I begin by quoting from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, page 735:

'Sirius did not hate Kreacher,' said Dumbledore to Harry Potter, 'He regarded him as a servant unworthy of much interest or notice. Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.' Whether you are a Harry Potter fan or not, the above quotation might set you thinking as it did me when I read it, thinking about the relationship there is among the three words which the headmaster outlines to the pupil: indifference, neglect, outright dislike and also how fact might yet speak louder than fiction. Because fiction can and must be an acute and incisive a critic of reality. It can and must challenge the uncomfortable reality where we ourselves look only for comfortable delusion. It set me thinking because of a stalemate and an antagonism in which we find ourselves all too often in the church. Because now we need something quite different. We need confidence in God's future, we need loyalty to one another, we need hope for the world of which we are inextricably and wonderfully part. My anxiety is: if the only achievement which we as a self-consciously Christian community can offer ourselves and others is the relationship of three negatives: indifference, neglect, outright dislike or even the energy which goes into denying them then we haven't got much to offer.

We are in fact simply throwing in our own contribution to what has been called the paralysis of analysis. It is already so much a feature of contemporary life and it seems to anyone of a practical bent such an indulgence and such a frustration. Our generation has unrivalled opportunities of self-fulfilment in the service of others both within and beyond the church. Information and insights once the preserve of an elite are now open to so many of us. The possibility of having your say and making your personal contribution is positively invited at every level of civic and political consultation. We need to make that contribution and we need to want to do so.

In our own diocese we too have taken this route of consultation through the Diocesan Review process. It has, I believe, been a revolution to enable lay people to speak openly and honestly in the absence of their clergy; to enable clergy to speak openly and honestly to one another in their own fraternals and Rural Deaneries; and to enable young people to have their voice independent of clergy and of other older adults. The responses coming through are significant. There is less and less of an appetite - web-site junkies beware! - for ministerial schemes which are separate from the regular parochial ministry of visitation, prayer and Bible reading. There is an acute request that clergy listen as well as talk. There is a keenness for worship which is participatory yet dignified and accords with what is a reasonable expectation by Church of Ireland people of the Church of Ireland ways of doing things. And there is a desire to contribute to the life of the wider communities of which we are part in the societies to which we belong. My hope and prayer would be that as a church and as the people of God we might continue to take steps creatively and in a development of our tradition towards a shared future in which we do not vacillate, take courage in our hands and are not perceived to be holding back while others make the running. My hope is that we will contribute to the making and the sustaining of that future.

In the few modest words I wish to share with you in this Synod I hope to draw together some of the many positive threads which have been part of our church life since last we met as a Diocesan Synod. Much has happened for which we should be ready to thank God and one another and this can and ought to inspire us to continue in a spirit of optimism and shared trust.

First I have great pleasure in welcoming all of you, ladies, gentlemen, friends, colleagues and visitors, for my second time, to the Clogher Diocesan Synod, the one hundred and thirty second occasion of its meeting. For your presence today I thank you all. Some of you are here as a regular part of your work, some are here by virtue of creating time in your own lives to be here and others are representing other Christian churches:

Representing the Methodist Church the Reverend Kenneth Robinson from Enniskillen;

Representing the Presbyterian Church the Reverend Ian Abraham from Aughentaine Presbyterian Church and Mr Wilson McConkey from Monaghan Presbytery.

Dr Gareth Higgins is here to facilitate our engagement with The Hard Gospel in a part of the world which has suffered hard from paramilitary violence and endemic sectarianism, a part of the world which cries from deep within its people for active reconciliation. Mrs Janet Maxwell, Head of Communications in Church of Ireland House, has come again to our Synod. The Revd Brian Parker, a journalist of distinction and standing, joins us from the Church of Ireland Press Office as does Mr Denis Reardon, Chief Officer, from Church of Ireland House. Our own Impartial Reporter staff, so well disposed to us and to our parochial and diocesan activities all year round, are also here. It is surely a delight that Mr Mervyn Dane, former Editor, has been honoured in the year past by Her Majesty the Queen with Membership of the British Empire.

