President urges Christians to practise what they preach

The President, Mrs McAleese, has said that "too many people hold desperately to the conviction that God is a Catholic and an Irish nationalist, or that he is unionist and a British Protestant. Or that he is Jewish and Israeli or Muslim and Palestinian". But, she said, "nobody owns God."

Speaking yesterday in Maynooth to the general assembly of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (the Holy Ghost Fathers), she said it must seem strange to the outsider in Ireland, "a place where there is so much `Christianity' ", that people "can so readily use scriptural rods with which to beat fellow Christians, or as steps to a higher moral ground from where they can look down on them and judge".

Christianity, she said, should force us all to think of others before ourselves. It also meant "we must accept `others' for what they are. We must accept "that it is not possible to homogenise humanity and that we must embrace the world in all its diversity," she said. Nobody had a monopoly on victimhood. And Christianity also meant "sitting down with demons" at times, she said.

The "Gospel of love is not something that we can put into a glass case and admire from a distance. It is incumbent on all of us who profess to be Christian, to build our lives around it and to practise what we preach," she said.

This is the second week of the general assembly, which began on July 12th and continues until August 8th. The Holy Ghost Fathers hold such an assembly every six years and, though they have been in Ireland since 1859, this is the first time they have done so here.

It is being attended by 72 representatives elected by over 3,120 members in 51 countries, mostly in the developing world. There are 500 members in Ireland, with Blackrock College, St Michael's College, St Mary's College and Templeogue College in Dublin, and Rockwell College, in Cashel, Co Tipperary, among the order's best-known schools here. Its Irish headquarters are at Kimmage Manor in Dublin.

Apart from its schools the order is also remembered for its role during the Biafran war in Nigeria in the late 1960s, when Irish members were expelled, and for Dr John Charles McQuaid, the late Archbishop of Dublin and former president of Blackrock College, who was a member.

The main themes at this year's assembly include the changing face of a major religious order approaching the millennium, decline in the developed world versus growth in the poorer nations, and the northern versus southern hemisphere experience in vocations.

It will be addressed on Saturday by Father Enda McDonagh, former professor of moral theology at Maynooth. He will speak about "The Irish Church as part of the new Europe".