Press Releases
Bishop Jackson launches Irish School of Ecumenics Book
, launched a new publication The Irish School of Ecumenics (1970-2007)
Floreat ut Pereat, edited by Michael Hurley SJ, The Columba Press, 2008 at the ISE Building Belfast on Thursday May 1st 2008.
The Irish School of Ecumenics was an independent istitution for 37 years and offered a voice that was both scholarlny and prophetic during the period of conflict from the 1970s onwards.
Bishop Jackson paid tribute to the past heads of the School, for the courage and integrity with which they addressed the key issues of the day and for their consistent and persistent work against sectarianism. The ISE is now being integrated with Trinity College Dublin and will continue its work within this new structure.
The text of the Bishop's address deals in detail with the topics raised in the book and offers a response based on his own experience and scholarship and may be found at this link:
The Bishop identifies the emerging areas that the ISE and the Churches in Ireland must address in coming years as globalisation, professionalisation, the inter-faith dimension, ecumenism and peace building.
Speaking of Inter Faith matters, Bishop Jackson said:
"The Inter Faith reality: This has almost become as predictable a cliché as was the phrase: the peace process. Yet, without a doubt, a mobile European population which immigrates and emigrates at will across now non-existent borders is creating a new society. The Christian churches are too tied to old empires to speak and act into this novel understanding of what it is to be a neighbour, a Jew and a Samaritan in today's world. It greatly exercises both families of Orthodoxy and the Anglican-Lutheran family of the Porvoo Communion. In Ireland the historical Christian churches have not been able effectively to speak prophetically into this situation. Much of the painful and understandable distress across today's embittered Anglican Communion derives from what geographically is the Inter Faith interface. In my own opinion, a divided Christian witness, luxuriating in the minutiae of denominational identity which excludes rather than embraces, will only become more and more a specialism for those who are already convinced or for those who seek tidy, truncated certainty. We need to be wary. Ecumenism always needs to be 'poked in the ribs' as each of the successive Directors has done in his and her inimitable personal and human way. But both the Inter Faith and the Ecumenical aspects can now only be enriched by going together in an exploratory way into the texts which really matter emotionally to each of us and seeking understanding by divine illumination. Scriptural Reasoning is a discipline in generosity of comprehension and faithfulness.
Full Text Follows:
Bishop Jackson launches Irish School of Ecumenics Book
The Rt Revd Dr Michael Jackson, Bishop of Clogher, launched a new publication The Irish School of Ecumenics (1970-2007)
Floreat ut pereat, edited by Michael Hurley SJ, The Columba Press, 2008 at the ISE Building Belfast on Thursday May 1st 2008.
CONTEXT
It may seem strange to some to celebrate a 37th birthday in one's 38th year - but, then, this is Ireland! We often find our own ways inexplicable long before we admit that others find them indecipherable! However, even outside Alice's Wonderland, celebrating 37 years in year 38 is in fact entirely appropriate, marking as it does the inception of the School with all the expectations for the hope-filled future and the challenges of the shifting present right through to its ultimate location within the School of Religions, Theology and Ecumenics of Trinity College Dublin, an aspiration long in the maturing.
The volume itself takes an approach which is ambitious. It is at the self-same time chronological, reflective and analytical. It is important at all times that the reader keep an eye to wider events - social and political - which surround the best efforts of principled people to hold true to the founding expectations of ISE and to seek to be that most unpopular of things in Ireland - intellectual and religious. What is of importance for the future in my opinion is to give thought to two further volumes for 2020. One would be a collection of essays by former members of the School. The other would be a critical reflection by those who will then be leaders of Churches in Ireland on how ISE, its vision, mission and practice, have affected the life and witness of the Churches in Ireland as they grapple with Christ's call to unity. Even if the repeated descriptions of the various rooms and corridors of the different buildings in which ISE has been housed are of limited interest to a general readership, the interminable gyrations about money and recognition are not to be bypassed by anyone. They are painful. But they are essential if we are to celebrate properly ISE's thoroughly Irish journey to what it is today - an international institution recognized globally for holding fast to the simple yet profound understanding that the oikoumene is the whole inhabited world and that dying to self is important for true flourishing.
