Media Library

Speeches

Remarks by President McAleese at the opening of the conference on church and state

Remarks by President McAleese at the opening of the conference on church and state in the 20th century

 “Religion and the State in Twentieth Century Ireland” is a subject of major significance at this time in our history as we approach the 2000th Anniversary of the birth of Christ – and we have reached a turning point in our island’s history. Indeed in the wider European context, the topic of the first lecture, by Rabbi Julia Neuberger, “Jews and Western Europe after the Holocaust” is particularly apposite because, it was on the 9th and 10th of November 1938 – just sixty years ago this month – that the Jews of Germany, Austria and Sudenten underwent what one historian has described as “a degradation ritual”, known now as the infamous Kristallnacht. By 1945, some six million Jews had died in the Holocaust or Shoah which means “destruction” in Hebrew. Why did Western democratic powers not act in 1938 to prevent further disaster and the violation of human rights in Germany? Why did “the heavens not darken”, as Professor Arno J. Mayer entitled his book.

Rabbi Julia Neuberger discusses many of those issues in her book “On being Jewish” and concludes that one should never forget what happened less than sixty years ago. But it is important to be informed and to understand the nature of the society in Europe which was responsible for the crime of genocide. As Rabbi Neuberger has written.

“I desperately hope that my children will be clearer, and fairer, in their reactions to Germany and the Germans, but I do not believe they can be unless the holocaust is taught properly in Britain, in Germany, in America, in Israel, and indeed all over the world. It must be taught alongside other genocides, particularly those taking place in our time. It is a lesson which matters.”

A contemporary poet, Czeslaw Milosz, questions in recent work whether Europe has learned the lesson of the holocaust. He writes, in his poem “Sarajevo”:

 

“While a country murdered and raped calls for help from the Europe which it has trusted, they yawn.

While statesmen choose villainy and no voice is raised to call it by name …

Listening with indifference to the cries of those who perish.

Because they are after all just barbarians killing each other”.

 

The organisers of this conference are to be congratulated for including a session by the distinguished scholar, Professor Nikky Singh, whose late father – and she through her own writings – has done so much to bring about dialogue at his institute between the different world religions which have so many followers in India. The West has much to learn from such dialogue and has an obligation to jettison the stereotypes of different religions so prevalent in contemporary media coverage of international events. Irish people, too, know much about the dangers of stereotyping, albeit in a very different historical context to that of India.Fr. Michael Hurley’s latest book “Christian Unity: an ecumenical second spring?” deals with a subject with which I have been personally familiar for most of my adult life. His work in Dublin and Belfast over forty years parallels the work of Professor Singh’s father. Fr. Hurley has presented a challenge in his text to every Christian on this island when he writes that the ecumenical spirit also means acquiring a number of new and quite radical insights and convictions - that divided Christians, although they do differ, share nevertheless the one faith and are in communion with each other, although not yet perfectly.

The cover of Fr. Hurley’s book reproduces a famous Japanese woodcut by Hokusai entitled “The Hollow of the Deep Sea Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa”. It conveys a sense of the unity of things with the boat curving into the shape of the stormy waves as the crew place their confidence in the Shinto shrine at the stern of the boat.

Perhaps that Japanese woodcut is also a good image of the voyage of the churches during the past thirty years as Ireland confronted the challenges of industrialisation, urbanisation and membership of the European Union. The lectures tomorrow from Drs Ruth Barrington, Margaret MacCurtain and Christel Hugh will examine central aspects of church-state relations from the 1950s to the 1990’s.

In Northern Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s the welfare state provided benefits to all including free secondary and free university education which were of inestimable value to the minority community. That opening up of education was so beautifully described by Bellaghy’s famous son, Seamus Heaney, in his poem “From the Canton of Expectation”, where he talks about those with “intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars” with

 

“Books open in the newly wired kitchens.

Young heads that might have dozed a life away

against the flanks of milking cows were busy

paving and pencilling their first causeways

across the prescribed texts”.

The “intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars” were the liberated – those who were given access to education – who could finally attain the skills and learning to break out of an existence that looked in on itself.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, it is important for the churches to work as closely as possible together in order to help shape the future development of Irish society based on shared values and principles which place the weak, the marginalised, the unemployed and the poor at the centre of community priorities.

May the search for truth guide your deliberations over the next two days. I hope also that the passionate God, as written about by Professor McDonagh, guide you in your reflections.