Sir, - It is timely that these past few years we have seen world events pass before our very eyes through the media. The television, in particular, has brought the terrible impact of civil war in Bosnia, and now Albania, right into our homes. It has also been clear that in both those tormented and tragic countries, during their former communist-ruled days, the Christian Churches had been suppressed. The people lived in a lifestyle imposed by atheistic dictatorships, within which Christian-based morality played no real part.
Once these dictatorships collapsed, leaving the mass of the people without proper leadership or rules to live by, everything else collapsed. The tiny remnants of Christianity were unable to help the people from sliding into total anarchy. Dictatorships impose rules. Democracies rule through the freely given consent of the people (neither police or army can function unless the majority of the population back them up).
There are forces at work within Ireland whose objectives are to destabilise this democracy, so that people are so confused they actually withdraw their consent to be governed. This could lead us into full-scale civil disturbances, which could well gravitate into full-scale civil war. We had just a tiny taste of this chaos last summer (1996). We might properly, at this time, remind ourselves of the need to find solutions to what seem to be intractible problems, before the "marching season produces widespread violence.
I was once-told to my face that only civil war would solve Northern Ireland's future (by a highly placed and leading member of one of the Orders). I reminded him of exactly what this would mean to his home, family and business. It was like talking to a brick wall such were the ingrained hatreds in that man's soul. He had lost his ability to reason.
Few people I now meet wish to see this island escalate out of democratic control. By and large, they are appalled at the sectarian bigotries which are so dangerous, especially to young minds and which could lead only into the abyss.
All of us - the Christian Churches, the community groups, the marching Orders of both sides the forces of law and order the paramilitaries, the media, and we the people - need to grasp this nettle before it is too late. We must pull back from the brink of self-destruction.
I believe that we will do this. I am sure that the depth of Christian commonsense which lies within the majority of the people of our land will, with the help of their Churches, produce the solutions we need to find a lasting peace. May the risen Jesus Christ show us all the way out of our ancient quarrels this Easter, 1997. Not a rising into war, but a rising into peace. - Yours, etc.,
Marguerite Crescent,
Newcastle, Co. Down.