Irish Times Notes06 Feb 21

Church of Ireland Notes from ‘The Irish Times’

Gazette digitization complete

The Church of Ireland Gazette Digital Archive is now complete. All editions of the newspaper from its foundation in 1856 up to and including 2010 are freely available electronically at https://esearch.informa.ie/rcb. Since 2010, the Gazette has been available as an e–paper.

Written and read by lay and clerical members and others, the Gazette provides the longest–running public commentary on the Church’s affairs, and as such is recognised as a valuable primary source for understanding the complexities and nuances of Church of Ireland and indeed wider Protestant identity, as well as the Church’s contribution to political and cultural life north and south.

In 2013, the RCB Library’s goal to digitize and make freely available the complete run of the newspaper began modestly with uploading the content of the 1913 issues. Since then, a combination of state funding, private sponsorship and the support of central Church funds has sustained the development of the project, and thanks to the generous grant from the Irish Government’s Reconciliation Fund, administered by the Department of Foreign Affairs, the enterprise, which has been driven with admirable determination by Dr Susan Hood, is now complete.

The Reconciliation Fund grant has further allowed for the ‘Borderless Church’ – a series of reflections, which began last September, to analyse the content of the paper during each of the five decades between 1950 and 1999, in six contrasting and varied presentations by a variety of writers – David Bird, Dr Marie Coleman, Dr Ian d’Alton, the Revd Clifford Skillen and Professor Brian Walker.

The final ‘Borderless Church’ presentation, on the 1990s, is by the Archbishop of Armagh, the Most Revd John McDowell, and is titled ‘Flicking Through the Pages’. This aptly titled piece is all the more engaging because he was ordained right in the middle of the decade – on St Columba’s Day (9th June) 1995 for the curacy of Antrim in the Diocese of Connor. Looking back, he reflects that “to read through the Gazettes of the 1990s is to be transported to a different aeon, never mind a different century”. The decade “was also the aeon of the Celtic Tiger, Drumcree, the Downing Street Declaration, the first and second ceasefires, the Good Friday Agreement and the Omagh bombing” and represented “very difficult years” for the Church of Ireland, not least in the context of “the event/standoff/siege” that was Drumcree.

Archbishop McDowell pays tribute to several of “the dominant personalities” who led the Church through these times, not least “Robin Eames as Archbishop of Armagh with his resilience and steady diplomacy in Church and in society.”  Reflecting on the many challenges with which he had to contend, the current archbishop concludes how his predecessor “steered a course between urging greater openness and Christian compassion on the one hand and providing a shepherd’s care and reassurance to a fragile if resilient community on the other. His General Synod speeches and other major interventions during this period were reported exhaustively in the Gazette and are without exception weighty, considered and conciliatory. There is nothing florid or even particularly eloquent in the conventional sense about them. But they were what was needed, not only for the hour, but for the long haul, a prodigy of steadfast and sometimes painful endeavour.”

In addition to paying attention to the lofty issues of national and international significance, Archbishop McDowell further reflects on the many other issues where the Gazette provided the platform for discussion and discernment.

To view the Archbishop’s text in full together with all the other ‘Borderless Church’ presentations, go to: www.ireland.anglican.org/borderless–church