21.04.2019
‘Public interest must take account of religious belonging’ – Archbishop’s Easter Day Sermon
Civic engagement which takes account of religious and non religious stakeholders is essential to the public interest and to building a trusted democracy, the Archbishop of Dublin said in his Easter sermon. Archbishop Michael Jackson highlighted the irony of an Ireland pushing a relentlessly secular agenda and shutting its ears to diversity simply because that diversity wears a religious smile. He was speaking during the Festal Eucharist for Easter Day in Christ Church Cathedral this morning (Sunday April 21).
The Season of Easter is a ‘space of God’ in which new things happen and in which transformations take place, he said pointing to the new spaces of God and new relationships that came out of the Resurrection as outlined in St John’s Gospel [20: 1–18]. He said that for disciples of Jesus Christ and as people of faith, one of the ‘spaces of God’ that we are to create and share with others is an open and generous society for and with all our citizens. He encouraged the idea of an open civic dialogue to create a space for this.
The Archbishop observed that the Citizen’s Assembly had become a place of engagement with a wide range of interesting discussions and ideas about the present and the future of Irish society. He suggested that it might be a place for people of faith and people of society to come together to discuss the future of public interest.
“It would be an engagement quite different from the other matters discussed by The Citizen’s Assembly. But it could lead us right into two things that currently are at loggerheads in Ireland and neither of them is going away anywhere soon: secular policy and religious belonging,” he stated.
He continued: “The impression that we are given increasingly is that religious belonging should have taken itself off long ago in order to leave the adults to get on with the real work. One of the phrases that is a lightning rod is this: ‘the public interest’ on both sides of the Irish Sea. Rowan Williams spoke recently of its absence from political life as being ‘a recipe for anger, bitterness and stalemate.’ To this we might add that its absence from religious life is ‘a recipe for implosion, exclusivity and irrelevance’”.
Archbishop Jackson said that the public interest was essential to uphold and build up a functioning and trusted democracy. He suggested that democracy must take stock of the widest range of resources available to the public interest – non religious and religious alike. Religious resources must go beyond the inherited binary divisions internal to Christianity and between Catholic and Protestant, he stated.
“Religion in Ireland now is a much bigger and wider concept. ‘Public interest’ needs to give voice to real things beyond budgetary provision and number crunching and discontent. It needs to address ‘public wellbeing’ and ‘private happiness’ and the provision of both, otherwise the triad to which Rowan Williams gave voice: ‘anger, bitterness and stalemate’ will take even deeper root than they have done. We need to remember always the conviction: my margin is your centre and your margin is my centre. This lies at the core of respectful, fruitful dialogue and democracy,” he said.
Archbishop Jackson said it would be wrong to confine such a dialogue to church/state relations. This language is inadequate in contemporary Ireland, he contended.
“Whatever the deep concerns about individual expressions of Christianity; whatever the deep concerns about the binary denominationalism that remains a feature of Christianity as we who are its exponents have made it (we call it history); whatever the general revulsion from institutional religion itself because of the abuse of power and the abuse of persons, a totally secular state – as reflected in policy and politics – does not seem to me to accord with the fact that there remains an active spiritual and religious sense in the majority of Irish people and that there are new spiritual awarenesses and awakenings. Neither does it accord with the fact that the many people who are Irish and have come from outside Ireland have brought with them as heritage and as gift the combination of culture and faith that is their identity. It would be a consummate irony were an Ireland that pushes relentlessly a secular agenda in a post–secular world wilfully to shut its ears to the very diversity that is staring it in the face through its own residents and citizens simply and precisely because such diversity wears a religious smile,” he said.
The challenge for stakeholders and policymakers, secular, religious and political, is to pull together the areas which still divide them. “Being divided in such a way that we are Other to each Other does not make for a mature or vibrant society. For people of faith such division does not inhabit the new spaces of God given at Easter. It inhibits. People of faith, people of society together can do this,” he said.