It may sound odd to say this but the book is the story of how ISE 'got there in the end' and sustained its position. And it is equally strange to say that it did so by 'getting there from the start.' It began at the top and, in the face of multiple vicissitudes, never settled for anything less. This is part of its nerve of steel, its serpentine wisdom and its dove-tailed gentleness. The two trinities which from the start have interacted are those of: ecumenism, Inter Faith dialogue and dedication to religious, political and cultural reconciliation along with faith, intellect and institutional creativity.
CONTRIBUTIONS AND PERSPECTIVES OF SUCCESSIVE DIRECTORS
The approach taken to chronicling this development is that of giving to each Director in turn, Michael Hurley, Robin Boyd, John d'Arcy May, Alan Falconer, Geraldine Smyth, Kenneth Kearon, Linda Hogan the opportunity to speak of their own reign and to offer to a wider audience something of what it was like to be in 'the hot seat' at any given time. This is important because retrospect is more often kind than realistic to the past. But, throughout this volume, I am constantly and properly confronted by historical events as they unfold. Often these events are far from being attractive 'eye candy' to the churches but they are the backdrop essential to understanding the prophetic resilience of the School. And, therefore, my admiration for it grows and grows: for its courage; for its honesty; for its resilience; for its hope. From the early days, the School had the confidence and the vision to make theology flourish where people saw only weeds and thistles of denominational exclusivities and superiority complexes. This was, after all the religiously rather immature and institutionally self-satisfied Ireland of the 1970s. The churches generally were rather hard to convince. Mixed Marriages, Inter Faith issues, Human Rights and many more things like them cut through the tangle of these weeds. It is the spirit of living the future in the present which has made the ISE recognized internationally; it is, I regret to say, this same spirit which has left it significantly unacknowledged even to this day by the churches in religious Ireland as we grapple rather reluctantly with post-modernity and whatever will succeed it.
Michael Hurley brings a terrier-like tenacity to his articulation of the early philosophy of ISE, insistent that its genesis pre-dates Vatican ii, not least in making clear that ecumenism is not simply a dimension of church but a discipline of intellectual importance. With brutal factualness he says, 'Mutual ignorance continues to characterize relations in Ireland between North and South, with the additional features of indifference in the South and antipathy in the North.' An essential continuing guiding theme identified early by Michael Hurley is that theology cannot have its own private world called religion. Theology is called to witness, to discourse and to be integrative. The kenotic self-sacrifice of this is manifest in the conviction that 'all the institutions of the ecumenical movement are not only born to die but are born to put themselves to death .as soon as the task is completed of reconciling the churches in the unity which is God's will for his people.' To address as its first theological issue for serious study Inter-Church Marriages gave ISE the freedom from the outset to fulfil that adage: 'What you see is what you get.' This puts on the table the practical ecclesiological Irish issue which nobody can avoid even if we would rather sidestep it. One of the other abiding ambitions of this era is the full-frontal recognition that religion and class have an unhealthy alliance in Irish society. ISE sought to address this in working directly with six shop-stewards who had links to NI party politics. Such people saw and still see that sectarianism is the common enemy of people who are disadvantaged socially and economically while the conflict is still seen by analysts who ought to know better as existing in the realms of politics and religion. What people kept saying during the Troubles they are still saying as historical retrospect ten years into the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. The problem, however, for ISE today is the near-irrelevance of religious affiliation as a socio-economic designation in Ireland today. One of the many statements embedded in the Hurley era which continues to haunt is this: 'Church partition, they knew, must follow political partition and the example of post-World War 2 Germany seemed to prove the point.' The challenge still stands.
In taking up this vision, Robin Boyd along with Alan Falconer and Gabriel Daly, drew out another insight from the earliest days of ISE, namely that it is essential to lay a Biblical and theological foundation for all ecumenical activity. The argument runs that by having the appropriate theological documentation in place, there is thenceforth the possibility of mediating the discussion and dialogue and also facilitating a unity with integrity. This model is, of course, familiar from WCC and the triple model of WCC: Faith and Order; Life and Work; Mission is integral to the ISE programme of education. If I may use a rather raw phrase to describe an eirenically understated man, Robin is the only Director to be 'an Ulster Protestant.' I cannot relinquish his hope that every student who came through ISE would become an ambassador for unity, justice and reconciliation. Visionary and ahead of its time for Robin's period is 'A Declaration of Faith and Commitment by Christians in Northern Ireland,' in itself, as far back as 1986, pointing towards what tumbled out eventually as The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.
