Irish Sectarianism and Reconciliation
Cooney, John
since the U.S. already can blow the world up ten times over if we are stupid enough to want to do so, would not such an announcement make the world a safer as well as a better place to live in?...
...After comparing CatholicProtestant relations in Northern Ireland with other countries of mixed religions over the past 200 years, Dr...
...Waterford coast to discuss the theme "Sectarianism: Roads to Reconciliation...
...Eric Gallagher, told the participants, declare that "their only political stance is a demand for social justice...
...Speaking on the subject, "A Protestant Looks at the Republic," Mr...
...At this writing we have just received notice of a substantial increase in our printing costs, another major factor, and the same story can be repeated on other crucial items, as in your own business and household budgets...
...But in an era that cries out for moral courage and intellectual leadership, as Mr...
...In short, stick with us, and we will give you a Commonweal bigger and better than ever--and with more time between issues to digest the contents...
...Indeed, when one takes into account that we already publish on a biweekly schedule during the summer, the new rate of publication will involve only a 20 percent reduction in the yearly total number of pages...
...Some support to this view was given by a political scientist from Queen's University, Belfast, Dr...
...But as Professor Gibson also observed, there was more agreement that the Irish Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, have an important role to play in promoting greater understanding between the communities: in a word, reconciliation...
...But instead of showing moral leadership, the United States sent a badly divided delegation, led by a Secretary of Agriculture who insists on mouthing outworn tags of laissez-faire philosophy...
...Commonweal is becoming a biweekly rather than a weekly...
...JOHN COONEY (John Cooney, Commonweal's regular correspondent in Ireland, is on the staff of the Irish Times...
...Noting that the Protestant Churches of Northern Ireland were no longer, if they ever were, the churches of the working people and of young people, Dr...
...James Lennon, a Northerner and head of the Irish Catholic Church's Research and Development Unit, who spoke on "Roads to Reconciliation--a Catholic Contribution...
...To strengthen the up-front section we will be adding more regular reports from around the United States and abroad...
...National feeling, he said, was a more intractable force even than religious antagonism...
...Gallagher maintained that the middle-class and middle-age structure of Protestantism had serious consequences for sectarianism...
...The events of the past five years have reflected badly on the Irish Churches as institutions capable of establishing community harmony...
...This authoritarianism stemmed from the intolerance of the Roman Catholic Church and was in evidence in other spheres of social life (for example, in opposing contraception, in the way the Gaelic language was imposed in schools, in the sectarian nature of education, in general fear of social non-conformity, and in the decline of the Protestant population...
...Gallagher, who is superintendent of the Belfast Central Mission, was speaking on the subject of "Roads to Reconciliation--a Protestant Contribution...
...The price of the paper on which the magazine is printed--a big item in our budget-has more than doubled in the past year...
...He admitted that the Protestant Churches shared in the guilt for Irish sectarianism but emphasized that they only shared in that guilt and did not have a monopoly of it...
...This makes it easier for the latter to drop out-and to be isolated...
...and every issue will contain a Washington report by the widely admired Sisyphus...
...and we do not think just that people drink too much...
...If it did nothing else, the Dungarvan Conference helped to promote public discussion about the nature of sectarianism and on ways to bring about reconciliation...
...We see it as a place from which too many people emerge with an antisocial Mafia-type attitude...
...The week-long conference was attended by 170 participants from both the North and South of Ireland...
...Smyth said that if the Catholic Church moved in the direction of allowing greater individual freedom, encouraging lay participation, allowing a married clergy and accepting a more scriptural approach, then the Republic could "be a very different and much more attractive place in a generation or two, less narrowly sectarian, more tolerant, more prosperous, more happily at ease with itself, a nicer country to live next door to...
...He explained: "Street leadership is frequently in the hands of anti-ecumenical and anti-ecclesiastical personnel...
...During the just finished 50th Anniversary Year, the generosity of our readers has got us through such fiscal crises, but we cannot appeal for this additional support every year...
...The Protestant Churches need, not only because of the biblical command to preach the Gospel, to reach young people and the workers...
...Like most Americans, we hoped for the best when Mr...
...THE EDITORS Commonweal: 229...
...Whyte, who is the author of Church and State in Modern Ireland, concluded that the division in the North is not primarily sectarian at all, but one of national identity...
...The Dungarvan conference has shown that there is more willingness for change in the Irisk ~hurches than is often acknowledged by Irish Church leaders...
...As Professor Norman Gibson of the New University of Ulster noted in the closing address to the conference, there was some difference in emphasis on the importance or relevance of sectarianism to the conflict--or at least as a cause of the conflict...
