THE Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Walton Empey, has said the witness of the Church of Ireland itself had been severely damaged by the sectarian actions at Drumcree.
"Do we really see the risen Christ screaming abuse at others? Do we see Him demanding his rights without regard to the rights to others? Do we see Him in the rejection of reasonable assurances asked by the primate [Dr Robin Eames] from those attending public worship at Drumcee?"
Drumcree was, he said, a microcosm of the sectarian divide in the North.
He asked whether that evil spirit had not been there for a long time and "if so, were the churches content to allow themselves to be imprisoned by tribal loyalties?"
More than arms need decommissioning in the North, he said. "There must be a much larger and even more difficult process, the decommissioning of old attitudes, prejudice, hatred, resentment, and suspicion."
All was not well with the institutional churches, he said in his Easter address at the Festival Sung Eucharist in Christ Church Cathedral yesterday.
He said: "Many people fail to see in our witness any real evidence of our belief in the risen Christ. We are still capable of squabbling over ridiculous things, making us seem irrelevant to many in our society." He took as an example the issue of inter-communion. "In an age when institutional religion, at least in the West, is suffering serious decline, what do those on the periphery make of the situation where Christians of one denomination are not allowed to share in the Eucharist of another?
"Has any one church the total understanding of the mystery of the Eucharist? Must we really spend time, and energy, disagreeing about such mysteries when there is so much else to be done together in holding up the risen Christ to an increasingly unbelieving society?"
Dr Empey also said it would seem an increasing number of people in the Republic "no longer need God". The Celtic Tiger fulfils most of their needs. It was very difficult to see the risen Christ "in the corruption revealed in the current tribunals, where greed and graft are evident in the body politic and in business".
The Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, the Right Rev Dr James Mehaffey, at St Columb's Cathedral in Derry, said yesterday the reading from St John's gospel described the reaction of some of the disciples to the empty tomb and the folded grave clothes that began to convince them of the reality of the resurrection.
He said as a community they could so easily be wrapped in the grave clothes of the past. Instead of history being something they could all share, it could so easily become like swathes of binding grave clothes.