The year past has seen a number of significant changes in the world in which we live. A second Gulf War raised questions for a generation which had no active experience of the knife-edged brutality of war either in its own or its preceding generation. Somehow it seemed to be all over too automatically, too cleanly with a cruel dictator - both in terms of internal oppression and external aggrandizement - halted in his tracks. Yet there have been both a loss of life and humanitarian deprivation on a scale only gradually trickling through to us. There is also deep-seated anxiety about the whole philosophy of the pre-emptive strike now so readily assumed to be the voice of freedom. CAP reform has gone through with the inevitable implications for farming as a way of life and as an agri-business. This continues to have huge repercussions for a farming community and its livelihood in the forthcoming decade. The next stage of European enlargement means that we now carry the mantle of giver, not that of receiver, and we who have for so long been beneficiaries of a European ethos as well as of a European market now have the scope for the enlargement of our understanding of where we stand in tomorrow's Europe - an exciting prospect if ever there was one.

Those of us familiar with the Republic of Ireland or for whom it is our home will already have felt the tangible results of a currency which is the same in the parishes of Drumully, Kiltyclogher or Tydavnet as it is Athens, Hamburg or Palermo. The Euro covers all. In the year past I have had the opportunity to take part in a Theological Consultation with the Baltic-Nordic Lutheran Churches in Latvia as part of a significant and fruitful interchange of ideas which has been going on since 1929 and now has a strong impetus as a result of the Church of Ireland's participation in Porvoo and the enlargement of Europe. I hope to take part in another Consultation in Oslo in early December. Both of these have opened my eyes to aspects of European Protestantism of which we hardly get a glimpse in this country. I hope that at some point in the future we might have an ordained person from the Porvoo Churches with whom we are in communion working in our diocese and might thereby see Porvoo in action. The nature of the Porvoo churches nationally is that they are accustomed to rather intimate, indeed small, communities and are not frightened or embarrassed by small numbers as we, to the detriment of our morale, in the Church of Ireland have become. A critical minority can be both realistic and prophetic and we need to be both.

Politically in the Republic of Ireland provisions for healthcare have gone through a stormy period with interruptions in the comprehensive provision of public health and with plans unveiled in the early summer for a range of new Heath Regions. Healthcare in Northern Ireland also is under reconstruction as does secondary education seem to be. Our regional political self-confidence is severely diminished by the suspension of local regional government. So far we simply have not been able to make it work. We may get another chance before the year is out and, if we do, we need to take it. Wherever any of us may stand on the question of the Good Friday Agreement the implementation of its provisions five years on remains both an inescapable political reality and a very slow process. The hope of us all, I imagine, is that The Assembly will be about its business again very soon. The painful progress of a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland means that those of us within this jurisdiction are having to grapple with thirty and more years of social and political discussion, negotiation, wrangling and resolution which have been put on ice by The Troubles and their devastating effect on our community integration and social cohesion. The reality of devolved government - whether active or suspended - is that it is an attempt seriously to implement locally and to implement by ourselves what for too long we have left to others. We need to seize the moment of opportunity instead of watching others reap the benefits. The future is ours only if we participate in its making and its doing.

Recognizing the complex reality and the pressing insecurities of identity which being a border diocese and being what I have often referred to: frontier people gives us, I nonetheless appeal to all present to take the opportunities to participate, again and again, in the structural and civic life of our country with confidence, charity and conviction which says that the future has to count us in, not out. Policy, practicalities and politics must reflect our active willingness to mould and to sustain our future shared with others. Else our democracy will only pass us by and we become spectators of our history at a critical and vital time of development locally, nationally, internationally. Simply stated: if we're not in, we're out.

Self-understanding together with the recognition that, as Border Protestants, we need to move forward has been greatly facilitated by the professional and sensitive work of Mr Neville Armstrong, a member of our own Board of Social Responsibility. Those of us who had the privilege of attending a specially convened Day Seminar in Newbliss, County Monaghan are all too aware that confidence lies at the heart of development, that contribution lies at the root of participation and that somehow we need to work hard to draw confidence and contribution together into community.

