Bishop sees `post-denominational' era

The Bishop of Cork commented yesterday on the controversy surrounding the invitation to have Masses said at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

The Right Rev Paul Colton, Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, said that "the present, rather too public way of conducting ecumenical dialogue" between the Dean of St Patrick's, the Very Rev Robert MacCarthy, and Archbishop Desmond Connell would appear "quaint and remote" in the coming post-denominational era.

He also said that strict denominational segregation of children in schools would become increasingly meaningless.

Speaking at a service to mark the beginning of the third millennium at St Fin Barre's cathedral in Cork yesterday, he said Dr Connell was "simply adhering to a well-established maxim of ecumenical etiquette that `it would be wrong to accept an invitation to do something in a church of another Christian tradition, that in good conscience, you cannot reciprocate in your own'. "

Bishop Colton felt what was most important was that Dean MacCarthy was "articulating prophetically what is the inevitable way forward for the churches: the way of shared buildings and resources, interchangeable ministries, mutual respect and enrichment, and reconciled diversity."

In many way what was being proposed was "old hat", he said. Elsewhere in the Christian world and even in some facets of church work in Ireland such sharing was commonplace. "The time is surely right in Ireland for the churches to break down old patterns of division, to build up and to embrace one another," he said.

Looking to the future, Bishop Colton said it would be a time when churches "will face the actuality of being a collective minority together . . . we will be unavoidably thrown into co-operation and a common existence with one another. Institutionalised division should no longer hamper our witness."

One of the consequences in that post-denominational future "will be that any pattern of educating children in a narrow denominational way will, I'm sure, appear increasingly anachronistic," he said.

"Strictly segregated models of education will be increasingly meaningless in a Christian culture that is post-denominational. This is an area that I believe the churches need to work together on and then, to use the recent political analogy, to have the courage to jump together."

He said he knew "this language will be uncomfortable for some" but he believed it was right "to anticipate and shape the inevitable."

In his homily at a Mass to mark World Peace Day in Dublin's Pro-Cathedral on New Year's Day, Mgr Alex Stenson said that one of the difficulties in speaking about peace was that the vocabulary "has been and still is purloined by some who are `armed to the teeth'. "From our own sad experience of the Troubles in the North, we know how difficult it is, if not impossible, to embrace as brothers while holding offensive weapons."

Addressing our current prosperity, he asked whether the time had come "to rethink the nature and purpose of our economy. What is prosperity if it excludes solidarity and caring for the less well-off?"

Three out of every 12 people in the world were living in subhuman conditions, he said. "As brothers and sisters in the one human family, can we allow such to continue?" he asked.