Clergyman highlights injustices in society

In Ireland today "the stranger is not being welcomed, the refugee is being turned back, and many of our new immigrants are the victims of pernicious racism . . . prisoners who are being tortured are being transported through Shannon airport", a congregation at a service in Dublin's St Patrick's cathedral was told yesterday.

It was held to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 39.

In a sermon, Rev Patrick Comerford, southern regional co-ordinator of the Church Mission Society Ireland, asked: "Are we speaking out, speaking out now, before our silence becomes complicity in something even worse?"

He said: "Bonhoeffer's story of the church remaining silent when she should have spoken out as the synagogues were burned down in 1938 is a challenge to us today."

Rev Comerford asked: "How often have the different brands of Christianity been called on in recent decades to justify the nation-state as it embarked on disastrous wars of pride, one after another, whether it was the Falklands war, or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or indeed whether it was Catholic Croats or Orthodox Serbs indulging in ethnic cleansing to create nation states with a single religious identity?"

He said Bonhoeffer had talked of the need to face up to the secularisation of society, but the need to speak about God in a secular way was much more pressing now.

"We are so obsessed with maintaining not so much our church structures but our church pomp and sense of self-importance, leaving us unable to reach out to a secular world with a 'religionless Christianity'."