The consequences of yet another Drumcree on the Church of Ireland can only be profound

It is now down to the politicians to avert what is shaping up to be a mother-of-all-Drumcrees. If they cannot succeed in persuading both parties in Portadown to agree an accommodation, and if they cannot reach an agreement on decommissioning by June 30th, then four days later Drumcree 5 will begin.

The Church of Ireland went as far as it felt it could on the issue at its General Synod this week. Its voice was clear and unequivocal: "No pledges, no invitation." But just as clear is the intent of the rector of Drumcree, the Rev John Pickering, and his select vestry that the Orange service will go ahead as normal on the first Sunday in July.

The consequences of another Drumcree on the Church of Ireland will be profound. The agonies it has endured over the past five years will be as nothing to what would then lie ahead, not least if there is further death and destruction. Drumcree 5 would mean having to address that which lies at the core of its reformed tradition, authority and its exercise.

This is a hugely important issue within Protestantism, including Anglicanism. It was central to the breakaway from Rome in the Reformation period. Since then, all reformed churches place individual conscience at the centre of their practices.

Hence the deep reluctance to "legislate" Mr Pickering and his vestry - the committee of lay people who help him run the parish - into acting against their convictions.

Hence the preference "to encourage mature counsel and responsible action than to threaten the exercise of individual responsibility by coercion", as the church's sub-committee on sectarianism report put it this week.

Though it might be argued that, while the church has avoided using legislative coercion, the very forcefulness of its exhortations to Mr Pickering and his vestry might well be described as moral coercion.

As things stand, the church remains powerless to deal with a recalcitrant Mr Pickering or his vestry. In which case it is difficult to disagree with Bishop Richard Clarke's comment in a sermon at St Patrick's Cathedral on Monday: "As a church we have in fact imprisoned ourselves". He was speaking in the context of cultural identities on the island.

Bishop Clarke, of Meath and Kildare, would be toward the turbulent end of the Church of Ireland priesthood on the question of Drumcree. It was he who announced that his fellow bishops wished to vote publicly on the "Drumcree motions" on Tuesday.

This took the Synod by surprise, not least as standing orders state that "if they desire to vote, the bishops may withdraw from General Synod for that purpose . . ."

Bishop Clarke's initiative did not please everyone. The very announcement would have made it clear to representatives in the hall what outcome the bishops desired and might be considered an exercise in undue influence. But vote publicly is what the bishops did and they did so unanimously, supporting all three motions.

Other turbulent priests on Drumcree within the church include the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Walton Empey, Bishop John Neill, of Cashel and Ossory, and the 160 Church of Ireland clergy who signed a letter from the Belfast-based Catalyst group sent to Mr Pickering and his vestry on September 30th.

They wrote "to beg you not to invite or accept requests from the Portadown Loyal Orders to participate [in the July 4th, Sunday service] next year". They also appealed "to you as Christians and as members of the Church of Ireland to state publicly that you do not wish the Orangemen to use our church in this way".

For his pains, Dr Empey was attacked by the deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, Mr John Taylor, who accused him of mounting a campaign from the Republic against the Orange service at Drumcree, and described as astounding the Archbishop's call for an end to it.

Unsurprisingly, Mr Taylor got as good as he gave. The MP's "ignorance of the Church of Ireland seems to be total", remarked Archbishop Empey in an address to the Dublin Diocesan Synod in October.

IN the same address, he acknowledged the damage Drumcree was doing to the church in the South. Members had a respected place in the life of the Republic, he said, while there still persisted in the North a view that it was a theocratic state. "We are light years away from that."

He urged Northerners "to come down here and see for themselves, just as they want us to try to understand the North", neatly turning on the Northern brethren a phrase they frequently use to Southerners.

There could be said to be mutual exasperation between Church of Ireland members North and South over Drumcree, with people on both sides of the Border insisting the other does not understand its position.

Northern members are prone to saying it is easy for those at a safe distance to criticise the church for its stance on Drumcree, while Southern members have a tendency to dismiss all Orangemen as bigots.

Neither is right. There is no safe distance on the island of Ireland from Drumcree, while there do exist "ordinary, decent Orangemen" who have no hatred in their hearts for Catholics.

Sometimes it seems that implicit in church members' attitudes on both sides is uncertainty as to the good faith of the other.

Bishop Clarke, in his sermon on Monday, drew on T.S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral, which dramatised the killing of that original turbulent priest, Archbishop Thomas a Becket.

Bishop Clarke referred to the chorus in the play and its acknowledgment that it is made up of men and women who fear the injustice of men less than they fear the justice of God.

Contemplating the General Synod beginning the following day, he wondered whether it would show the church as one which had lost all sense of the Gospel imperative to take seriously the sometimes confrontational and even divisive implications of the love of God as "shown to the world hanging on a cross rather than sitting on a fence".

Today, after the General Synod, it remains a pertinent question.

For now, for all our sakes, and not least that of the Church of Ireland, we must hope that the politicians will succeed once more where our priests have not.