...We must, therefore, cut costs substantially, and the only way we have been able to devise is to join the ranks of such magazines as the National Review, Christianity & Crisis, the New Leader, the Saturday Review~World and other well-known biweeklies...
...Looking to the future, Mr...
...Inflation--the oil crisis--the world food crisis: three examples but crucial ones and all badly managed...
...In effect Father Lennon presented what might be described as the official Northern Catholic view--which is to acknowledge that the Northern troubles have religious overtones, but that fundamentally the conflict has nothing to do with religion...
...About all Mr...
...Indeed, it has been a matter of speculation that it was only the chance death of certain Irish gang chiefs in Chicago in the early 1920s which caused what we now call the Mafia to be an Italian rather than an Irish phenomenon...
...However, there was little illusion that such a system would be easy to achieve and that it would solve community problems over-night...
...Now, 100 disappointing days later, we cannot conceal our disappointment...
...Father Lennon argued that the first step to reconciliation must be the recognition that the real and primary cause of the eonllict is political and social, that the second step must be the positive and unqualified rejection of violence from whatever source, and the third is for each community to isolate and reject the men of violence who claim to represent them...
...Protestant church structures are too often geared to the participation of the affluent and retired than of the young and the wage-earner...
...Dr...
...It was to rectify this oversight that the 22nd Social Study Conference met recently in Dungarvan on the Co...
...Much of the time there will even be a dab of color on the cover just to brighten things up, and there will be other innovations...
...He added: "Many of us Ulster Protestants regard the Irish Republic as a very sick society...
...Smyth also maintained that this authoritarian uniformity had produced severe cases of psychological inadequacy and personality disorders...
...Martin Smyth, a Belfast-based Presbyterian minister who is also the Imperial Grand Master of the Orange Order...
...This is important, for it is clear that the ecumenical movement in Ireland faces the challenge of not just promoting theological understanding between church members but must also, as a former President of the Methodist Conference in Ireland, the Rev...
...The new biweekly will be a bigger, improved Commonweal...
...Dr...
...John Whyte...
...Discussions avoided the trap of being over-intellectual by the presence of a number of Northern working-class Catholics and Protestants...
...A major evidence of this, he continued, was "the extent to which citizens of the Republic seek to drown their sorrows in alcohol...
...Ford seems sure of is that he likes to travel and that he is going to run again...
...However, given the complexity of the Northern Irish situation, it is not surprising that the conference did not reach agreement on the extent to which sectarianism is at the heart of the present conflict...
...The economy of less frequent publication will allow us to add extra pages to make a fatter issue...
...And now the good news...
...These people are too often easy prey for marauding bigots and propagators of sectarianism...
...Smyth said that authoritarian uniformity dominated southern Irish society...
...Gallagher's conference "opposite number" was the Rev...
...To Our Readers First the bad news...
...This country may in the end cooperate in meeting the world food crisis, but the Administration policy of putting our worst foot forward succeeded only in further tarnishing an already soiled national image...
...Along with our regular columns by Michael Novak, Abigail McCarthy, Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr., and Saul Maloff, we will have more frequent contributions from Michael Murray, Mark Taylor and Frank Getlein...
...Kissinger suggested, the Ford Administration is proving itself uninspired, flabby and weak-kneed...
...This change in frequency of publication will take place immediately, which means, therefore, that there will be no issue of the magazine dated December 13 and that the issue to be dated December 20 will be the first of the biweekly Commonweal...
...Ford took over the Presidency...
...The back of the magazine will be expanded, with more articles on cultural and literary affairs and more book reviews...
...o e o o o o o e o o o e o o I r i s h Sectarianism And R e c o n c i l i a t i o n Despite the many comments that have been made in the past few years about the sectarian nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland and despite the fact that talk of reconciliation in the North has become as axiomatic as in post-Nixon America, little detailed attention has been given to the Irish siamese twins: sectarianism and reconciliation...
...Our subscriptions and advertising are holding up well, but inflation is squeezing us hard...
...If ProtestantCatholic conflicts have proved easier to assuage in 6 December 1974:2~8 other countries, it may be because in no other country (other than Northern Ireland) are they so closely overlaid by conflicts of nationality...
...It was generally agreed that one of the ways to bring about better understanding was an integrated education system...
...The contrast between life in the Republic and life in Northern Ireland was stressed by the speaker who attracted the largest audience, the Rev...
...If there is sectarianism, it is of political nature...
Vol. 101 • December 1974 • No. 9
