Cardinal Cahal Daly has said that most people in these islands "must humbly and sadly confess how far we are from having killed in ourselves the hostility of passion, prejudice and partisanship, which is first cousin to the hostilities of guns and bullets".
Writing in the October issue of Bible Alive magazine Dr Daly recalled how, "through these bitter years" so many in Northern Ireland have been saying "the other community began it; it is they who must stop it first. The other side are ruthless; our side are only bravely defending themselves. The people of the other island could never be trusted or respected; we are guiltless - if only we were left alone."
How many in Ireland and Britain have been reproducing every classic guilt-evading prototype given in the Bible? he wondered. Like Adam and Eve, we have each blamed the other, he said.
Like the Pharisee, we have thanked God we are not like the rest of men, "not like the exploiting British, not like the murderous Irish; not like the bigoted Irish Protestants, not like the disloyal and feckless Irish Catholics, not like the reactionary church establishments."
The hostility was not killed, he writes, because we would not recognise it as our concern and kill it, each in his or her own person.
