The Church of Ireland Bishop of Meath and Kildare said last night the church had to acknowledge that Drumcree was seen "as an issue of racism in which we as a church are colluding".
The Most Rev Dr Richard Clarke said Ireland was revealing itself as one of the most racist countries in Europe.
He referred to the justifications for segregated worship offered by the Reformed Church in South Africa and suggested other Christians "see us, the Church of Ireland, today in a direct parallel." Dr Clarke was speaking in a sermon last night at a pre-Synod service of evensong in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.
He referred to the chorus in T.S. Eliot's drama Murder In The Cathedral and their acknowledgment that they were made up of people who feared the injustice of men less than they feared the justice of God.
"Over the next three days, will we too display ourselves as a church which has lost all sense of the Gospel imperative to take seriously the sometimes confrontational and even divisive implications of the love of God as shown to the world hanging on a cross rather than sitting on a fence?"
He accused the church of "a massive self-absorption that prevents us from looking beyond ourselves, and outwards to a world beyond that we are absentmindedly torturing."
Dr Clarke said the church had imprisoned itself. "Can any of us doubt that whenever any church has become so identified with any particular culture or ideology the maintenance of its numerical strength - or even its continuing survival - is dependent on its espousal of that identity . . .?"
He told the congregation this was an Ireland which was revealing itself as one of the most racist countries in Europe. It was a place where the childhood mortality rate among Travellers was three times that of settled people.
"Yet in the Church of Ireland we seem to have isolated ourselves into a cultural cocoon of comfort and complacency which has difficulty at times even vaguely connecting with the reality of life under our noses," he said.
He referred to "the sickening reality of world debt" as a new slavery. For every £15 billion given as aid, wealthier countries were paid back more than £150 billion. He said: "It all makes the loan shark in the high-rise flat look benevolent."
