The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, has said "pluralist does not mean secular" where society is concerned.
Delivering the RTÉ Michael Littleton Lecture 2004, in Dublin last night, he said "a pluralist society will not request people to leave their religious values at home or on the street corner before they enter into the debates of the public square.
"Religious expression has its place in such a pluralist public square, just as any other expression."
He added: "There is no way in which the Christian believer can or should impose his specifically religious beliefs on any other in society. But it would also be unacceptable should valid insights which spring from religious concepts and language be excluded from the public square just because they are religious in origin."
He noted how the Second Vatican Council was "already very much at home with the concept of a pluralist society. But it saw the Church not as an outside observer but much more as a true player in the construction of the underlying values of pluralism".
Christians, he said, had an obligation to be present in the world in which they live.
Those who did not share religious faith could rightly be asked to recognise that the life of the man, Jesus, "who was fully divine but also fully human, can offer insights into the truth about humanity."
Likewise the religious belief that all human beings were created in the image and likeness of God could open a path in which the truths revealed by Jesus can resonate in all people of good will.
The believer, for his or her part, "must be open to truth whatever its source and whoever brings it to the fore. God is active in the Church, but also in the world.
"The believer will find insights into the truth in the most unexpected quarters and must have the honesty to admit that."
He noted the "strange dichotomy in which modern society welcomes the contribution of religious insights when they are popular, for example on questions of social justice, and rejects even the right to speak on other areas, such as on sexual or conjugal morality, not observing that the positions of the Church on justice or on sexual ethics might be founded on the same vision of the dignity of the human person."
