Catholic World News News Feature

Cardinal Pell raps educational relativism September 22, 2005

Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Australia denounced liberal educational ideology during a speech at the National Press Club in Canberra.

Cardinal Pell said that said that contemporary educational institutions have led to what Pope Benedict XVI called the "dictatorship of relativism." He attacked the trends in which "great works of literature and the study of history are dismissed as elitist," saying that the practical result of that approach is to "dismantle the sense of objective reality."

If this approach becomes universal, the cardinal warned, the word "conscience" could be stripped of its meaning, and become understood as "personal preference-- a polite term for 'doing it my way.'"

Cardinal Pell pointed out that the attack on objective educational standards has a clear political motivation. The post-modern approach to education, he said, "proposes to make students into agents of social change." The modernist curriculum, he charged, undermines age-old beliefs about "family, sexuality, maleness, femaleness, parenthood, and culture," and to "normalize moral and social disorder."