The person of John d'Arcy May weaves its way twice through this volume and the different perspectives within the different time-frames make fascinating comparative reading. From Melanesia he brought with him an important point of reference for the ecumenical agenda and he describes it as follows: 'the foreignness of mission churches, their unseemly rivalries, their failures to come to grips with their theological differences and the ineffectualness of their social leadership.' Much of this still haunts and impedes the work of mission today. John is devastatingly honest about the difficulties he found in coming to terms with Christian Ireland. How, an objective outsider unaccustomed to special pleading might well ask, could he have found it anything other than wrong-footing of outsiders, impenetrable to insiders and unquestioning of itself? He quotes from his own journal what remains a challenge to us today: 'the painful fact remains that Christian faith in one of its heartlands is unable to exercise a decisive influence on the solution of a problem fraught with historical resentments, economic injustices and political complexities.' One other phrase while we are at it: 'the oppressive intimacy of Irish Christianity.' The two catalytic contributions which he made, to my mind, were: (1) the confident assertion in a religiously self-protective Ireland of the Theology of Religions as a basis for engaging in the dialogue of world religions and (2) forcing the churches to support ISE. The definition of peace as the goal in this world of ecumenism and the concrete manifestation of unity and dialogue when they bear fruits of peace are vital and energizing insights. The tide of world events shows us that courageous prophets are unheard at our peril.
Consolidation and structured development fell to Alan Falconer, someone whose assurance with the European aspect of Christianity enabled him to bring something special to bear on Irish Christianity in order to assist it to overcome the pettiness and emotional insularity which John d'Arcy May delineated. In Alan's time began the serious addressing (1993) of sectarianism through a variety of agencies including Coventry Cathedral, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and The Community Relations Council. His journal is also instructive: 'I kept being exercised by the question of the acceptance of the other as other .' This question, God be praised, now exercises many more than it did in the early 1990s. We begin to see light being shed on the frustrations of John d'Arcy May through this seminal and courageously envisaged project.
Geraldine Smyth has a turn of phrase which bespeaks an unselfconscious classicism with an eye for detail and for opportunity all in one. Plucked from the ranks of the student body, Geraldine is another 'Northerner' with a tremendous conviction that the academy and the public square must do business together. In this way the church can find and take a place in the debate which must happen. To my mind, Geraldine's commitment to intentional plurality expresses the real invitation offered to Ireland and it does so in the following terms: 'ISE is itself a testimony to the power of diversity when it is oriented towards reconciliation, justice and an ethics of inclusion.' This Agenda item is still very much on the table for the whole of Ireland. It is still a stone in the sandal of the churches of Ireland.
The tenure of Kenneth Kearon did not in any sense let go of the radicalism of Geraldine. Ironically the personal academic interest and expertise of one who is now the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion unlocked the next stage. Ken knew David McConnell, Vice-Provost of Trinity, through the latter's being chairperson of the Adelaide Hospital Society and through his own extensive lecturing career in medical ethics. In Ken's own words: 'The bitterly divisive abortion debates of the 1980s had only served to undermine the importance of ethical diversity within the Irish health service.' This instinct and this vision carried into the Partners in Transformation Project, the natural development of Moving Beyond Sectarianism.
Linda Hogan has had the distinction of being the last Director per se. She has had the job of integrating the School as ISE into the aspirant school of RTE in TCD. Within that labyrinthine context of walking what I might call 'the cobbles of power,' Linda has also carved out four strands of development:
(1) new local Inter-church Fora
(2) extension of the women as peace-builders initiative
(3) fresh strategy of reconciliation-focused adult-learning
(4) dissemination of all of this at local level.
All of this is hammered out against the increasingly unexamined ethic of contemporary Irish-style Thatcherism. The School is developing reconciliation studies spanning Northern Ireland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and the Balkans. At the same time it is preparing for the centenary of Edinburgh 1910 and recognizing the importance of multi-religious ethical issues. My plea is that all of this be incorporated into all four strands of development and that the School, particularly in its new home, be careful about the seductive call of the pure over against the applied, however unpalatable Irish life and Irish religion may seem in their practical outworkings.
