CARDINAL George Pell, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, is not a happy bunny.

Addressing an audience at Oxford University during a recent visit to the UK, the barmy cleric attacked a global campaign of “bullying and intimidation” by secular groups.

Some secularists, he said in this report, wanted a one-way street, and sought to drive Christianity not only from the public square but from providing education, health care and welfare to the wider community.

Modern liberalism has strong totalitarian tendencies.

Cardinal Pell said a Californian referendumÂ – Proposition 8 – that rejected same-sex marriage had been a focus for demonstrations, violence, vandalism and intimidation of Christians.

He said “this prolonged campaign of payback and bullying” would have received much more attention if same-sex marriage supporters had been the victims.

He added that it was strange how some of the most permissive groups easily became repressive despite their rhetoric about diversity and tolerance.

Opposition to same-sex marriage is a form of homophobia and therefore bad, but Christianophobic blacklisting and intimidation is passed over in silence.

Cardinal Pell said discrimination laws had been used to redefine marriage and the family. Children could now have three, four or five parents, relegating the idea of a child being brought up by his natural mother and father to nothing more than a majority preference.

He also said last year’s Victorian law decriminalising abortion made a mockery of conscientious objection, which had been attacked as merely a way for doctors and nurses to impose their morality on their patients.

Cardinal Pell said Christians urgently needed to deepen public understanding about religious freedom.

But Pell is quite happy to have Islam subjected to close scrutiny and criticism.

The West, he lamented, had become scared to criticise Islam and accepts death threats by Muslim extremists as normal. Laws intended to promote tolerance were being used to stifle debate, which was: