People today live “in a culture within which anger rather than
courtesy is the most prevalent behavioural pattern”, the new Church of
Ireland primate Richard Clarke has said.
Warning that “many seem
to find their only focus and meaning in life through constant rage”, he
said, “Salman Rushdie has coined a useful phrase, ‘outrage identity’,
for those who can find any meaning for themselves only in their anger at
others.
“True courtesy is the converse of spiteful anger. And
courtesy is not simply good manners – desirable as they most certainly
are – but goes a great deal further.”
He was speaking in the
context of deep divisions within the Church of Ireland over same-sex
issues, though without making explicit reference to these, at his
service of enthronement as Archbishop of Armagh, primate of All Ireland
and Metropolitan, at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh on Saturday.
“The
essence of courtesy is that it treats ‘the other’ – whoever or whatever
that ‘other’ may be – as an individual always worthy of respect, whose
very individuality is to be allowed an integrity of its own,” he added.
Courtesy, he said, meant “generously going further than we actually have
to go, in our service of another individual. It is the very reverse of
manipulation, mean-mindedness, and calculated malice, which sadly can so
easily be cloaked as moral high-mindedness”.
He said: “How often,
when we hear those fateful words at the beginning of a speech, ‘With
all due respect . . .’, we just know that we are going to have to endure
a particularly nasty rant that is utterly disrespectful.”
The
courtesy of God was “never ego-driven, unloving or bullying. And if you
and I cannot, and will not, model the courtesy of God in our dealings
with one another within the church, and in our relationships with those
outside the walls of the church who are also made in the image and
likeness of God, we have indeed fallen at the first fence in Christian
faithfulness”, he said.
Attending the service were Catholic
primate Cardinal Seán Brady, moderator of the Presbyterian Church Rev Dr
Roy Patton, president of the Methodist Church, Rev Kenneth Lindsay,
Archbishop of Dublin Michael Jackson and Anglican Communion secretary
general Canon Kenneth Kearon.