The Census figures for 2002 add further urgency to our commitment to work with and in the County Monaghan part of our diocese. The church of God is not about big parishes, so-called successful parishes as an end in themselves - certainly not. Or as St Paul would have said: God forbid! A recorded drop in Church of Ireland membership over a decade of 13.3% in County Monaghan - the most significant single drop of the 26 Counties - ought to concern all of us. I have already commissioned research leading to in-depth consultation locally in Monaghan between clergy and laity to see what can be done to stem this human haemorrhage and to address this serious situation. We value the contribution made by the people of County Monaghan to the witness of the Church of Ireland over many years, we stand with them in their search today for a confident way forward and I wish personally to thank Canon Desmond Kingston for the magnificent pastoral work - traditional in the best sense involving house-visiting, prayer and Bible Reading - which he has done in the Clones Group of Parishes and the Ematris Group of Parishes. Let it never be said by anyone that the people of those parishes have been forgotten by their bishop or their diocese.

I am myself made anxious by the following sort of language which I hear all too frequently: 'The problems in Ireland have taken us 500 years to get us to the point where we are now; they will take another 500 years to solve'. We don't have this sort of time. This long fingering is just a recipe for deferring any initiative in a way which is plainly irresponsible. We as members of the Church of Ireland are well placed to make our contribution to this process precisely from within the spectrum of the Christian perspective and tradition in our country. Not only do we possess a developed sense of the worth of the individual often expressed in terms of salvation but we also possess the noble tradition of something which we have all too rarely - North or South - used strategically as an enacted principle: political involvement. Revival has to be about more than the church, it has to include our complex yet richly talented communities. How long, I ask, can what divides triumph over what already unites?

We also have the opportunity and as a diocese are about to take practical and human steps to explore our inter-relation afresh - to collaborate in the spirit of the Covenant with Methodism in its combination of simplicity and social conscience, friendship and worship. I very much hope that the Covenant will flourish in this part of Ireland where Church of Ireland people share already so much together. It would be my hope that through exploring the link with the Methodist Church, where signs already are favourable and friendly, together with the opportunities afforded us by the Porvoo Agreement we might re-invigorate the organs of a church structure which serve us very well but at times can be burdened by propping up past structures, propping up past glories and pandering to an unengaged conservatism. In such a spirit we can and indeed must go places in a spirit of both confidence and contribution as we constantly reassess and reapply the tradition which we rightly cherish and can all too readily take for granted. But we need to do it with others because it is quite honestly pointless to be doing it ourselves alone.

Confidence, contribution and change can, I believe, offer the positive antidote to that despairing triad so simply yet devastatingly spelled out by the headmaster to the pupil in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: indifference, neglect and outright dislike.

With contribution, challenge and change we can and will move forward together.

In so many aspects of our diocesan life I sense a great willingness on the part of the people of Clogher to be generous both in their hearts towards their neighbours and in receiving and accepting guidance, in the desire for participation and in the need for development. For their part their expectation is that clergy will care for them pastorally, will conduct worship in a way which is sincere, dignified and recognizable as being in the spirit of the Church of Ireland. We clergy need always to remember that our calling has brought us into membership of and acceptance by communities who value their church and its forms of worship, love its ways and place in us considerable trust. We must not abuse that trust through the delusion of spiritual superiority, rhetorical power or the capacity to outwit or confuse them. The spirit of truth is the spirit of peace. I appeal to all clergy to honour the trust placed in them, to listen to their people, to be a focus of leadership and unity in their parish and to draw people to God through faith, hope and love.

My own particular work in the diocese regularly brings me into direct, hands-on contact with anything up to 1000 people on a Sunday. And this is in fact only a small part of my regular contact - and I dearly wish there was more time for more of it - with my people, not only because I have a specific responsibility in the Holy Spirit for you but more vitally because I am and always have been one of you. It is a peculiar and particular privilege that as one confirmed in and ordained from this diocese I now serve you as your bishop.

