Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, Dr Paul Colton, said stories emerging from institutions for unmarried mothers run by the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland were deeply unsettling and challenging for people of all faiths in Ireland.
Speaking at the St Patrick’s Day
Civic Service at St Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork, Bishop Colton said
the place of religion in Irish society had been placed under the
spotlight in the wake of “the harrowing accounts about mothers’ and
babies’ homes”.
He said he listened to Liveline
twice last week to hear “car-stopping, heart-rending testimony” of women
and children who experienced mother and baby homes and he was not in
the least surprised at the outbursts of anger against institutional
religion.
Church attitudes
While he did not agree with some
who had called for a boycott of St Patrick’s Day celebrations this year,
he acknowledged there was “something curiously unsettling and
profoundly challenging” in celebrating Ireland’s national saint and the
place of religion in Ireland without acknowledging “mistakes of the
past”.
“There is much in our religious
legacy to be worked through, and not only in institutional religion in
Ireland, but also its relationship with the State, to come to
understand, and to be reconciled about, even within ourselves perhaps,”
he said.
“Many people, including many
people who are religious, find themselves in an emotional heap – a heap
that has tilted their world on its axis. We live in times when the
relationship of many Irish people with religion is, at best,
complicated.”
Bishop Colton recalled how, before
he was elected bishop, he preached in his parish in Dublin in 1995
about the church’s attitude to unmarried mothers and their children and
he again preached about such attitudes two years ago during a service in
Cork.
“Repeatedly, over the years, I
have included the church of the day’s attitudes to unmarried mothers and
their babies as part of the litany of people who have been wounded by
things done in the name of the church and, even more shamefully, of
injustices committed in the name of Christ.
“Later that year [2015] I wrote to Judge Yvonne Murphy
asking that, in the interim report of her Commission of Investigation,
she recommend to Government that the terms of reference of her inquiry
be expanded to include Protestant mothers and babies homes also,” he
said.
Prejudices
Stressing he was not prejudging or
imputing wrongdoing to anyone by seeking to have Protestant mother and
baby homes included, Bishop Colton said it was important to acknowledge
that the story of institutional religion has not always been one of love
and generosity as espoused by Christ.
He recalled that when launching
the Cork LGBT Awareness Week in 2014, he noted that slaves, Jews,
science, single mothers, children born outside marriage, people in
inter-church marriages, divorcees and victims of suicide were among the
many to suffer from the prejudices of the institutional church.
Bishop Colton said that “the
desire to be instruments of what is right is not the monopoly of one
religion or, indeed, of religion at all. It is something that, whatever
our background, we share as a matter of the common good.”
But Jesus teaches in the Gospel
that people should be compassionate and that was why, “as people reflect
on the current love/hate relationship many in Ireland seem to have with
religion, that we truly need to know the truth of what happened in the
name of religion in the past and to acknowledge it”.
People need “to look around and to
ensure that the needs of our own time are truly being addressed and
met, and that we do so in a way that is just, generous, wholehearted and
compassionate and to ensure that we are not unwittingly or unthinkingly
complicit in new atrocities in our own time”.