Vatican City - Pope Benedict XVI on Friday said the Catholic Church must counter ideologies that seek to relegate religion to the "private sphere," as well as the media's "systematic attacks" on matrimony and the family. Addressing visiting bishops from Slovakia, Benedict said the East European nation risked seeing its Catholic traditions eroded by "consumerism, hedonism, secularism and relativism."
Benedict noted that secularisation was threatening such traditions in both Slovakia and Poland, two of the Eastern European countries where they are richest.
"Slovakia and Poland," the pope said, "are currently exposed to the risk of seeing this heritage, which the communist regime had been unable to destroy, heavily undermined by the typical agitations of Western societies."
The 80-year-old German pope also partly blamed Slovakia's dwindling birthrate on the "systematic attack" carried out against the family and matrimony by "a certain culture and mass media."