Let me simply give some examples of where this sense of service in and by so many people has shown itself even in the short time I have been here:

First, I wish to draw to our attention the work of the Diocesan Review Committee. It was established by Bishop Hannon in 1993 and it looked at a whole range of aspects of diocesan life and witness. Who are the Diocesan Review Committee, you ask? My response is: people like you, a combination of lay people and clergy who have taken a caring and forward-looking interest in the future shape and activity of our diocese through a process of consultation with the people who make up the diocese in its parishes. Perhaps for the first time in our history, lay people from across geographically separated Rural Deaneries, and across the political border too, have consulted together in one another's company and in the absence of clergy. This, I trust, will have given lay people as lay people, parishioners as fellow-parishioners the opportunity to grow in understanding of one another's situations and genuine needs and difficulties. To their own surprise, many found themselves appreciating their own parishes and their own rectors! There is also the opportunity for further consultation and for separate consultation among clergy on their own and there has been a consultation among the youth of the diocese on their own.

The purpose of this series of consultations is, however, not talk for the sake of talk but it must issue in sustainable strategic suggestions for strong, sensible developments and changes in the life of our diocese. It might perhaps be compared with a diocese-wide Stewardship-style exploration of what can be done, what can be done without if we are to be sustainable in the future because, let there be no mistaking it, the present is unsustainable and widely recognized to be such by laity and clergy alike. My hope would be that whatever changes come through as policy changes from the Diocesan Review will be implemented in large parishes as in small parishes because the Review is not a cynical and distant exercise in monitoring numerical or structural decline. Rather, it is a creative, consultative look at the need for development and change of perspective - particularly lay involvement in the authorized ministries of the Church of Ireland as they develop afresh - within our diocese. It will draw out and draw together the ideas which you have for the future and, with further input and refinement, give them flesh and blood. For the future is in fact even more exciting than it is threatening. I wish to pay tribute to all Members of the Committee particularly its untiring chairperson, Archdeacon Pringle, for the work they have done to date and to encourage them for the future ideas and programmes which they will share with us.

Secondly, I wish to make reference both to The Book of Common Prayer 2004 and to Youth Initiatives in the diocese. The forthcoming BCP 2004 has been in use across the Diocese of Clogher since the latter part of May 2003 with my permission. In this we have been in the vanguard of the Church of Ireland and should not shrink from saying so. Provision has been made for all of you to have experience of the following Services: MP, EP, Holy Communion, Holy Baptism with and without other Services, The Service for Ash Wednesday, Ministry to those who are Sick and Confirmation. This I, as bishop, though to be sufficient as a preparation and introduction alongside the Service of the Word already so well established as a vehicle of worship. Again lay people together with clergy have worked hard to implement this and training has been provided to Readers and clergy. The BCP will provide an opportunity to be creative in worship while being faithful to the traditions of the Church of Ireland. It is really up to the Diocese to make a go of it now and I encourage all of you to bring this message back to your parish from this Synod.

What I have to say is this: If you have not experienced these Services by now, please do get on to your rector or rural dean immediately! Let me repeat: These and other services will not replace but will complement the services of the BCP 1926. What will now go and in effect be obsolete will be both BCP 1926 and APB 1984 because BCP 2004 will be the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of Ireland. It will contain BCP 1926 and other services and will in effect render redundant the two other books in the contemporary Church of Ireland.

Those of us who have experienced the Service of Confirmation from BCP 2004 will be forcefully aware of the shift of emphasis, responsibility and commitment which there is in this Service as it now stands. Early in the service there is what I might describe as a three-way conversation, or rather a four-way conversation as the Holy Spirit of God is always heard to speak through the liturgical voice of the church and in a particularly clear seven-fold way in confirmation and ordination. As the confirming bishop I ask questions of parents and Godparents, of the rector and the parishioners, and of the persons presenting themselves for God's confirmation. This is not a crude rite about how you begin to get Holy Communion. Again, as St Paul would say: God forbid! It is an articulate expression by the local church community of respect, responsibility and the drawing forth and confirmation of Christian service towards and by those who are being confirmed in the faith of their Baptism. Holy Communion is envisaged as a normal part of this Confirmation Service. These theological expectations are the context in which all present receive the Word of God.

