"The Catholic Church is no longer the primary, secondary or even tertiary means by which most younger people learn about the world or form their identities and cultural views. Consequently, for the Church to try to compete with the secular world in promoting modern music, climate change awareness, fair trade or gender equality is merely playing someone else’s tune badly. If today’s young Catholics want to know about climate change they inform themselves by going directly to the sources, not by listening to what Father says about it in his homily. By branching out into areas that are not its province religion soon loses its footing and ends up appearing ill-informed, struggling to catch up with the very secular society it is meant to be guiding – particularly if it falls in with the latest fad only for that fad to disappear or be exposed as misconceived …
The Church must turn back to prayer and place God, and not itself, at the centre of this prayer. At the same time it should re-emphasise that suffering and pain are not best papered over with folksy communal singing and hand-shaking any more than they are by narcotics or recreational sex."
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