Archbishop Eamon Martin with Archbishop Richard Clarke Sarah Mac Donald
Archbishop Richard Clarke tells Sarah Mac Donald about his plans to get the Church of Ireland out of survival mode
As the year of centenaries and elections begins to unfold, opinions on party manifestos and commemorative events are reaching a crescendo. Amid the clamouring views, one authoritative voice, with an all-island perspective, needs to be heard.
Archbishop Richard Clarke is the Church of Ireland Primate of All Ireland. Members of his flock are found north and south of the border. Indeed, one of the flock, Arlene Foster, is now at the helm in Northern Ireland as First Minister and leader of the DUP.
Discussing the significance of 2016 with The Irish Catholic, Archbishop Clarke appealed to people on both sides of the border “not to confine themselves to marking either the Easter Rising or the Somme but to allow the totality of what is being commemorated to be celebrated together”. He hopes the people of Ireland “will have the maturity” not to make the commemoration an either/or in relation to the Rising and the Battle of the Somme, because “there is too much grey” and people need a more nuanced understanding of both.
His comments have a special resonance in view of the new First Minister’s signal that she would not attend centenary celebrations of the 1916 Rising in Dublin. For Foster, honouring the Easter Rising would be a betrayal of the State she is loyal to and would pay homage to republicans who took up arms against that state while lacking a popular mandate. That would pave the way for republicans in the North to draw parallels between their ‘struggle’ and that of 1916.
Arlene Foster is someone Archbishop Clarke knows “reasonably well” and is “a person I like very much”. He is pleased that a member of the Church of Ireland is “involved at this level in political life” because Anglicans in Ireland “have had a very low profile in political life particularly in recent times”.
Involvement
This, the 66 year old observes, has been one of the aspects of their life in the Republic, where they have had “relatively little involvement in the upper aspect of political life” with the exception of former Green Party leader, Trevor Sargent. “So it is encouraging to find people who are involved in politics and I would encourage Church of Ireland people to have a higher profile and level of involvement,” he commented.
Next summer, Archbishop Clarke along with his Catholic counterpart in Armagh, Archbishop Eamon Martin, will take a group from Northern Ireland and the Republic to visit Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin and then on to the Irish peace park in Messines and the Somme. “It’s a kind of pilgrimage to try and draw people together to see the totality. The more we try to do that the more the memories will become wholesome rather than simply partisan,” he said.
When he talks about allowing the totality to be celebrated together he means that “1916 is part of what has made this country and we need to commemorate it well and properly and constructively. But the First World War was also at its height at that time, particularly the Somme, and we need to think about all that that epitomises, North and South, because we tend to think it is just a Northern Irish thing.”
People in the South tend to forget that thousands of Irish men lost their lives in that battle and the First World War.
He also reminds people that some of the greatest nationalists and republicans were members of the Church of Ireland.
Any survey of Irish history would be “hard pressed” to find nationalists who weren’t protestant. He cites luminaries such as Robert Emmet, Thomas Davis, Wolf Tone, Parnell, Isaac Butt and Henry Joy McCracken and of course Yeats.
Though republicanism and national independence were later to become “much less a protestant thing” it was he underlines, “never totally expunged” and he believes there is a confidence in the Republic today that recognises there is no antithesis between the two.
When he talks about the totality and the grey areas, he is referring to people like the poet Francis Ledwidge, who was a nationalist and wrote poetry about the aspirations he and people like Thomas McDonagh had in his poems O’Connell Street and Lament for the Poets of 1916 but who was killed in action at the Battle of Passchendaele during World War I.
The Archbishop admits he is personally fascinated by the figure of Thomas Kettle, the barrister, nationalist, and campaigner for Home Rule, who was disappointed by the 1916 Rising but never disavowed the people involved in it but also believed that the aims of World War I were righteous. He was killed in the later stages of the Somme in September 1916. “So it is not all clear cut…”, Dr Clarke reflects.
Historian
As a historian he is trained to look beyond simplistic narratives. “I do think that theologically and socially and politically we should be a big enough to be able to look at the totality and see why it has got us where we are.”
Dublin-born Clarke’s own family history is a “mixed bag”. His father was also Dublin-born and served as a Church of Ireland rector in the capital. But he highlights that he has “Irish, English, Scots, Welsh and Manx blood” and perhaps this has contributed to his tendency to “think of myself as being a mongrel – a very content mongrel; I carry an Irish passport, I regard myself as Irish in a kind of mongrel way”.
Furthermore, he is “very conscious that the primary identity we have as people of faith is that we are all made in God’s images and likeness – children of God – and that should be the identity we treasure most rather than the other labels we attach to ourselves.”
Referring to the book he wrote in 2000, And Is It True?, where he explored his theme drawing on First World War poetry, he explains that Christian faith is “very much like a no man’s land in that you are between two trenches – the trench of an absolute fundamentalism and rigidity and a trench which is postmodern relativism, which means that nothing is true of any kind. As people of faith you have to be in-between those two trenches and it is not always a very comfortable place to be.”
He feels the poetry of the First World War is very powerful in expressing the fragility of how we feel in that no-man’s land.
Future
One of his hopes for the future is that people in Northern Ireland and the Republic will concentrate on the big vision for society rather than thinking in terms of sectional politics.
With a general election on the horizon in the Republic and Assembly elections in Northern Ireland, he warns that the “homeless rates are no credit to a modern state” and that the homeless “have been forgotten” perhaps because “there are other things that are much more likely to win you elections”.
