`Outsider' O'Leary launches C of I bishop's book about quest for faith

As "a Sixties child", the broadcaster Olivia O'Leary expressed surprise at being invited to launch a new book by the Church of Ireland Bishop of Meath and Kildare, the Most Rev Richard Clarke.

She was uncomfortable with the idea of faith/religion, she said. And she was "an outsider, as are all women, outsiders to most organised religions because of the lesser role allocated to them.

"If I am to be a passive lesser being, one of the women who met at the foot of the cross, well, there is no God. I'm not voting for him. I resign," she said.

She was speaking at the Dublin Writers' Museum on Tuesday evening. The book, And Is It True?, deals with belief and the need "to search for faith with integrity".

Ms O'Leary recalled her mother's last days and how for the first time she was "in doubt" after a life of "absolute sure-fire certainty that there was a God".

Her own favourite Gospel stories were about the doubts of Thomas, Peter's cowardice and "the rich young man who didn't want to part with his loot". For her the doubters were always more real. The book was for doubters, which is why she felt comfortable with it, she said.

In asking questions on the search for truth Bishop Clarke had frequently resorted to poetry rather than scripture, something Father Enda McDonagh also did, she said. Both got inspiration from the aesthetic in the search for meaning, and from the fight for justice. What she most appreciated about the book were "the question marks and the shadows".

Bishop Clarke said his book was pitched at that ground between the trenches of "utter fundamentalism" and "total relativism, where we meet other people in pain". The fact that Dominican Publications "would happily publish the agnostic ramblings of an Anglican bishop" was a good sign ecumenically.

Father Bernard Treacy, editor at Dominican Publications, said they were glad to be involved and would be glad "if our book is a marker of how the church traditions can relate in a different way".