John Waters’ column on Friday dealt focused on John Bruton’s speech on Monday, hosted by the Iona Institute and Studies, the Jesuit quarterly review. 

Waters’ central point is this: Religion is not a compartmentalised part of people’s lives. Rather, it is the driving force, the organising principle which makes sense of the whole. 

Furthermore, only religion is able to do this, Waters argues. In opposition, secularists offer no alternative guiding principle. 

As he puts it: “A society without a cultural consciousness of the absolute, such as we are in the process of creating, is like a lawn laid on top of a concrete yard: it may briefly give the impression of health, but eventually, for obvious reasons, it withers away. What is called secularism, therefore, strikes not merely at specific religions, or even religions in general, but at the very capacity of humans to be human.”