麻豆社

Post-election, there is much talk of the need for healing and reconciliation both here and in Northern Ireland. Is it possible?

Last month I was invited at short notice to give a talk in the Henry VII Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey on the theme of ecumenism, reconciliation and the common good, living with partition a century on. That鈥檚 the Irish partition! The occasion was the annual lecture for the Anglican Centre in Rome, which could be described as the Anglican Communion鈥檚 embassy to the Papacy.

It wasn鈥檛 just the complexity of the title that stood out; it was the venue. For the Lady Chapel of Henry VII, is the resting place of many of the key figures of the Reformation era, including Oliver Cromwell, who rested there briefly. Speaking about ecumenism and partition, surrounded by the tombs of Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I, and Mary Queen of Scots, or even James I of England, under whose reign the plantation of Ulster began, was not lost on me. James I moved large numbers of English and Scottish settlers to Ulster to quell Gaelic Ireland, politically and religiously.

The venue and the title said something more powerful about how far ecumenism had come. Over the past sixty years faith leaders have found a way both to hold to their particular beliefs and yet come together to serve the common good of society. One does not negate the other. Compromise, civility, and seeking consensus and understanding, things once more popularly associated with democracy, now characterise relations between religious leaders.

It was not always thus. In the twentieth century, the political and the diplomatic, acted as the midwife to the emerging ecumenical relationship. Reconciliation between Whitehall and Rome preceded that of Rome and Canterbury by many decades. The re-opening of diplomatic relations between the Crown and the Papacy in 1916, and ministerial visits from London to the Vatican, including Churchill in 1944, all helped to encourage the ecumenical journey between Rome and Canterbury which started to blossom in the 1960s.

A desire to seek understanding replaced the strident divisions, suspicions and even hatred of the other, which had often characterised relations between Christians in the aftermath of the Reformation. Today, it is the political that needs to find a way to heal its divisions and like the religious disputes of the past, re-discover a grammar and a vocabulary to balance difference with respect. That鈥檚 essential for political healing and reconciliation.

So some one hundred years on, could ecumenism repay the favour and show politics how to re-appreciate the art of compromise and civility?

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