In his sermon at the Easter Eucharist in Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral, Cork on Easter Day 2003 the Right Reverend Paul Colton, Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross said that the Church has not always lived up to its calling as a resurrection community.

The tragedy is, he said, that we in the Church, the community of the resurrection, have at times thoughtlessly and through lack of care perpetuated the sense of crucifixion being experienced by many.

He said:

"Throughout history, this has happened most often when the Church becomes more concerned with its own survival and image than with the people it is called to embrace and the good news it announces. It happens most of all when we try to make God smaller than he is, and to limit the divine love only to people who are like ourselves, or almost.

"We are all too aware that for many in our world, living is a hellish crucifixion experience: not only the dramatic victims of war, terrorism, oppression and injustice; but also the silent sufferers of illness, loneliness, alienation and isolation whose plod through life weighs them down to breaking point.

"I think of those who suffer because we have failed to open the arms of welcome; of the pain that flows from the inflexibility of our doctrinal posturing and our ecumenical frigidity. Then there are those who, by being different, or by labels they do not choose for themselves but which we slap on them, are pushed by us to the edge; those who do not fit into our sense of order. There are those who have fallen who we have not reached out to and helped up. There are the bridges we fail to build; the embrace we do not offer; the ill-chosen words; - sadly the list is endless of those whose experience of the Easter community, the Church, has, far from being one of resurrection, been that of crucifixion."