THE Church of Ireland Gazette has called on the Church of Ireland to rethink the longstanding relationship between many of its Northern parishes and the Orange Order in the wake of the Drumcree clashes.
The Gazette, an independent journal broadly representative of Church of Ireland thinking, says that "if individual parishes are not willing to examine their own consciences, then it falls on the Church of Ireland as a whole to apologise, and to repent and to seek forgiveness".
In a separate interview, with the Irish Catholic, the new Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Rev Walton Empey, has said that the "anger at recent events in the North felt by people in the South was shared by the members of the Church of Ireland".
In an editorial in its current issue, the Gazette says: "Unless we learn some lessons from the recent events, we are facing a similar catastrophe next month when the Apprentice Boys of Derry march in the face of opposition and resistance from the local community."
The editorial continues: "We all knew the potential for the crisis at Drumcree. We saw it happen last year. But what did we do to prevent it happening this year? And if we did nothing to prevent this crisis from erupting, what right has any of us to defend the use of a Church of Ireland church a Church of Ireland hall and a Church of Ireland churchyard for a service, a march, protests, and secret meetings between David Trimble and Billy Wright, knowing the logical consequences of having failed to do anything? How naive can any of us be?
The Gazette says it appeared that "good faith may have been betrayed" at Drumcree "as secret deals were made even as the negotiators, including the Archbishop of Armagh, continued to search for a settlement".