I say all of this by way of context for the work and time given to children and young people here in the diocese. In so doing I express admiration and gratitude for the work of the Clogher Diocesan Board of Religious Education, the Girls' Friendly Society, the Church of Ireland Youth Department and our own Youth Councils Northern and Southern together with the work of Sunday School Teachers and Youth Leaders across our parishes. I make my remarks in full knowledge of the safeguards which are now in place and rightly must be implemented when children are in the charge and care of adults. I do so also in full recognition of the determination of the people who work with young people and children that they will have enjoyment and fulfilment. The pioneering work of J1 in 2002 and 2003 - the most inspiring initiative of our Youth Council - together with our growing association with the CIYD deserves especial mention. The challenge is for this centralized work to take root in the parishes and for parishes to work on two levels, the local and the diocesan. Here the Committee really does need the active support of the parochial clergy and leaders. This is vital if we are to develop an effective diocesan youth initiative. Singling people out is invidious. Suffice it to say that we currently have excellent leadership. In the region of two hundred people attended last years J1 Event in the Share Centre (although how many took the opportunity for water-skiing in late November on Lough Erne I really shudder to think!) and more than three hundred attended the J1 Service of Praise in St Macartin's Cathedral, Enniskillen. Both events were and remain inspiring to any who attended them. Another J1 is planned for later in the Autumn and is already oversubscribed.

My one concern has always been and will remain a positive one: How do we in the parishes of the Diocese make the structural and liturgical involvement of young people normal as an expectation and expression of life in our church life? Too many young people (and they are not in fact asking for everything to be made in their image or changed in response to a momentary whim on their part - they are far too sophisticated and unselfish for that) feel that they have to leave themselves at the door when they come into church. And somehow there are too many people of an older generation who no longer know how best to converse with young people and are acutely aware of their own deficiency in this regard. Surely this is something which we can and must address locally.

I've said it before and I say it again: we have proportionately the largest concentration of young people in a rural area in the Church of Ireland. But it may not always be so - take note again of the implications of the County Monaghan Census figures and think of the emigration form this whole area of our young people for work, education, an escape from our inability to heal community differences and divisions. In our church life we need to develop and enhance the easy interchange across generations and age groups otherwise we will find ourselves inventing something we ought never to have lost in the first instance. Silent adults and monosyllabic teenagers do not make for good church life.

Time and again I include this sentiment when preaching at a Confirmation: encourage your young people in the spirit of the BCP 2004 to be part of your church life and your Sunday worship. One snide remark, one supercilious glance can put off a sensitive person for life. The great thing about the BCP 2004 is that it gives opportunity for participation in planning and presentation of worship and my own opinion is that this approach is essential if it is really to take off imaginatively. I would urge parishes which do not already have such a group to establish a Worship Planning Group well in advance of the official launch of the BCP 2004, to think ahead and to think afresh in the planning of worship and this is every bit as vital in parishes which currently have no rector as it is in parishes which have a rector. In the emerging spirit of our Diocesan Review we need to think lay every bit as much as clerical in our ministry in a way parallel to that in which the Mothers' Union encourages us to think domestic as well as ecclesiastical in our discipleship. I believe that all the ingredients are with us. However, I need your co-operation for this to happen, your loyalty to the future and your proper sense of belonging to the contemporary Church of Ireland.

