20.01.2013
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin Preaches at St Saviour’s Arklow
The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Revd Dr Diarmuid Martin, preached at an ecumenical service in Saint Saviour’s Church of Ireland Church in Arklow, this afternoon (Sunday January 20) to celebrate the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
Welcoming the large congregation, rector of Arklow, the Revd Nigel Sherwood said that it was believed to be the first time a Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin had preached in St Saviour’s. He highlighted the neighbourly cooperation that has been going on in various communities in the Arklow area and said the historic service came on top of all that work which had been going on quietly behind the scenes.
He thanked Archbishop Martin for coming to Arklow and welcomed his master of ceremonies, Fr Damien McNeice also. He also thanked the members of other denominations and their leaders for coming to the service. He paid tribute to Janet in the local parish office for her work in producing the order of service and the church wardens and those who assisted with the parking.
There was a large local ecumenical involvement in the service and music was provided by the Revival Gospel Choir.
In his homily Archbishop Martin said the call to ecumenism was an urgent call. He added: “There are of course many areas where enormous progress has been made and if we look at them in terms of the length of years of our common history of division these gains have been attained in a remarkably short time.”
Archbishop Martin told the congregation in Arklow that prayer was the essential stepping stone towards overcoming our “self–generated” divisions. He later said that a dimension of silence and contemplation must also form part of our contribution as believers to our world, where so often the emptiness of noise prevents us from even asking the fundamental questions about life.
Referring to address last year by Archbishop Rowan Williams to the Synod of Catholic Bishops in Rome, he said: “He(Archbishop Williams) noted that if we do not manage to live more humanly in this sense we “run the risk of trying to sustain faith on the basis of an un–transformed set of human habits – with the all too familiar result that the Church comes to look unhappily like so many purely human institutions, anxious, busy, competitive and controlling”.
You can read the full text of Archbishop Martin’s homily in St Saviour’s here