CONNECTING THE WORK OF ISE WITH FUTURE PROSPECTS IN IRELAND
In my own opinion all is still to play for with ISE. A society increasingly post-Christian in its idiom proffers opportunities as well as providing challenges:
(1) Policy-makers in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland working in partnership within the terms of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement need to understand that the phenomenon of religion is not going away even if it were better to suit their agenda if it did. There simply is no value-free Utopia.
(2) Policy-makers likewise need to understand, as must church-people of all hues, that there is a tremendous potential for coherence in the religious pluralism which is today's Ireland. Religion properly understood and lived still has much to contribute to Ireland for tomorrow.
(3) There is an urgent need to re-configure theological engagement with people of World Faiths other than one's own.
My own prediction is that the three-fold clusters of exploration with which ISE began its life are as vital and necessary today as ever they were. A secularism which has a genius to be highly selective will bite deeper in Northern Ireland now that the heat of violence has largely cooled and it will also do so in the Republic of Ireland as a cynical attitude to institutionalized religion strengthens. The challenge, again, is to stem the tide and address the imbalance whereby inequality of wealth and opportunity continue to erode the expectation of an actively shared society. And, by the way, what has happened to that particular Governmental rhetoric of 'a shared future'?
My greatest admission is that I am singularly unqualified to address you today in that I am not, regrettably, a graduate of ISE although I know countless people who are. I take heart, however, from the Foreword by David Ford who at a much deeper level than I grapples with a cluster of issues which in my current work I cannot, and in fact would not, avoid. Professor Ford draws attention to the genius which academic institutions have to deflect any engagement with wisdom. Such wisdom involves, indeed demands, interaction with theology. For ecclesiastics the same difficulty exists in their reticence to engage with academic exploration. And again Professor Ford gives voice to it with his customary generous exuberance. Christians, he argues, need continually to think through 'the ways in which God is the ultimate interconnector. Now that religion is returning to the public sphere it cannot have a private theology that is not exposed to the rigours of intellectual standards across other disciplines.' For Ford this issues the challenge to seek and find wisdom rather than settling for knowledge, skills and know-how and to locate it in areas of values, ethics, leadership and professional formation. Ford, of course, speaks with the combined experience and assurance of establishing with considerable success the Cambridge Inter Faith Programme.
My own comments in this area are twofold as follow. The first is that ecumenical and Inter Faith studies need to explore within the Irish context the insights of Scriptural Reasoning whereby Jews, Muslims and Christians together discuss their Scriptures; Cambridge has developed this in a dynamic and programmatic way. The second is that although universities are the primary context in which these issues are hammered out, they are not the only context. The first 37 years of ISE have shown how important it was to involve the public whether in Benburb or in Derry as well as in Dublin. Indeed in my own part of the world we are beneficiaries - in both Enniskillen and Ballybay for example - of ISE outreach and are greatly enriched by it. Like Harry Potter, it is amazing what you can achieve when all you have to work out of is a cupboard under the stairs! Those of you here today are more aware than I of the challenges and opportunities ahead of ISE in the next 37 years which incidentally will bring us to the 75th birthday of the School. Many of them are embedded in and were given voice through those early years which, in retrospect, may seem so amateurish but, like good cinema, hold within them the intimations and the scintillae of a fascinating future.
SUGGESTIONS AND CHALLENGES IN THE YEARS AHEAD
I offer a few suggestions of my own:
(1) Globalization: It is a reality with which we live and which, through the range of subject areas and the composition of the student body from many countries, ISE has modelled to good effect. But globalization has brought us in a very real sense away from the wisdom to which Professor Ford aspires and even from the information of which he speaks to an infotainment of which he does not speak. Virtual information carries no moral framework either on the part of those who 'put it up' or on the part of those who subsequently download it. The renewed linkage between ethics and information is vital today.
(2) Professsionalization: In society generally I see many elements of a new Gnosticism, an esoteric information-based elite with skills which far outweigh life experience or community awareness. One of the realities about life in Ireland at its best and most real in terms of community life is if you organize the meeting you also probably find yourself buying the biscuits, boiling the kettle and doing the washing-up! I am not talking about amateurism for amateurism's sake but I do hope that those with critical experience at the 'cutting edge of difference' - so-called ordinary people - in the core areas of ISE study will not be excluded in years to come from accessing the riches of what ISE is and has to offer. The fact that potential candidates do not have readily processable access qualifications ought not to blind us to the reality that the new alma mater's own international standing and reputation is in no way diminished but rather enhanced by their membership. A gift shared, after all, is not a gift halved but a gift doubled.