During the year past we have said: Farewell to Canon Hay who is now the well-established dean of his native Raphoe, to Canon Hoey who is fast establishing himself as Church Pastoral Aid Society (an English parent body) Co-ordinator in Ireland and also to the Reverend Brian Bower who has himself decided to review his position within the parochial ministry. We wish all three well in the years ahead in thanking them for what they have given us and their parishioners. We have welcomed the Reverend Alan Capper to be rector of Lack, the Reverend Stanley Bourke to be rector of Inishmacsaint and the Reverend Robin Wakely to be curate in the Clones Group of Parishes. The Reverend David Luckman, currently curate of Enniskillen, is soon to be rector of the Galloon Group of Parishes. The Reverend Michael Bryce has become Rural Dean of Kilskeery. The Executive Chair of the Ministry of Healing is occupied by the Reverend Maurice Armstrong,. The Chairpersonship of Mission is in the hands of the Reverend Jonathan Heyhoe. The Reverend Canon Trevor Gillian has taken on the vital job of Diocesan Director of Ordinands. The Reverend Canon Peter Wilson has become Prebendary of Donacavey and a member of the Chapter as has the Reverend Canon William Johnston become Prebendary of Kilskeery, the Reverend Canon Raymond Thompson has become an Examining Canon as has the Reverend Canon Trevor Gillian. The Reverend Kyle Hanlon has become my Chaplain in succession to Canon Thompson. To all those who have assumed new roles and responsibilities we give our thanks for what they have done and share our hopes for what lies ahead of them. I wish also to pay a tribute of gratitude to the retired clergy, to our one auxiliary priest and to Diocesan and Parish Readers for all they give in terms of service, encouragement and sheer decency all year round in our diocese. Without you we would be in what I can only call: worshipful liquidation!

The Scoping Study on Sectarianism which you will all have received and read ahead of today's Synod needs our careful attention. For me it remains a challenging and chilling document. I find little comfort in its tone and content and I find its honesty devastating because its accents and its content are ourselves talking about ourselves. Simply stated I find the problem to be the following: that for so many there is no recognition of a problem. And yet sectarianism, the Study suggests, in all its manifestations simply is a defining reality of our church, of ourselves. Is this, I ask again, the whole truth? Does our capacity to cope with difference find itself so very fragile, so hedged about with extenuating circumstances? Have we nothing else to offer a society which in fact is now looking to the churches for a contribution to a shared future after all the faithful work of being alongside people in the darkest days of sectarian violence, intimidation and bloodshed?

'Ah, but,' I hear, 'bishop you don't really understand, you weren't here when it all happened;'

But, I reply, 'Please hold on a minute:

'I was here when much of it happened, here on the Border in 1969, during the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s.

'I have lived and worked in both Dublin and Cork and I do not remotely suggest that sectarianism is an exclusively Northern problem. Its solution lies throughout our country.'

The presence of Dr Gareth Higgins means a lot to us in that we have during this afternoon's discussion the person who, because of his expertise, was asked by us, the Church of Ireland, to write this Report, to do this research, to draw it together between two covers and to present it to us and to the rest of Ireland. For, whether we like it or not, we are now under scrutiny. This report is a working part of living history.

I feel that it takes us to the heart of our religion and the core of our society. I am left with the question: Are we willing to cope with difference in its many varied forms in our world or are we in retreat from this world? I am left also with a profound sense of gratitude to my own Church of Ireland in its honesty in commissioning this Study. It demands not only our own willingness to take its lessons to heart but also the expressed urgency of other denominations and religions to work on the same issue on their own and together with us. We in the Church of Ireland urge them to undertake similar work. I myself conclude that we cannot: deal with difference on our own. An internal debate is not sufficient. We need to do more than talk to ourselves. We need to hear from, talk and listen to those who are other than, different from ourselves, but we also need to decide if sectarianism for us is a problem. Because if it isn't a problem to us, then we need to have a very good and coherent explanation to offer to the many who believe with conviction that it is a problem of our making or at least of our perpetuating.

