Cardinal George Pell on the dictatorship of relativism

From his September 21, 2005 address to Australia's National Press Club, published in A.D. 2000 magazine,

Examining how relativism in the form of school-based post- modernism proposes to make students into "agents of social change" makes it apparent very quickly that there is another agenda at work underneath it all. Generally accepted understandings of family, sexuality, maleness, femaleness, parenthood, and culture are treated as "dominant discourses" that impose and legitimise injustice and intolerance.

These dominant discourses are then undermined by a disproportionate focus on "texts" which normalise moral and social disorder. Too much time is given to narratives about sad and dysfunctional individuals and shattered families. ...

My generation has had the benefit of learning from the tradition and thus we can critique it. To give youngsters all-critique-and-no-foundation leaves them rudderless. School syllabuses or university courses in which great works of literature and the study of history are dismissed as "elitist" or relevant only to "the dominant ethnic and social group" dismantle the sense of an objective reality in young people, by denying any philosophic foundation for adhering to humanist values.