The political situation in Northern Ireland is changing in ways that would have been "unimaginable a few years ago", the Church of Ireland primate, Archbishop Robin Eames, has said.
In his Easter sermon at St Patrick's Cathedral in Armagh yesterday, he said that "despite all the difficulties and setbacks, things are changing in Northern Ireland. There is hope as we see what was unimaginable even a few years ago becoming a reality".
He continued: "True reconciliation cannot be enforced. Forgiveness is part of reconciliation. Forgiveness demands much - in fact too much for some. But understanding encompasses both hope and openness to each other. In that process we, as a community, can and must move on."
In Dublin, Archbishop John Neill said that a "relegation of faith to a very private realm" had allowed the 1916 commemoration to take place on Easter Sunday.
Preaching in Christ Church Cathedral yesterday, he said: "Easter means little for many in a secular society such as we have in most of Europe today, including in Ireland. The fact that a major national commemoration was arranged on Easter Sunday morning in our capital city simply reflects our changing society.
"In a secular society such as we have, there may be little antagonism towards Christian faith. It is more a matter of either indifference, or the relegation of faith to a very private realm, with the underlying assumption that it has very little to do with the real world." He emphasised, however, that the affirmation that Christ is raised was not something private that could be shut away in a corner for people who like "that sort of thing", he said.
"We succumb to the secular indifference of the modern world if we limit Easter to an area of personal faith alone," he said.
Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin addressed the same theme in his Easter homily at the Pro-Cathedral. He said secularist thought would like to see religion reduced to the private sphere.
"Religion, it is said, is a private matter and should have minimal influence in the public domain. But secularist thought can go further and can even influence the cultural climate and even believers themselves. Secularist thought can begin to drive a wedge between God and his creation.
"From saying that religion is a purely private matter, it is easy to go on and to affirm that God has no real relationship with the world, that the world is not in fact permeated with divine thought. In such a situation faith becomes not just a matter for the private individual, but just a thought of the private individual, totally divorced from reality," he said.
Believers had the right and duty "to be present in the societies of which they are part, bringing the liberating message of a 'God who is love' and who challenges all to make love the fundamental principle which should guide relationships between people," he said.
In his homily at St Patrick's Cathedral in Trim yesterday, the Bishop of Meath, the Most Rev Richard Clarke, said that "the risen Christ - in an Ireland where racial difference is taken to mean inferiority, where vicious violence is the instant response to insult (great or small), where material voracity is the only game in town, and where celebrity status is based on the infantilised willingness to invite the entire world into what should be one's private life - is not the winsome if ineffectual 'survivor' in the over-familiar plot of a first- century soap opera.
"He is the definitive cipher for our coming to grips with all that we are, all that we might become, and everything that we could make of the world in which we live," Bishop Clarke said.