While he welcomes the “slight upswing in the economy” in the Republic, he is still “deeply concerned” that there are a lot of people disengaged from the political process and there are a lot of people who have fallen out of the bottom of the whole social life of the country. The number of food banks is indicative of this and while the recent battle over welfare in Northern Ireland appears to have been won, “it has been a long hard process”.
Political disengagement and “a lurch to the right” are matters of concern. He is critical of American presidential hopeful, Republican Donald Trump over his “abhorrent” proposal that America should refuse entry to all non-American Muslims.
Archbishop Clarke warns that Syrian and Iraqi refugees coming to Ireland are not coming as economic migrants. “We can assume that they are coming in fear of their lives,” he observes.
The Church of Ireland Primate acknowledges that a degree of care must be taken as to who is coming in, but he said he would not want to go down the road of some Eastern European countries which have said they will only take Christian refugees. “If we start to delineate between different forms of refugees – those whom we will relate to because they are Christians and those we won’t relate to – I think we are disgracing ourselves.”
He warned that a fear many have is that those migrants and refugees who came to Ireland a number of years ago will now be the forgotten ones because all the emphasis would be on those who have come in from the horrors of Iraq and Syria. “There is a danger that the displaced people may actually be those who have been waiting for years for residence.”
On the issue of faith schools, the Church of Ireland Primate warns that the “notion that denominational education is no longer fit for purpose is more a political notion than actually something that will stand up.” Referring to a recent survey of parents of children in Church of Ireland national schools, he said it showed there was “utter satisfaction” with the system and that people for the most part were “utterly content with the patronage of the bishops”.
Legitimate place
For the time being, he believes, there is going to be “a legitimate place for schools that are of a denominational hue” and he warned that the notion of sweeping away denominational schools is part of “a secularist agenda”. He adds: “It doesn’t stack up when it comes to people’s use of denominational education or satisfaction with them.”
On Minister for Education Jan O’Sullivan’s proposed abolition of Rule 68, Dr Clarke said it wouldn’t “in essence” change an awful lot as the Education Act makes it “very clear” that religious patronage is allowed. “We should be looking at a mixed economy. There will always be a place for schools that are outside the religious sphere in a secular sphere but for the time being there is also going to be a legitimate place for schools that are denominational.” He adds: “I think it should be perfectly possible in a liberal democracy to live with a mixed economy on this matter.”
The head of the Anglican Church in Ireland is also concerned about the push to liberalise abortion warning it could result in a “eugenics culture” which would pressure parents of unborn disabled children to abort. Liberalisation could “begin a process where if there is any risk that a child may be disabled in any way, then a mother will be under pressure to have an abortion.”
For the Church of Ireland, the life of the unborn and the life of the mother both deserve protection. “We have never ever said there should be an open door to abortion on demand or anything of that kind.”
But Archbishop Clarke highlights that there are “exceptional times” when a mother’s life is at stake, when “an abortion may sadly be morally justified”, but he added that it was “still a horrifying and a sad thing”.
On the issue of fatal foetal abnormality, the father of two adult children and one grandchild, underlines that most doctors are “more chary than politicians” on this issue. “We don’t always know for certain that a child may not survive outside the womb for even a short period, and that brief time may sometimes be of great comfort to parents.”
Dr Clarke underlines that the death of an unborn child is never a matter “of no consequence” and said he was speaking as someone whose wife had had two miscarriages. “It is something I feel quite passionately about having had, in my own personal life, the experience of miscarriages. It is a trauma for both the father and the mother.”
He warns people against seeing the beginning of life as a ‘happening’ and not a gift, and the end of life as just an ‘event’. “You can be brought to very dangerous places when you get careless about the end of life; it is a very quick jump to get very careless about the beginning of life as well. I think one needs to be extremely careful when you go down a track of saying human life is anything other than a gift.
“Sometimes at the end of life, when someone is dying, it is very hard to see that this is still a gift of life and at the beginning of life, with the unborn child, sometimes it must be very difficult to believe that this in Christian terms is a gift. But I think once we start to lose that you can be brought to very dangerous places.”
Recalling the death of his wife Linda in a hospice in 2009, and the “wonderful care” she received in the closing days of her life, the Archbishop said it had made him personally very engaged with end of life issues. “One of the things I emphasised when I became Archbishop was my concern with those beginning of life and end of life issues” and he underlines that he is quite happy to be considered “very conservative” on these matters.
No limits
Liberalism, he suggests, does not mean that “there are no limits to what society may choose to make legal. To me there is a fashion to say that this or that is what liberal democracies do and therefore Ireland must do it, but I think we just need to be ourselves and take a deep breath and say – is this actually the direction in which we want to go?”
As head of the Church of Ireland, Archbishop Clarke is making preparations for 2019, when the Church will mark 150 years since disestablishment. “It is quite a good watershed to take stock of ourselves, to see are we preparing for the future.”
As part of this strategising for the next 150 years, the Church of Ireland will undertake “an inspection from outside”. According to the Primate, they will ask people from other Churches in Ireland and elsewhere “to look at us dispassionately but also kindly and critically” and identify what “we are doing well and where we are absolutely failing”.
This objective assessment is intended to be a “dispassionate” critique which is loving but will also “help us to see the areas which are neglected and the areas where we are clearly making a mark and bringing the Gospel into the world.”
The last census showed that a lot of people who carry the Church of Ireland badge are not really much engaged with the worship of the Church and he describes that as a reality check.
“We have got to get out of survival mode – of lurching from the immediate to the immediate – and get into a mode where we are confident about where we want to go and what we want to be in the life of Ireland.”