The area of sexuality, which The Scoping Study commissioned by the General Synod addresses in chapter 16, was given prominence by the Archbishop of Armagh in his own General Synod Address and subsequently received coverage in the Church of Ireland Gazette and other media soon after the Synod. Caution, carefulness, compassion and courage are the hallmarks of the Church of Ireland from the ways in which we have developed over time and do our work together. The first - caution - is often a frustration to many who wish to see greater, faster change, sharper, crisper clarity. Carefulness and compassion lead us in a direction which we have time and again valued in retrospect because they require and engender more courage than they might at first glance seem to trumpet. But that fourth component: courage is absolutely essential if compassion is to have any bite and we will need all four plus a fifth: charity if we are to address the whole complex area of sexual ethics and behaviour and the church's call and response both to lived reality and Godly expectation.

Events have moved variously in other Provinces of the Anglican Communion in what are wrongly, but perhaps irretrievably, designated as liberal and conservative directions. If there is to be fruitful discussion we need to set aside caricatured positions. Our neighbouring Church of England finds itself in a very particular morass of its own making. Its 1990 Statement made a distinction, which many now deeply regret, between the sexual identity, if I may use those words, of the ordained over against the non-ordained. Unfortunately a similar distinction, admittedly on different criteria, was made when the Church of England agreed the ordination of women to the diaconate and priesthood but not the episcopate. I do not draw parallels here, I simply point to a certain similarity with problematic repercussions.

If I may continue for a moment in this vein, we in the Church of Ireland voted for the validity of the ordination of women to all three orders of ministry. We in the Church of Ireland have not, nor I hope will we ever, condemn those who are homosexual as unworthy of the love of God and the pastoral care of the church. Nor should we deny to homosexual people as human beings the invitation to worship God in our churches and to share in all of our ecclesiastical life. Open and blanket condemnation will do no more than drive down and drive out individuals whose condemnation is not the proper fruit of what we do and say. Sexuality generally has become too automatic a point of definition of who people are, particularly if we differ from them and feel that our difference is a betterness which can be sustained without mutual listening. It is to such listening to the experience of homosexual persons (and here I quote directly from a Resolution of the Lambeth Conference of 1998) that I am open in the expressed conviction of that same Conference (and again I quote) that they are loved by God and that all baptised, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ. Both of these quotations come from what is now universally referred to as Lambeth 1.10. Sexuality, or should I say sexualism, is so well established a feature of marketing, advertising and economic exploitation that it would indeed be banal were it not so invasive. Sexual definition has become too automatic a point of definition of people as people. We need to be sensitive about an area of life which is not our immediate business.

The Bishops of the Church of Ireland have issued a Pastoral Letter which invites us to look at this whole area of human sexuality including homosexuality sensitively and carefully. It is an area where most people have an opinion and many people have a strong opinion. It is an area in relation to which many people are quiet and reticent, understandably so. It is also an area where many people, in this diocese as in others, have been hoping for prayerful, informed consideration for a long time. It is clear to all of us involved to date in what we hope will be an interchange both honest and honourable that charity and clarity should never part company. Otherwise we become the aggregate of our weaknesses rather than the greatness of our strengths. The world in which we now live and on which we would turn our backs in our folly and to our detriment as well as in disobedience to our Lord's command to love God and to love our neighbours as ourselves expects of us openness far beyond exclusivity, respect far beyond condemnation and consistency far beyond the laissez faire of modishness.

In conclusion I feel that if we can retain those five words beginning with c caution, carefulness, compassion, courage and charity and use them like five spiritual senses, then we can make a vital contribution to the whole area of mature comprehension of the human person from a Christian perspective where holiness of life and mutuality of respect can contribute afresh to the vitality of a church and the vibrancy of a society which copes maturely with difference as we all participate in the experiment - for that really is what living is - the experiment of living together with other people in our differences and diversities as inhabitants of one world and children of one God. These are defining but need not nor should not be dividing issues and times.

Our calling remains God's calling of us to reconciliation and peace. The spirit of Clogher is very much summed up in the Collect for St Macartan's Day with which I end. It talks of building and strengthening, of Gospel proclamation and of reconciliation and peace as follows:

Heavenly Father, we thank you for Macartan, faithful companion of St Patrick, and builder of your church in Clogher: Build up your church through those whom you call to leadership in this generation and strengthen your church to proclaim the gospel of reconciliation and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.