Press Releases
Church leaders meet the President of Burundi
Reconciliation in a Post-Conflict Situation: The Challenges Faced by the Churches
A speech by the Archbishop of Armagh, the Most Rev Alan Harper, given at a meeting with the President of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza:
Please forgive me if I preface what I want to say with a little gentle theology.
St Paul, in his 2nd Letter to the quarrelsome people of the church in Corinth, wrote:
…from now on we regard no-one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. [1 Cor. 5.16-20]
The word in the Greek that Paul uses is katallasso/katallage which means to change thoroughly.
The first challenge to the churches is to recognize in each other’s members that, through our common baptism, each of us is a new creation, thoroughly changed. Therefore, in our personal and our corporate relating, we need to behave in ways that demonstrate such a conviction. If we do not live and model what we say we believe, we demonstrate the essential hypocrisy of what we pretend. This is the fundamental challenge we face in Ireland. We have allowed differences in doctrine to become entangled in generations of conflict. This has undermined the recognition, and the respect, we owe to one another, and has subverted the proper character and quality of our relating. We have consented to the tribalization of what is a common possession: faith and transformation in Christ.
So, what must we do?
First, let us recognize the truth about the unholy attitudes we have endorsed in the past.
Second, let us make plain that we now recognize our past sins against each other so that those whom we seek to serve through leadership understand clearly what we mean when we pray forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
We have to begin with ourselves. This is at the heart of the project In the Church of Ireland which we call the Hard Gospel. At one point we considered branding the project “the beam in our own eye” to make it plain that before we can even consider pointing to the sins of others we have first to deal with our own shortcomings. Furthermore, because fallible humans are expert at failing to recognize their own sinfulness, but always ready and eager to detail the faults of others, we actually need to engage directly with those from whom we differ to explore the ways in which our own actions and attitudes give offence and thus maintain or foster division.
Third, as Churches, we need to commit ourselves not to take initiatives separately that we could better take jointly. The example of working constructively together is important both for the witness of the Church and for the optics in the wider community.
These are general principles. There are, however, specifics relevant especially to where we find ourselves now, ten years after the Belfast Agreement and one year into partnership government.
The first and, perhaps, the most intractable, is the question of how to deal with the legacy of the Troubles and the aftermath of division and conflict. The Eames/Bradley Commission was appointed to address such issues. The Commission will report in the summer.
The immediate concern currently is that the political institutions may be too fragile to survive the full onslaught of a public “truth recovery process”. Two things need to be borne in mind here.
First, that the Truth and Reconciliation model adopted in South Africa, which seemed, initially, to have been spectacularly effective, is now coming under increasing strain as initial euphoria has ebbed and the harsh reality of governing and continuing to live in harmony has begun to be experienced.
However, second, such issues cannot be set aside indefinitely: Spain, Brazil and Argentina, for example, are all now trying to deal with the unresolved issues left behind by violent episodes in the past which, many decades later in the case of Spain, threaten to destabilize current community life.
Any “public inquiry” process, whilst it might compel access to official records and personnel could not do so in respect of paramilitary organizations, and such an exercise could not achieve balance let alone completeness.
Given that, in many cases, inquiries will never prove the truth of what has happened because evidence is not available, or those who know what happened have died or, if living, will never volunteer information, the community is left to engage with an unresolved aftermath. What options does society have? I have heard suggestions ranging from holding formal inquiries into every unresolved incident, to a complete drawing of a line under the past. In the light of the “Bloody Sunday” Inquiry, the appetite for more of the same may be limited. One suggestion I should like to see explored is that there might be established an “Archive of the Troubles” to include not only written but also oral evidence, covered by a 30 or 50 year non-disclosure rule similar to that covering state documents, in order to enable people with any involvement – whether as onlooker, perpetrator or victim – honestly to recount their individual experiences.
It is important to be aware that not all survivors and other victims desire or seek punishment or retribution. Most of all they seek information: they want to know what happened or why a particular action was taken. Knowing what happened and why - including the clearing of the names of those who were innocent victims and in no way engaged in conflict – appears to be immensely important in helping people to find “closure”.
