Letter: Churches right to call for legacy role in Northern Ireland but we cannot say sorry for what we did not do

A letter from WA Miller:
By Letters
Published 26th Jan 2023, 06:46 BST
Updated 26th Jan 2023, 06:47 BST
The Most Reverend Eamon Martin, Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland (seated left) says churches could play a role in legacy truth recovery. Also pictured other church leaders (left to right) Right Reverend Dr John Kirkpatrick, Presbyterian moderator, Right Rev Andrew Forster, President of the Irish Council of Churches, Rev David Nixon, President of the Methodist Church in Ireland. Seated (left) the Most Reverend John McDowell, Church of Ireland Primate of All IrelandThe Most Reverend Eamon Martin, Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland (seated left) says churches could play a role in legacy truth recovery. Also pictured other church leaders (left to right) Right Reverend Dr John Kirkpatrick, Presbyterian moderator, Right Rev Andrew Forster, President of the Irish Council of Churches, Rev David Nixon, President of the Methodist Church in Ireland. Seated (left) the Most Reverend John McDowell, Church of Ireland Primate of All Ireland
The Most Reverend Eamon Martin, Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland (seated left) says churches could play a role in legacy truth recovery. Also pictured other church leaders (left to right) Right Reverend Dr John Kirkpatrick, Presbyterian moderator, Right Rev Andrew Forster, President of the Irish Council of Churches, Rev David Nixon, President of the Methodist Church in Ireland. Seated (left) the Most Reverend John McDowell, Church of Ireland Primate of All Ireland

Archbishop Eamon Martin (Legacy ‘role’ for churches, January 23, see link below) is right to ask for the involvement pf the institutionalised church to be involved in truth recovery.

But it should not be in hand-wringing and apologising all round as is customary. We have had too much of that. We cannot apologise for what we were not involved in doing.

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None today can be held responsible for what became the imperial church of the West through its use of the supposed donation to the Bishop of Rome of much of the West by its Emperor Constantine. A fresco by Raphael of the kneeling Constantine handing over the Decretals to the then Bishop of Rome, Pope Sylvester, can be seen on the wall of the Stanza di Constantino in the Vatican City State today.

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The Decretals were shown to be a forgery by the Humanist scholar, Lorenzo Valla in 1435. When Eamon Duffy in ‘Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes’, Yale University Press, 1997, writes of the tortured relationship between the two islands of the archipelago beginning with a papal blessing of a Norman force landing in Ireland (nation states as we know them today then did not exist) to reform the territorial church amongst other matters the Decretals having given Britannia to the Bishops of Rome.

This, and much besides can be read in ‘Documents of the Christian Church’ ed by Henry Bettenson, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, 1963.

No apologising for what we did not do but the ‘talking cure’, to borrow a term from psycho-analysis (and there is a lot to talk about) might just work.

W A Miller, Belfast BT13

Church leaders could play role in Troubles legacy 'truth recovery' gathering hears

Related topics:Eamon MartinChurchesNorthern IrelandRome