Long live Irish Christianity!
It's important to keep a sense of perspective this weekend. The news has been dominated by ecclesiastical dignitaries declaiming who cannot be granted access to the grace of God. The God being talked about is the God who deliberately ends his book by addressing humankind in the person of his Holy Spirit with the words, "Come! And let him who hears say `Come!' Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life." (Book of Revelation 22:17).
Even those who seem to be generous in this stand-off emit an aura of negativity. The baptised may come, they concede. So members of the Salvation Army and Quakers, on holiday here perhaps, could well sense they are being told they are not worthy to join with Irish Christians to remember the first Good Friday and their Saviour's dying love.
General William Booth dispensed with baptism and Holy Communion in his army because he felt the disputes they caused distracted Christians' minds and hearts from the primary business of proclaiming the Gospel!
Pat Kenny tried to get to the bottom of it all on radio with two minor players on the ecclesiastical circuit who mostly talked past each other, one waggling frenziedly on the fairway endeavouring to explain transubstantiation in three minutes while the other made a beeline for the bunker, digging himself deep into the sand with the Eastern Orthodox Church. The car radio hardly concealed the exasperated sigh - or was it a snort? - of intelligent, wanting-to-believe layman Kenny who had asked a straight question and ended up with confusion worse compounded. The heartache is that this public discussion about access to God's grace is going on in a country where vast numbers of people no longer care anyway. While the secularisation of Ireland seeps relentlessly through every home in every parish, the religious institutions, like dinosaurs, continue to pirouette around each other, trading courtly indignation. It is not primarily our heartache, of course. It is the heart of God that aches and breaks in the first instance, and not for the first time. The prophecy of Hosea is a keening lament over the failure of the institutional church of Old Testament days to reflect the character of God's grace. God's accusation cut through the liturgies and paraphernalia of their religion: "My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge." It was to the religious institutions that Hosea delivered the fearful divine verdict: "They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind."
Yes, let Christians think themselves clear on their internal arrangements and disputes, but let them be acutely aware that a watching world watches only to shrug and in the end turn away in boredom. But primarily, let Christians know that God weeps at it all, yet he will have the final word and his Gospel will reach the unreached because he will execute his policy by other means, to borrow from Clausewitz.
Christian Ireland is in terminal decline and it will die at the hands of its churchmen. In its place will emerge full-blown secularist Ireland where the government proudly believes in all gods and therefore in none. It can only be a matter of time before there is reverse discrimination in this nation against Christians in public life, as is already happening 60 miles from these shores. Church bodies which receive public funds cannot advertise for Christian staff, couples applying for adoption are carefully vetted in case they turn out to be born-again Christians, a political party whose name includes the word "Christian" will automatically be denied airtime. In place of what we're losing, however, long live Irish Christianity! There is no need for despair, or even gloom. In America the churches are growing apace without state recognition and the faith has flourished where public schools are forbidden to say the Lord's Prayer and where children worship only the flag. We now serve God in the same kind of world as St Paul preached in and Jesus suffered in. That's why perspective is so important this weekend. Maybe we'll decide Christian Ireland has been more trouble than it was worth.
G.F.