In the wake of the Good Friday Agreement and the subsequent referendums there remains for all in these islands a very real and twofold challenge: the "decommissioning" of centuries-old hatred, and the "release of prisoners" from a culture of resentment.

Arms buried in the ground will rust away. Hatred, resentment and "unforgiveness" have no built-in obsolescence. They are Ireland's largest prisons, where too many people don't so much live their lives as "serve time".

A former inmate of a Nazi concentration camp was visiting a friend who had shared the ordeal with him.

"Have you forgiven the Nazis?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Well, I haven't. I'm still consumed with hatred for them."

"In that case," said his friend gently, "they still have you in prison."

"To err is human, to forgive divine," wrote Alexander Pope, but if forgiving is divine, asking forgiveness is even more so. When Pope John Paul reached out in forgiveness to his would-be-assassin, his act was met with general approval. When he asked the forgiveness of the Jewish community in Rome, there was much grumbling in otherwise loyal quarters.

Closer to home, when Bishop Walsh of Killaloe sought the forgiveness of the Protestant community in Ireland, he was viewed by some as letting the side down.

More than the doctrine of papal infallibility, carefully circumscribed and understood, it is, perhaps, a culture of infallibility which is the greater obstacle to church unity. For too many within our church, infallibility would seem to mean never having to say you're sorry.

A church, however, which calls people to repentance but itself refuses to repent will always be part of the problem on these islands rather than part of the solution.

To the hard men (and women) in our church who wonder "When will all this apologising ever end?" I say: "The morning after we decide to drop the penitential rite at the beginning of every Mass and remove confessional boxes from our churches".

The humble confessional may yet prove to be the most powerful reminder we Roman Catholics need if we are to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly before our God. Walking humbly before God will mean forgiving and seeking forgiveness "not seven times but 77 times".

To seek forgiveness is to attempt to effect a healing, to bring about a closure. So long as this remains undone, there will continue to be fertile breeding grounds for resentment. "Resentment" literally means "to feel again" in the sense of revisiting old wounds, going back over old injuries, rekindling old rages, constantly reinventing oneself as victim. There are those who will say of attempts to seek forgiveness and bring closure to wounds: "Why rake up the past, why stir up old hatreds and resentments?" To these I would say: "Resentments never die, they just fester away." They simmer beneath the surface of life, ready ammunition for the fearful and embittered to use against the generous-hearted who wish to move ahead in friendship and solidarity.

Forgiveness and seeking forgiveness, like charity, must begin at home. In the diocese of Ferns we have much to be grateful for in the ecumenical field. For me personally, ecumenism has moved from being a subject to be studied to an affair of the heart.

THE reasons for this are in great part personal. When I most needed support, no one of any religious persuasion was more generous and forthcoming than members of the Church of Ireland in this diocese, people like Ivan Yates TD, Bishops Noel Willoughby and John Neill, the Rev Nigel Waugh and so many others, clergy and laity.

Because of my respect and affection for members and leaders of other Christian churches, I have never felt so sharply the pain of separation and division between us as I do at this particular time in my life and ministry. When one loves another, it is not at all hard to ask forgiveness.

It is not difficult for me, therefore, to ask forgiveness for the offence and hurt caused to the Church of Ireland community and others by members of my own church, particularly by some of its leaders, in what has come to be known as the Fethard-on-Sea boycott.

Nor am I judging the past by today's standards. By the standards of its own day the Fethard boycott was seen at the time by a prominent lay Catholic to be "an unjust and terrible thing". Mr Donal Barrington expressed the view that this was not just his own opinion but "the opinion of all intelligent Catholics, priests and laymen" with whom he had discussed the matter.

The then Taoiseach, Mr Eamon de Valera, replying to Dr Noel Browne in the Dail on July 4th, 1957, described the boycott as "ill-conceived, ill-considered and futile, unjust and cruel" and expressed himself as convinced that 90 per cent of the people of Ireland would agree.

In this context, it is necessary to apologise also to the members of my own church who were then and since saddened and dismayed - scandalised even - by church leadership at that time.

My Pentecost Sunday apology, therefore, was not some kind of revisionism, but rather an effort to allow the voice of common sense and decency of that period to have its say, even if it had to wait all of 41 years to be heard.

On such a public occasion and in the presence of leaders and representatives of the Church of Ireland, by expressing my deep sorrow and my promise to do whatever I could to make amends, I was hoping to bring about healing and closure to a sad period in the history of our diocese and of our church.

To ask for forgiveness and healing was but a first step. I was humbled by the speed of the response, by the generosity of spirit of Bishop John Neill, and by the unforgettable sight of Sean Cloney, ravaged in body but heroic in spirit. On Sunday evening last these two Christian men anointed and blessed our community, our churches and our country with grace-filled words of forgiveness, peace and love.

For me the last Sunday of May was in every sense "a new Pentecost", a day of God's grace and favour in the summer of '98.

Anoint the wounds of my spirit with the balm of forgiveness pour the oil of your calm on the waters of my heart take the squeal of frustration from the wheels of my passion that the power of your tenderness may smooth the way I love that the tedium of giving in the risk of surrender and the reaching out naked to a world that must wound may be kindled fresh daily to a blaze of compassion that the grain may fall gladly to burst in the ground and the harvest abound.

From Messiah by Dom Ralph Wright

Brendan Comiskey is Roman Catholic Bishop of Ferns