There is absolutely no doubt that full disclosure of all that can be known would be immensely shocking and deeply distressing for everyone: few, if any would be unaffected, either because someone they knew was involved, or because institutions and organizations in which they trusted will be shown to have acted badly. Furthermore, there will always be significant residual matters that remain unresolved. Nevertheless, I have no doubt, personally, that “truth recovery” is in the long term best interests of the whole community. We have to learn to take ownership of the whole of our history in order, if possible, not to be condemned to repeat it. Historical events and processes are not the property of particular groups; they are the inheritance of all.
One component in the process of reconciliation that has been proposed is the provision of some kind of public act of repentance and reconciliation, perhaps facilitated jointly by the Churches. In fact such an occasion would be fraught with difficulties:
• There would have to be agreement as to what an act of repentance might look like and what an act of reconciliation might signify;
• There would have to be clarity about how and upon whose behalf the confessional component of repentance might be articulated and how a mandate for such an act could be secured within the context of the disparate polities of the various churches;
• There would be the problem of what might be the implications of the exclusion of those churches which for reasons of conscience could not take part in such an event;
• There are all the complexities of the theology of vicarious confession and vicarious forgiveness.
The negative aspects of such an endeavour may outweigh the positive.
An alternative way forward might take the form of the articulation and celebration of a covenant among mainline churches, giving mutual recognition to each ecclesial body’s membership of the Body of Christ and identifying specific commitments governing future ways of relating based upon concepts such as parity of esteem. Such a covenant ought not to give birth to yet another “ecumenical instrument” in the form of an additional consultative body, but it could offer the opportunity for the consultative and governance structures of the individual churches to endorse the covenant through the contexts and structures of their various polities.
There are many other aspects of the current situation that I could touch upon, but time is short. Therefore I shall advert to only one other: the highly conflicted issue of arrangements for education in Northern Ireland.
There is an opinion abroad that the divisions in society here are significantly reinforced by the denominational nature of the educational structures in Ireland. I need to make it clear that, whilst one cannot dismiss entirely the implications of this criticism, the facile conclusions that have been drawn are just that: excessively facile. Furthermore, a recent piece of research in the Republic of Ireland shows a high percentage of the population in favour of church involvement in education, and also of parental choice (Iona Institute, March 2008). A similar finding would almost certainly be forthcoming in Northern Ireland.
Nevertheless, the issue still arises as to whether, as a community, we want our children to be educated together or apart (I put this question in its most simplistic form quite deliberately.) My response to this challenge is to suggest that denominationally based education remains desirable, especially in the context of overwhelming parental choice, so long as it also focuses on the development of an understanding of and respect for diversity. In other words, our educational establishments need intentionally to focus on positive attitudes towards diversity and the specific promotion of cohesion. It may become inevitable in any case that, in order to deliver the whole curriculum entitlement, at least at secondary level, schools will have to collaborate and share both human and physical assets. This should be seized as an opportunity rather than a misfortune.
All of our churches are totally committed to the pastoral and spiritual care of people. The Churches will always accompany people on their lives’ journeys to comfort the broken hearted, to care for the sick and afflicted, and to offer the hope and promise of redemption in Christ. Part of that responsibility is discharged through seeking to shape society on the basis of human dignity, equality, justice, mercy and compassion. One of the challenges, therefore, that confronts us is to work together to articulate and advocate the sort of society we wish to establish. There is a case to be made for the Churches deliberately and pro-actively to seize the Human Rights agenda to rescue it from becoming the cat’s-paw of narrow single interest groups and also to use it to promote a positive vision of citizenship as not merely a matter of individual rights but also individual and corporate rights and responsibilities. It will be immensely important for the churches to work together to offer a vision of the society we need and towards which we should work. Our voice will be persuasive and our efforts effective if we develop a shared vision and speak with a united voice.
However, we have to acknowledge that all religions, and Christianity in particular, are under attack in the west; the forces of atheistic secularization are very powerful. Nor do the Christian Churches any longer command the attention or respect they once enjoyed in the public space, even in Ireland. We now have to earn that respect and influence. We will do it best by intentionally working together. That also is a challenge we face afresh now that, with peace in our grasp, we move beyond religious tribalism into a new era.