The dignity, richness and diversity of asylum-seekers and refugees should be recognised, the Archbishop of Armagh, Dr Sean Brady, has said.
Dr Brady said people of many faiths and the Irish tradition for hospitality were being tested.
"It's also a question of the dignity of every person," he added. "No matter what their religion or their colour or their race, they are made in the image and likeness of God, they have a tremendous dignity worthy of respect, of being welcomed, of their rights being acknowledged."
Dr Brady said asylum-seekers and refugees had left their countries for their own reasons and were often highly intelligent people, with great integrity and talent. "You think of our own people, when they went abroad, the contributions they made. These people are leaving difficult situations, they have come here. It's a question of getting people to reflect and trying to put ourselves in their shoes. How would we act and how would we expect to be welcomed in a country that is Christian?"
Dr Brady made his remarks to journalists yesterday during a break in day-long discussions by representatives from different churches which he co-chaired. The theme of the 17th session of the Irish Inter-Church meeting in Dundalk, Co Louth, was "Being a Church in a New Millennium". The moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Right Rev Dr Trevor Morrow, said there needed to emerge on the island "radical Christian communities who are willing to participate in the whole social and political fabric of life, but who do so on the basis of Christian principles and values affecting and permeating everything they do".
The church had become entrapped in a "subcultural tradition" in how people expressed their faith and engaged in worship and this affected everything from dress to music to language, he said.
"Because of the nature of the society in which we live, we are going to have to do some pretty fundamental rethinking as to how to effectively relate the Christian faith in areas like Temple Bar."
The difficulty was that the people who made up the majority of the church were holding on tenaciously to their past, he said. "I have heard it described that tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."
Alongside traditional forms of worship in some congregations there were radical "seeker-friendly" styles of worship using multimedia tools to allow people to express their faith comfortably in environments they felt comfortable in, he added.
People should be encouraged to find race inequality as unacceptable as drinking and driving, the chairman of the UK Commission for Racial Equality told a conference in Dublin yesterday.
Mr Gurbux Singh said legislation together with advertising had caused a change of attitude to the acceptability of drinking and driving and he hoped racist attitudes would similarly change. He was speaking on the final day of a conference entitled "Delivering Race Equality in the Workplace", organised by the Equality Authority.