Don’t allow ‘aggressive secularists’ to reduce religious believers to ‘second class citizenship’, the director of The Iona Institute, David Quinn, told almost 10,000 people at Knock on Friday.

 Mr Quinn criticised politicians who warned the bishops that they should not “intrude” on “State matters”, or who told other politicians that they shouldn’t let religion “cloud” their judgement.

 He was speaking at two Masses at the Marian Shrine on Friday as the annual novena continued. The Masses attracted congregations of almost 5,000 people each.

 Mr Quinn said: “Religious believers have as much right as anyone else to have their say about public matters and to have an opinion about the law of the land. The attempt by aggressive secularists to deprive us of this right is really a bid to reduce us to second class citizenship, and we must strongly resist this”.

 He also referred to the newly passed Civil Partnership Act and said that the refusal by the main political parties to include a conscience clause in the law stemmed from a growing feeling among politicians that belief in traditional marriage is a form of prejudice.

 He said: “Belief in traditional marriage is nothing of the sort. It is founded on the well established fact that children usually fare best when raised by a married mother and father.”

 Mr Quinn also warned that rising individualism was sapping people’s commitment to religion, to politics and other forms of civil involvement, and even to their own families.

He said the ethic of individualism needed to be countered by the Christian ethic of love and commitment and in this way both Christianity and society would be renewed.