Sir, - I write to express publicly my deep respect and admiration for Rev John Pickering, Rector of Drumcree Parish, acting with the loyal support of the Select Vestry. I have sent him a postcard to say so.
In the face of most unfair and ill-judged pressures, he has stood resolutely for the basic Christian right of the public and members of the Orange Order or lodges within it to worship in any Church of Ireland church. I felt he was badly let down by the recent Dublin General Synod, whose location in this case was politically appropriate. Up to the time of the Synod the hopeless public relations work of the Portadown lodges had not helped.
The synod may have been truly representative 100 or more years ago, but since then the church membership in the South has been decimated, not least by RC marriage rules, as well as by the 1920s harrying of C of I upper and lesser classes as the then newly-vanquished "British Protestant ascendancy".
The Southern C of I folk had to learn humility, keep a low and submissive profile and try to please the new State. To some extent this has become habitual. They were submerged in a sea of hostile Republican and aggressively State-supported Hiberno-Catholic nationalism.
With ever falling numbers, churches closed and clergy often not replaced, and parishes joined up, they had to cosy up to their environment as best they could. By the second generation they became no longer British, but half-Irish; by avoiding overt Protestantism, they managed to co-exist peacefully with their neighbouring Hiberno-Catholic priests and people. Now, in the third generation, it seems to me, our Southern Irish counterparts are proud to be Irish, do not like the British connection, and regard the Tricolour as their flag of duty and loyalty. They are, in effect, no friends of us Northerners.
The synod has, if my memory of the recent media comments is correct, some 350 Southern Irish delegates, representing some 100,000 members. The Northern churches have probably rather more than 250,000 members, and yet have only 280 delegates (round figures, of course). Nationalists in the North would damn this state of affairs as a most gross gerrymander, even though it has come about gradually over a long period.
The Synod seems to me to have felt it wiser and more politically correct to be seen to put the screws on the Orangemen of Portadown and on the rector who dares to receive them, preach the Gospel to them and guide their worship, than to risk damaging the good relations being desperately cultivated with the dissident Hiberno-Catholics coming over the divide, and those considering that course. Any resulting potential loss of Northern members evidently does not matter.
Northern C of I folk who are reasonably cross with the Synod and the secretariat who refused to accept what I feel was a very proper response by the Orangemen to somewhat patronising and arrogantly worded demands, should under no circumstances rush out of their pews to some other church. No, they should call an extraordinary general vestry meeting, discuss the events of the Synod with their rectors and synodsmen who were there, make clear that the gerrymander is long overdue for correction, and begin to set into motion the Church's legal wheels to do this. - Yours, etc., John Redmond,
Craigavon, Co Armagh.