During the past year, society had been rocked and shocked by revelations of dubious dealing in high places, and it appeared in some quarters that the only crime was to be found out, the Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, the Right Rev R.A. Warke, told the Diocesan Synod in Cork.
Addressing the Synod yesterday Bishop Warke said that as he read the ever-expanding saga of duplicity he was reminded of the words of Bishop Richard Harries of Oxford in another context: "There was, I suspect, a sense that something foul and squalid needed to be spat out." The Church of Ireland, he went on, could only set standards if it was true to its own teaching, which ultimately was based on the life of Christ, and if the rhetoric and reality corresponded. But there were new challenges. Bishop Warke said he had first heard the phrase "a confident minority" used about the Church of Ireland by the late Bishop Arthur Butler at a youth conference in Blessington in the mid-1960s.
"It has haunted me ever since. So often as a minority, and in some cases a very small minority, we have retreated into an ecclesiastical shell, almost permitting our heritage to go by default, allowing the myth of alienation to flourish."
As it approached the 21st century inexorably, the Church of Ireland was bound up with ecumenism, Bishop Warke said. "To some, this may sound like a record that is stuck, but I continue to stress it for two main reasons. The first is pragmatic. We cannot expect others to take talk of reconciliation or indeed prayerful reconciliation seriously unless it is obvious that the different traditions of the church are living reconciliation themselves.
"As a minority, and a small minority at that, there is still a genuine fear of absorption, fuelled unfortunately by occasional, but happily infrequent, cases of insensitivity in relation to inter-church marriage."
Bishop Warke continued that as a minority, the Church of Ireland offered its attitude and its way of life as a contribution to a diverse society, and in return it sought mutual respect and acceptance. This, surely, was the essence of pluralism, he added.
How, in the fullness of time, church unity would be manifested, he did not know, Bishop Warke said. But he told the Synod that in the meantime the churches could do much and could work together according to their collective conscience.