THE CHURCH of Ireland has been warned not to take as a given its success in holding together despite history.
The church's Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Rev John Neill, has said that as a church, it "set great store by the fact that we have been able to remain one in times of deep political division and in spite of the fact that our ministry, North and South, is in a very different context".
He was preaching last night at St Nicholas Collegiate Church in Galway during a Eucharist for members of the Church of Ireland General Synod.
"This is something that must not be taken for granted," Dr Neill said. "We must ensure that differing theological emphases and differing judgments are not allowed to become matters for division."
Referring to the Anglican Communion of Churches, to which the Church of Ireland belongs, he said it had been "going through a very difficult few years".
He was referring to the crisis which has beset Anglicanism worldwide since the ordination as Bishop of New Hampshire in November 2003 of (then) Canon Gene Robinson, a homosexual man who is in a relationship.
The issue is expected to dominate the 14th Lambeth Conference in London next July, which will be attended by Church of Ireland bishops.
Dr Neill said: "It is easy to blame our [Anglican] lack of very formal structures to deal with a time of crisis - but this is of course part of what it is to belong to a communion of autonomous churches.
"Nevertheless we are working on an Anglican covenant which will spell out something of the implications of being both autonomous as churches and being in communion with each other".
He also felt the crisis "can be viewed positively. It has enabled us to discover more of what it means to wrestle with the recognition of diversity and the call to unity which is of the very nature of the Church."
At the General Synod yesterday, the church's Changing Attitudes Ireland group called on Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern to introduce same-sex civil partnership without further delay. Committee member Gerry Lynch said they were concerned the Government had failed to meet its commitment to deliver by the end of March draft legislation to legally recognise same-sex couples".
Devolution of policing and justice powers in Northern Ireland was "rightly regarded as an essential component in completing the transition to normality, signalling a new level of confidence in the robust nature of the new political dispensation", Church of Ireland primate Archbishop Alan Harper said in his presidential address.
This posed "particular challenges", he said, but "a new vision of an Ireland that lives with its past but not in it" was emerging.
