Sir, - The group calling themselves "The Real Victims", who are organising the Long March to Drumcree, concentrate on the sufferings of the Protestant community. Do they not know that, because of the deeply embedded sectarianism that has plagued this land for generations, Catholics as well as Protestants have been brutally and relentlessly victimised?
Such one-sidedness is the enduring affliction of Northern Ireland. Sectarian bigotry makes us deaf to the voice of reason, oblivious to the consequences of our actions and coldly unresponsive to the sufferings of our fellow human beings. There has developed in this society a myopia of the heart which causes us to stumble around in self-absorption, perpetuating our withdrawal from one another.
There exists an undeniable blindness whereby we will not acknowledge that there are "real victims" among all sections of our people. We are all human beings. All of us have already suffered long enough. For that very reason, it is particularly depressing to hear ministers of religion, and others purporting to be professing Christians, promoting martyr complexes and using language that further divides our community.
We are called by God to bind up the broken hearts of all who have suffered. When are we ever going to cease from fruitless recriminations and pointless, outdated disputes? We urgently need to break the vicious cycle of manic hatred that menaces everyone at this time of year with the dread of what new horrors are waiting to be unleashed during the summer holidays.
This can only begin by all of us, Catholic and Protestant, asking forgiveness of one another for the accumulation of hurt, injustice and anguish caused by our fratricidal contempt; and by the ruthless uprooting from our own hearts of every last vestige of sectarian attitudes and prejudices. - Yours, etc., Fr Patrick McCafferty,
Sacred Heart Presbytery, Belfast 14.