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Bishop John McDowell on Disestablishment’s legacy
The Rt Revd John McDowell, Bishop of Clogher, referred to the legacy of Disestablishment in his Presidential Address to Clogher Diocesan Synod in Enniskillen last Thursday evening (26th September).
The Irish Church Act 1869 completed the nineteenth century parliamentary reform of the Church of Ireland but, while this was fiercely opposed at the time, the Church’s Disestablishment was its liberation.
“Whatever might otherwise have happened, Disestablishment enables the Church of Ireland, like the other Churches to continue as one Church in two civil jurisdictions,” he remarked. “This has allowed it (perhaps required it) to speak to either civil jurisdiction conscious of its place in the other and to speak to both from a grounding in the Kingdom of God.”
Bishop McDowell continued: “Without being backward looking or inward looking we have much to thank the Disestablishment generation for, particularly in the financial and administrative arrangements which they devised in very short order and which have survived more or less intact right down to today.”
However, the Church would also do well to acknowledge and learn from some aspects of its legacy.
Firstly, Establishment and all the Acts of Parliament that supported it over the years were intended to give the Church of Ireland “a privileged position far beyond its numbers.” Only 12% of the population of Ireland belonged even nominally to the Church of Ireland.
Secondly, the ‘Establishment mentality’ of the Church of Ireland “didn’t cease with the passing of the Irish Church Act.” The Church had, over time, learned “not to depend on Big House generosity for our well–being” and … “to stand on our own two feet financially and indeed spiritually.”
This “rather strong self–preservation instinct,” he suggested, had prevented the Church from “being that leaven which we are called to be” in society and from using “our unique position to facilitate the sort of critical dialogue between and within the different jurisdictions on this island.”
In his remarks, he also commented that Disestablishment “set the Church of Ireland free to be what it is, a minority tradition in the Body of Christ, a Church on the same standing as others in the family of God, one branch of the True Vine.”
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