The Rt Rev Michael Jackson, Bishop of Clogher addressed the role of Churches in dealing effectively with issues of the past in Northern Ireland in a keynote speech at a conference run by the Irish School of Ecumenics in Omagh earlier this week.
Entitled, Acknowledging the past: remembering together in church and society - A role for the churches in Northern Ireland today and tomorrow, the Bishop said that the engagement of Churches must be actively directed towards positive inter-denominational dialogue.
He also said that Churches had to offer public expressions of mature, courageous leadership, and to model the fundamental principles of equality, respect and inclusion for every member of society.
The address can be read in full here:
Introduction
I wish to suggest three areas in which the churches, individually and together, need to take an active role in making a fresh contribution to the evolving life of Northern Ireland for the future.
You might understandably say: But is this not the sort of hand-wringing exercise in which the churches themselves already indulge all too often? In many ways, the churches are every bit as ‘lost’ as is anyone else in the new Ireland of today. Deliberately I use the plural.
In Northern Ireland society, we are going through a painful process of political maturing after years of brutal violence, years of uneasy truce, and now years where active community-building and peacefulness lie before us.
In the Republic of Ireland, there have emerged deep questions about the importance of readily recognizable values in a society whose expectations are set instinctively by the spread-sheet of economic achievement and expansion.
There are gaping holes in the moral substructure of both societies. These all too often are glossed over because a type of future different from the past is much more exciting and seems, from our irreversibly consumerized perspective, to make fewer demands of us as individual moral agents.
Call it secularism if you like! Call it mammon if you prefer! It is part of the air we breathe and the churches are powerless to reverse the trend. They are not, however, voiceless to speak into the situation critically and compassionately.
Three aspects of the future role of the Churches
(1) I myself have often said that Northern Ireland suffers just as much from religious indigestion as it does from religious hunger. A result of this is that the conventional language and ideas of religion are not ‘new news’ to anyone, nor indeed are the caricatures of the convictions and practices of people who try to live a religious way of life.
The first suggestion which I have as a role for the churches is that they or we, if we are part of them, be honest about the chain reaction, and often the causal link, between denominational conviction and rank sectarianism. One of the big, bad scary words in today’s society is: pluralism.
But if religions embed themselves in exclusivity as a primary definition of who they are and what they do, then their shelf-life is limited when people generally are no longer looking instinctively to religion or to religious practice to enhance their understanding of their own self-respect.
One of the basics of Christianity is that, in a primary way, it exists for others and for those outside the church. In technical terms, this is called mission. Too often mission has been understood as little more than recruitment of someone else to a set of religious practices and ideals, the philosophy behind which is already obvious to you yourself.
