Two Catholic Church documents have "sapped" the morale of Protestants, according to the Church of Ireland Bishop of Clogher, the Right Rev Michael Jackson.
He was speaking yesterday on "ecumenical possibilities in Ireland today" at the international assembly of representatives of English-speaking priests conferences in Dublin.
Bishop Jackson was referring to the 1998 One Bread One Body document published by the Catholic bishops of these islands. It banned Catholics from taking Communion in Reformed churches and underlined a refusal to allow non-Roman Catholics receive Communion at Mass, except in rare circumstances.
The second document, Dominus Iesus, was published by the Vatican in 2000. It described Reformed churches as "not churches in the proper sense". They "had not preserved the valid Episcopate and the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery", it said.
Bishop Jackson continued that "it is probably quite hard for a Roman Catholic person at ease with his or her tradition to understand this, but it seems to me that both of these documents, irrational though it may seem, dredge up the worst memories of Ne Temere as it applied in Ireland as a blunt ecumenical instrument." (The 1907 Ne Temere decree instructed that all children of a mixed marriage must be brought up Catholic.)
There was a problem "when internal ecclesiastical discipline is presented, received and read in an ecumenical framework as external criticism and negativity towards another church which itself has contributed positively and, in its own terms dangerously, to the argument for a future consideration of headship of a united Western Church in the bishop of Rome as something gradual and by consensus through the interim conclusions of ARCIC (Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission)."
The two documents "put intense strain, of the 'I'm not sure what they make of us' variety on ecumenical relations," he said. He felt that "one of the problems from a Roman Catholic perspective may well be that we Anglicans do not look to Rome for our self-definition. Anglicanism has never claimed to be the whole church but claims to be part of the whole church as that church will come into being in the age to come," he said.
On future directions for ecumenism in Ireland he believed there would continue to be institutional difficulties at clerical level, "becoming more complicated as neo-conservatism sweeps in on the churches". But he saw "no good reason why this should impede ecumenical convergence of the laity" in less contentious areas. There could be "a local convergence of clergy and lay people" so that when community issues arose they might respond through an agreed spokesman. Local was "vital", but "without the wider picture of aspiration to visible unity the local will become occasional and perish." Sectarianism imbued "all denominations in Ireland with an Achilles heel of inertia". It was "the silent killer in the ecumenical equation".