The president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, Cardinal Stanyslaw Rylko, said this week, “The time has come to free ourselves from our false hang-ups of inferiority towards the secular world and courageously be ourselves, disciples of Christ.”

During his remarks at the opening of the Council’s plenary assembly, which this year is focused on the theme, “Twenty years after Christifideles laici: memory, development and new challenges and tasks,” the cardinal stated that “our true problem is not being a minority, but rather having voluntarily become marginal, irrelevant, because of our lack of courage, so that we will be left alone, because of our mediocrity.”

According to the L’Osservatore Romano, Cardinal Rylko denounced the “dictatorship of relativism” that Pope Benedict XVI has correctly identified, in which universal truth does not exist.

“The rush to create a ‘new man’ completely detached from the Judeo-Christian tradition, a new ‘world order,’ a new ‘global ethic,’ is gaining ground,” the cardinal said, and thus a “new anti-Christianity” is emerging that makes it politically correct to attack Christians and Catholics in particular. 

“Whoever wishes to live and act according to the Gospel of Christ in the Western liberal democracies must pay a price,” he stated.