Army role in church ceremonies gives pause for thought

THIS week, the Northern Ireland Police Authority published a report on the symbolism of policing - the use of flags, oaths, badges, uniforms and what they might say about the impartiality of the forces of law and order.

Whatever one might think about the report in my case, not much - it was a reminder of the importance of symbolism and perception on this island, especially when it comes to the legitimacy of armed authority. Separating religious identity from State authority is, everyone agrees, an absolute necessity.

It would be dreadful, for instance, if large numbers of uniformed RUC officers stood guard in a Free Presbyterian church while the Rev Ian Paisley preached a sermon. Yet last Sunday in Limerick, we had a large and official presence of the Irish Army at the consecration of the new Catholic bishop, Dr Donal Murray.

I don't know whether many Northern Protestants watch the RTE television news, but if any had tuned in on Sunday evening, they would have seen the most extraordinary sights Dr Murray, outside the church, accompanied by an Army lieutenant and sergeant inspecting a guard of honour made up of 30 members of the 12th battalion, Southern Brigade.

There, too, was Dr Murray inside the church during the religious ceremony flanked by an officer and 14 members of the same honour party. A more potent and dramatic image of the inseparability of Church and State is hard to imagine.

Did anyone in this State, so rightly sensitive when it comes to the conjunction of military and religious symbols in the North, stop to wonder - how this might look?

The installation of a bishop is a matter for celebration for many Catholics in Limerick. And the promotion within the hierarchy of a man as intelligent, cultured and honourable as Donal Murray is, for public life in Ireland generally, a good thing.

But the appearance of official State sanction, the addition of the allure of militarism to the religious solemnities of the occasion, diminishes both State and church. The State is identified with one religion. And, surely, the religious meaning of the occasion is blurred by such an overt emphasis on worldly power.

The first question that arises is how this happened. I asked the Army how it came to be present, and was told that it was there as a result of "a request from the diocesan office". I asked the Catholic Press and Information Office if the bishop or the diocese had asked for an army guard of honour at the ceremony and was told that they did not.

SO THE Army thinks the church asked for the soldiers, the church thinks it didn't, and yet three dozen well drilled men in impeccable ceremonial dress turned up at the cathedral and took a prominent part in the ceremonies.

The Catholic Press and Information Office has a credible explanation for the discrepancy. The Army was present, it says, because it was "assumed that it was always done", that it was "part of the tradition", and "a Limerick peculiarity".

And this, I am sure, is exactly what happened. Certain assumptions about the done thing on such occasions, assumptions unquestioned since the foundation of the State, simply worked their way out. That those assumptions are the same unthinking, unreconstructed sectarian suppositions that have brought such disaster to this island seems not to have occurred to anyone.

So much for how it happened. The second question is how could it happen? How can armed representatives of the State be sent out on an official mission which involves not merely submitting themselves to inspection by a private citizen but also participating in a specific religious ceremony? And the answer is that the law permits this to happen. There is a specific Defence Force Regulation under the Defence Act that lists, among the duties of the Army the provision of guards of honour at episcopal and other ecclesiastical ceremonies.

And this legal regulation is important. It means that what happened at Limerick cathedral last Sunday was not peripheral to the functions of the Irish Army but an official part of its mission. It would be bad enough for a group of off duty soldiers to decide out of religious devotion to, appear in dress uniform and in full military formation, at a church ceremony.

Such an action would still confuse the symbols of ecclesiastical and State power in dangerous ways. But what happened last Sunday was much worse. For not only did the law permit the soldiers to participate, it obliged them to do so.

The installation of Dr Murray was officially defined, under the Defence Force Regulations, as a "military detail". That in turn means that the soldiers who took part were not Catholic volunteers who decided of their own free will to honour their bishop.

There was no question of opting in or out. Whether those soldiers were Catholics or Protestants, Jews or atheists, Muslims or Buddhists, they were under military orders to enter a Catholic place of worship and take part in a Catholic religious ceremony. Their own religious beliefs were irrelevant. They had to take part or face the rigours of military discipline.

This is a disgrace to a modern democracy. People who are not merely public servants but who are acting as embodiments of the entire State, are obliged, under pain of serious punishment, to take a public part in religious ceremonies.

And, though it is none of my business, it must also be a disgrace to religion. I can't imagine that a sensitive and scrupulous pastor such as Donal Murray would be happy to conduct a religious ritual in which some participants are obliged by law to be there. But whether the bishop was or was not happy with such a situation, a State that is supposedly committed to freedom of conscience and worship could not be.

WHAT IS worrying about the whole thing is that it suggests, yet again, how little real engagement with the underlying imperatives of the peace process there has been in the Republic. I don't believe that anyone either in the Catholic church or in the State set out last Sunday to create the most obvious possible public image of crass sectarian triumphalism.

I don't believe that Dr Murray or the Southern Command wanted to turn a solemn religious occasion into a display of the church militant more appropriate to Franco's Spain than to a modern secular democracy. But equally I don't believe that anyone thought for a moment about what the concepts of parity of esteem and cross community acceptability that we keep pressing on our friends in the North might actually mean.

Changing the Defence Act to ensure that never again does the Army play a supporting role in any religious ceremony might force some process of thought into the cycle of dangerous assumptions.