(3) The Inter Faith reality: This has almost become as predictable a cliché as was the phrase: the peace process. Yet, without a doubt, a mobile European population which immigrates and emigrates at will across now non-existent borders is creating a new society. The Christian churches are too tied to old empires to speak and act into this novel understanding of what it is to be a neighbour, a Jew and a Samaritan in today's world. It greatly exercises both families of Orthodoxy and the Anglican-Lutheran family of the Porvoo Communion. In Ireland the historical Christian churches have not been able effectively to speak prophetically into this situation. Much of the painful and understandable distress across today's embittered Anglican Communion derives from what geographically is the Inter Faith interface. In my own opinion, a divided Christian witness, luxuriating in the minutiae of denominational identity which excludes rather than embraces, will only become more and more a specialism for those who are already convinced or for those who seek tidy, truncated certainty. We need to be wary. Ecumenism always needs to be 'poked in the ribs' as each of the successive Directors has done in his and her inimitable personal and human way. But both the Inter Faith and the Ecumenical aspects can now only be enriched by going together in an exploratory way into the texts which really matter emotionally to each of us and seeking understanding by divine illumination. Scriptural Reasoning is a discipline in generosity of comprehension and faithfulness.
(4) Ecumenism: It has not yet arrived in any lasting sense in Ireland and yet, in another sense, it is already everywhere. Had it not been for the probing and prompting of ISE, I wonder where we might be. The largely 'hands-off' approach of the churches, each able to justify if not to substantiate its sense of distance in the early days, has left them in a strange position. Lay people and clergy from within the churches in Ireland have been tremendous beneficiaries of ISE and its courses and programmes. Many people across the churches have had an opportunity to grow in confidence and in expertise through what ISE has given them in terms of education, debate and development. ISE is now in a sense an eco-system within Irish Christianity. But ecumenism is, like ecclesiology, provisional. It is circumscribed by eschatology. As the ISE was honest and theological enough to admit from its inception: Flourishing to perish also requires: Perishing to flourish. It is the calling of churches as we know them, love them, belong to them, neglect them to cease to exist as we know them - within the oneness of Christ.
(5) Peace brings its own problems: The tenth Anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, like the Kingdom of God, is among us. We observe the politicians fumbling towards societal maturity. Northern Ireland may well now experience an economic up-turn, not maybe equivalent to the roar and leap of the Celtic Tiger, but kick-started by those who wish us well. Even within our own Judaeo-Christian tradition, peace and prosperity have to grapple with the enigma of Jerusalem and today so do we: ethnicity, politics, power and authority and all the conundrums which voracious urbanization brings. As Mad-Eyed Moody in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire repeatedly says: Constant vigilance!
WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR?
The urgency of the Gospel has now in Ireland pushed us beyond the limitations of denominational Christianity. The onus is on us to show that such denominationalism has hidden and tangible strengths - and I have no doubt that it has. Rowan Williams, discerning and building afresh from the traditions of the Christian East and West in a slim volume entitled Silence and Honey Cakes (2003), offers a reflection on St Anthony's saying: 'Our life and our death is with our neighbour. If we win our brother, we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ.' His reflection is as follows: 'If we ask how this literature contributes to any kind of contemporary understanding of Christian life together, the answer must lie in two of the words at the heart of that saying of St Anthony with which we started - 'life' and 'win.' To find my own life is a task I cannot undertake without the neighbour; life itself is what I find in solidarity, and not only in a sense of togetherness (talking about solidarity can easily turn into no more than this) but in that willingness to put 'on hold' the perspective I want to own and cling to and possess, so that the announcing of the gospel may happen through my presence and my words. And 'winning' is a word not about succeeding so that other people lose, but about succeeding in connecting others with life-giving reality. Together, these words challenge us to think about common life in some fairly radical ways.'
To myself and to you, I can only say: Go and do likewise... as I conclude some reflections and wish this volume, its contributors and the ISE God's blessing in the future.
Michael Jackson, Bishop of Clogher
May 1st 2008