THE Irish Inter Church Meeting Committee should consider drafting a "confession" to be accepted at the highest level by all main churches on this island, the former Bishop of Connor, the Right Rev Samuel Poyntz, said yesterday in a call for reconciliation and Christian unity.
He said the draft may be difficult to draw up, but if the right words were found the statement could prove to be historically significant. Another way forward might be through the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, similar to that operating in South Africa. He said the magnitude of the wounds and wrongs required more than words for the reality of forgiveness and reconciliation to be realised. Acts of reparation and restitution needed to take place.
"The churches - even divided as we are - can become communities of forgiveness, modelling the honesty of facing the truth of the past by making public confession where there has been a wrong done.
"When the Archbishop of Canterbury last visited Dublin, he asked the forgiveness of the Irish people for the evils done by his people in this land over the centuries. Cardinal Daly, in a similar vein, preaching during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity two years ago in Canterbury Cathedral, asked the people of Britain to forgive the people of Ireland for the evils they had perpetrated in the past.
"Archbishop Eames, last year, in an address commemorating the Irish Famine, and while acknowledging that some 40 members of the Church of Ireland clerical families had sacrificed their lives in tending victims, said: `We seek the forgiveness of God for the failure to meet the disaster in the ways which would have reduced unbelievable suffering - we seek the forgiveness of each other for the past.'"
Bishop Poyntz was speaking at the Week of Christian Unity in Our Lady Queen of Peace Catholic Church, Bray, Co Wicklow.
He said there was much in their past histories of which they should be ashamed, events which had left a legacy of hurt, stress and bitterness. To name but one among many of the Church of Ireland side - we never raised a voice against the Penal Laws which had such a savage effect on Roman Catholics and Presbyterians. On the Roman Catholic side, mention might be made of the way the Church of Ireland membership had been decimated through the rigorous imposition of the 1908 Ne Temere decree until more recent legislation, and the legacy lingers on. Scratch the surface and we find we all have hurts."
The churches, he suggested, could give the lead on three levels - at the international level, where there had been many remarkable achievements during the second half of the 20th century; at national level, where they could point to both success and failures in our own land; and locally, where the scene varied so much, often depending on personal relationships between bishops and other church leaders, not to mention personal relationships between local clergy.
Politically, the way ahead could only be found through inclusive dialogue, and this could only be accomplished in an atmosphere of peace and trust, he said. "If there are differing communities with differing perceptions and differing aspirations, as well as differing stories, then dialogue will provide a way in which differences are transcended rather than dissolved.
"The end of dialogue is to become cognitively bilingual. I am not pleading for discussion or listening, but for dialogue. Through dialogue, one enters into the world of the other person, seeing one's own world through their eyes, integrating their story into our story. Dialogue involves a long haul."
