A PRESBYTERIAN minister the Rev Terence McCaughey, told The Irish Times yesterday it was "a sad comment" that representative members of the Protestant churches were still holding office in sectarian organisations such as the Orange Order.
Mr McCaughey, a Trinity College lecturer, said little had changed since he wrote an open letter to the Orange Order leader the Rev Martin Smyth, in July 1970 at the start of the Troubles.
At the time Mr Smyth, who is also a Presbyterian minister, was Grand Master of the Order in Belfast. In 1972 he assumed its highest office as Imperial Grand Master.
In the letter, Mr McCaughey challenged Mr Smyth to justify his membership of the Order. Noting the basic Protestant tenet that the Christian must live by "faith alone", he added: "Yet in the North of Ireland we have the unseemly spectacle of a Protestantism which, since 1912, has not had the courage to be a minority, preferring to build a state around itself to ensure that it is permanently in the majority."
Mr McCaughey said Mr Smyth "must know as well as I do how the Orange Order came into being in the first place, how it has been used consistently (even by ministers of the Gospel) as an instrument to foment hated and fear of their Roman Catholic neighbours and openly to proclaim to the Catholic minority (or sometimes majority) that they were to be kept in their place."
Mr McCaughey asked Mr Smyth how he could defend the continued existence of the Orange Order given it was only duplicating the work of the Protestant churches in defending Protestantism; duplicating the work of the Unionist Party in defending the British connection; and contributing far less to the cause of civil and religious liberty than campaigning civil liberties organisations like the National Council for Civil Liberties.