HISTORY WAS made in the chapel at Trinity College yesterday when for the first time the Catholic and Church of Ireland archbishops of Dublin gave a joint blessing at the launch of their latest ecumenical initiative.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and Archbishop John Neill launched a specially commissioned Gospel of St Luke, 100,000 copies of which will be distributed through parishes in their respective archdioceses.
It will be followed up by a DVD, Luke the Book, intended for families. Both churches also plan a joint youth pilgrimage to Taizé later this year.
Speaking after the launch, Archbishop Martin said: “It’s actually a very significant event. This wasn’t always an ecumenical chapel and, in many ways, this college was a focus of religious division and I’m delighted, not only that we are here today but that we’re actually doing something together today, preaching the faith and renewing the church.”
At the launch Archbishop Martin said: "This university houses the Book of Kells, an extraordinary cultural legacy and a symbol of the centrality of the scriptures in the early Irish church. Renewal means pulling scripture back into that position in our culture and in our world."
Archbishop Neill said it was fitting the launch was taking place at the start of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and he was “very excited we are doing this together”. That “was based very much” on the Lund principle, he said, which arose from the 1952 faith and order conference of the World Council of Churches at Lund in Sweden.
There it was agreed the churches “should not do separately what they could do together,” Archbishop Neill said.
He presented Archbishop Martin with a cheque to defray costs of their initiative. Archbishop Martin said it was being paid for by a deceased priest who “left money to cover this”. He would not identify the priest.
