It was indeed a "very unusual event", as Mr Dominic McNamara, assistant to the president at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, said yesterday as three prominent clergymen from the Reformed denominations were conferred with honorary doctorates there.
Bishop Donald Caird, former Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, the Rev Ray Davey, of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, and the Rev Edmund Mawhinney, former President of the Methodist Church in Ireland, were each conferred with the "Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, honoris causa" by Cardinal Desmond Connell, Chancellor of the Pontifical University.
As Mr McNamara put it, all three men were "renowned for their contribution to ecumenism".
In his citation on Bishop Caird's conferring, the Archbishop of Tuam, Dr Michael Neary, said that Dr Caird's official involvement in ecumenical activity was of long-standing and went back to the first inter-church meeting in Ballymascanlon in 1973.
As Archbishop of Dublin [until 1996\], Dr Caird "became an example to many when violence and division threatened to destroy the whole fabric of society". He also spoke of Dr Caird's love of the Irish language and his brilliance as an academic.
Speaking of the Rev Ray Davey, the Auxiliary Bishop of Down and Connor, Dr Anthony Farquhar, recalled his [Rev Davey's\] central role in the founding of the Corrymeela Centre in October 1965, when "he had sensed, firstly, that people were beginning to come out of their denominational trenches and, secondly, that there was a practical need for a centre which would be an extra-territorial principality of reconciliation and meeting in a land of division".
In his address on the Rev Edmund Mawhinney's conferring, the Auxiliary Bishop of Armagh, Dr Gerard Clifford, spoke of the war years, when Dr Mawhinney's family had stayed with a Catholic family in Moira after they were evacuated from Belfast.
"It is mainly in the context of the inter-church meeting that we have come to appreciate the commitment and dedication of Edmund Mawhinney," he continued. "Today we pay tribute to his honest commitment to ecumenical work and to his courteous dedication to inter-church work."
