rejected a Coalition plan to insert a new clause to legalise both indirect and direct discrimination against students based on gender and sexuality through a schools’ “teaching activities”. The breakdown in bipartisanship meant the changes were not made in 2018.

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