Sir, - Vincent Browne writes dismissively (October 22nd) of Mary McAleese's "bridge-building blather" and "all that outreaching and embracing that she goes on about embarrassingly", and he is only one of many to write or speak in a similarly derisive way. I first worked with Mary McAleese as a member of an interchurch working party on sectarianism, of which she was a cochair, from 1991 to 1993. I learned there that when Mary talks of bridge-building, she is not indulging in cynical electioneering blather; she is expressing a passionate, deeply-held commitment. In that working party setting and in others, her self-critical capacity to examine her own and her community's sectarianism has been consistently and particularly exemplary.
I worked with her most recently for Boundaries and Bonds, a conference on sectarianism sponsored by our Moving Beyond Sectarianism project in Belfast in June. Mary was the formal respondent to a talk by Miroslav Volf, a Croatian Pentecostal theologian. Like all of us at the conference, she was deeply impressed by Dr Volf's analysis of issues of violence, identity, and reconciliation as starkly presented by conflict in the former Yugoslavia. He drew largely from his recent study in political theology, Exclusion and Embrace, and it was the dynamics of exclusion and the response of embrace that he presented so powerfully. Thus, when Mary borrows the language of "embrace", this is not sweet and pious cant. She is employing a hard-edged, sophisticated, analytical category with important political implications. - Yours, etc.,
From Joseph Liechty
Director, Moving Beyond Sectarianism project, Irish School of Ecumenics, Glasnevin, Dublin 11.