It goes on. Recently, in a BBC interview, the Catholic primate, Dr Seβn Brady, refused to advise his flock to join the new Northern Ireland police service. Was this because such would represent a risk to their faith and morals? Similarly, in January 2000, the North's Church of Ireland bishops "cautiously welcomed" the recommendations of the Patten Report on policing in the North. Was this because Jesus had a view on the RUC, policing, or Chris Patten? Even by interpretation? Or was it not really just a case of Church leaders simply following and endorsing the prejudices of their flocks? The Church of Ireland primate, Dr Robin Eames, and Archbishop of the Armagh diocese wherein Drumcree is located, is frequently accused of refusing to give leadership there.
In 1999, he and his fellow bishops in the Church of Ireland refused "by a significant majority" to endorse a proposal that he/they seek powers at General Synod that year which would allow him/them deal with Drumcree and such situations. Now they dare plead they have done all they can within existing church structures to deal with the situation. That is not terribly convincing.
The 1999 General Synod did request that the rector and vestry at Drumcree decline to extend an invitation to the Portadown Orangemen to attend the service if they did not agree to three pledges: to avoid any action which would diminish the sanctity of the service; to obey the law before and after the service; to respect the integrity of the Church of Ireland by word and action and not use Church property or its environs in any protest.
The Orangemen ignored the pledges and the rector and vestry at Drumcree ignored the General Synod. Nothing has happened since, where the church authorities are concerned.
The synod also carried a resolution banning the flying of flags other than the cross of St Patrick or that of the Anglican communion from its churches. That, too, has been ignored at Drumcree and elsewhere in Portadown and the North. Again without consequence.
Church of Ireland leaders, when asked about this, attribute their impotence to a tradition of "dispersed authority" within the Church. "Here we stand. We can do no other," they might say, as does an Orange slogan on the hill at Drumcree.
And the Catholic primate, Dr Seβn Brady, within whose Armagh diocese the Garvaghy Road is situated, has exercised no obvious leadership there whatsoever, despite his powerful position in a Church with a strong tradition of centralised authority.
He said Mass in St John's church on the Garvaghy Road during Drumcree 1998 as the Orange parade passed. It was a fine act of solidarity with a community under siege. But a little further down that road there was a smaller community, also under siege. He did not go there. They were Protestant unionists.
On the macro level, "chosen people" attitudes persist and are encouraged within all denominations on the island. Most hold to the belief that they only are true Christians. The others are not quite "proper". And each has its own theology to prove it.
The Presbyterian Church in Ireland won't even invite Catholic representatives to attend their annual General Assembly, though all other Churches receive such an invitation. In 1999, it also refused to be part of a newly proposed Conference of Irish Churches because the Catholic Church would be a member.
Most Orangemen in the North are members of the Presbyterian Church, which is the majority Protestant Church in the North but, and unlike the Church of Ireland, it has yet to address its relationship with the Orange Order and sectarianism within.
And where the Catholic Church is concerned... The ink was hardly dry on the Belfast Agreement in 1998 when the Catholic bishops of these islands issued the One Bread One Body document, banning all Catholics from receiving communion in a Protestant church and only allowing Protestants receive in a Catholic church in rare instances and in extremis. For good measure, the document denigrated the Anglican/Church of Ireland priesthood as not being real.
Originally, it was planned to publish One Bread One Body in May, 1998, a month after the Belfast Agreement was signed. This was delayed until September that year. It seems it was felt that any implied indifference to the effect on community relations in the North of publishing such a divisive document in May was eliminated by publishing it four months later.
And then last September the Vatican published Dominus Iesus which dismissed all Protestant denomination as "not Churches in the proper sense" and all other religions as being "in a gravely deficient situation". A letter sent by Rome to Catholic bishops worldwide around the same time instructed them not to refer to Protestant Churches as "sister Churches". The Church of Ireland is probably our most genuinely ecumenical, most all-embracing Church, despite a rump - popular in Armagh and not least in Drumcree - for whom scripture is a weapon not a balm.
Indeed, it is this predominantly inclusive disposition which makes Drumcree such a tragedy for it every year. That steeple has been plunged into its very heart annually since 1995 as it appears on television screens worldwide, associating the Church of Ireland directly, and unfairly let it be said, with the ugliest images of crass bigotry.
But any sympathy inspired by its predicament there is tempered by its seeming preference for wringing its hands and offering contorted explanations instead of just doing something. And after all, was it not their founder who said: "by their deeds ye shall know them". His observation might well be considered by our other Christian denominations too. It might help them understand how hypocritical they seem when urging both sides at Drumcree, and in the North generally, to get around a table and sort out their differences while themselves refusing to do just that about their own divisions. They might realise how hollow they sound.
Despite some heroic individual clergy in all denominations, Drumcree, the Northern troubles, and Ireland's 20th-century history generally exposed the churches as little more than tribal cabals in a context which has called again and again for a truly courageous Christian reaching-out.
Where has been the courage and imagination that might have retold the story of the Good Samaritan, for instance, in terms of our two tribes? That might cast, as an example, Portadown district master, Harold Gracey, as the victim, with Breandβn Mac Cionnaith of the Garvaghy Road residents as the Samaritan, or vice versa, to illustrate what a real Christian would be about in the North.
In Jesus's time, the Samaritans were despised by the Jews with as much passion as either side directs at the other in Porterdown. But as in the parable, it seems the clergy prefer to pass by. They must also attend to "higher" things, as it is assumed the priest and Levite in the parable had to do.
In Ireland, as elsewhere, it would greatly help if Christianity was to divest itself of national identities and concentrate instead on promoting its core universal message. That, after all, is what it is supposed to do. We would then be better neighbours to each other and a real example to our fractious friends in the former Yugoslavia.