Important in there were two or three things. The Catholic schools retained their rights through the governing body that their sex and relationships education is delivered according to Catholic ethos and teaching. Second, that whatever was put in place would be broad and general, not detailed and specific in terms of how it would cover things from relationships to more explicit matters of sexual behaviour and sexual ethics. The third thing that people have forgotten is that in this review the government has accepted that matters of sex need an ethical context, the context of relationships. This was actually a reversal of an earlier position that said: "Give them the facts, enough." They realised that that does not help any youngster and it does not help society. So, yes, it's an area in which we have to be very vigilant. Every school should look carefully at what's being done. It should work with parents because they remain the first educators. When it comes to the right of withdrawal, we were keen to defend it even though we wouldn't want parents to do it because we would want them to be working with schools as primary educators, to talk about what is being done in the classroom. This right currently ends at the end of the 15th year because of the Gillick judgment from the House of Lords a few years ago. Now it's come back that the courts have already decided that youngsters by the age of 16 have got areas of discretion and it would be impossible then to superimpose an absolute parental right over that age. But I don't think that any of us are particularly undermined by that because parents have to deal with their 15- or 16-year-olds in that way, they can't rely on the law for that. Those things are not too bad. There is esteem in the government for the quality of the education that is given. 

Another important area is that of social cohesion. This started out as a criticism but it has developed into a positive. We were able to demonstrate early on that Catholic schools have the kind of links with partner and neighbouring schools and outreach to people in need in the area and have the kind of principled approach to citizenship that is so valuable to our society. We are therefore a contributor to social cohesion, not a negator of it. What do we mean by cohesion? We don't just mean a veneer of tolerance where everybody puts up with everybody else. We need something much deeper than that. The tolerance notion comes from the classic or extreme liberal view of society, which is that its role is to keep potential enemies at peace, so that fundamentally it is individuality which rules our lives and it is society's role to soften or control it. 

This is opposite to the Catholic position, which believes that we are fundamentally people of community. We come into life in a family, we grow through the relations and the obligations that we have towards one another. It is on that basis that you best prepare somebody to play their part in society. If we want creative citizenship as a society then we have to make space for peoples' religious motivations to form that sense of community because that's where their best motives come from. Pope Benedict got it right: the best way of encouraging people to work together is to work together over shared obligations rather than to work for individuals' rights. 

The biggest tensions at the moment [between Church and state] are around the Equalities Act, which seems to have almost taken the view that the public expression of religious faith is quite low down on the hierarchy of rights that are to be defended. That's a real cause for concern. It's a very reduced, privatised notion of the consequences of religious faith. It appears in all sorts of ways. We're concerned about the public duties that could be put on schools or small care homes which would appear almost to be an extreme case to make it very difficult for a public body to act with integrity. What if people say it's unreasonable to have a crucifix in a Catholic care-home because it offends someone? So you get those echoes from the European judgment in Italy. Where is the balance between individual freedom and a corporate identity which is deeply rooted and carries with it goods which society needs? Some of those balances are not right. Increasingly in our society there is a sense that we need some stronger shared foundations. 

Pope John Paul II often said that democracy of itself did not create its values and did create its own foundations. Democracy is the best way of managing political power, but it needs to be based on something. It shows the need within a democracy for trust. The democratic process actually requires it, but it does not create it. So where does it come from? It's the family, the neighbourhood, the charities, the educational system. These are things which nurture values such as trust. These are well nurtured in religious faiths and they all need to play their part, not explicitly in the political forum-we're not looking for theocracies or direct influence of religions in the policy process-but society as a whole. This society is not secular. It is full of people with religious sentiment. That needs to be brought to the benefit of all and not pushed away.