{"id":2380,"date":"2005-09-15T09:43:47","date_gmt":"2005-09-15T09:43:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/churches-on-the-front-line.html"},"modified":"2005-09-15T09:43:47","modified_gmt":"2005-09-15T09:43:47","slug":"churches-on-the-front-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/churches-on-the-front-line.html","title":{"rendered":"Churches on the front line"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Tablet: Churches in Northern Ireland<\/a><\/p>\n

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Mass was cancelled this week at Our Lady\u2019s and the doors were bolted. I met Fr Paul Symonds, one of the parish priests (although after a number of attacks no priest lives in the presbytery at Harryville). He spoke of the inspiring signs of Christian love that have emerged from the darkness of Ballymena\u2019s summer. When the church was smothered in paint and graffiti this July a group from the Methodist, Church of Ireland, Baptist and Presbyterian churches worked together to clean it. One man in his seventies came from Clogh, a rural village, on his tractor with a power hose. After Mass that Sunday, local Presbyterians handed out red roses to parishioners as a sign of love to counter the hate. <\/p>\n

Fr Symonds is one of Ballymena\u2019s great mediators. Born in Ascot, Berkshire, he felt called in 1988 to serve in Northern Ireland: \u201cIt was a calling as strong as the calling to the priesthood.\u201d He works closely with clergy from the other churches and believes the awful events of the summer have brought them closer together. The Church of Ireland bishop, Alan Harper, came to Mass at All Saints and Harryville. \u201cThere was a spirit there I have rarely experienced before. A spirit of real joy.\u201d <\/p>\n

He compares the divisions in the province to \u201ctwo jealous brothers\u201d. \u201cThe violence we have seen is the negative fruit of the defeatist view that we are two communities. We have to accept we are one community and learn to rejoice in our differences.\u201d He is in dialogue with some of the perpetrators of violence in the Unionist community. <\/p>\n

Working alongside him is Billy McKay, 55, who has served 16 years in prison for paramilitary crimes committed when he was in the Ulster Volunteer Force. He has now converted to \u201csecular Unionism\u201d, he said, and believes passionately that religion and politics must be separated in Northern Ireland. He runs a quango \u2013 Community Voice Transforming Conflict \u2013 and seeks to influence the loyalist paramilitaries at street level. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Tablet: Churches in Northern Ireland Mass was cancelled this week at Our Lady\u2019s and the doors were bolted. I met Fr Paul Symonds, one of the parish priests (although after a number of attacks no priest lives in the presbytery at Harryville). He spoke of the inspiring signs of Christian love that have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nChurches on the front line - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/churches-on-the-front-line.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Churches on the front line - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the Tablet: Churches in Northern Ireland Mass was cancelled this week at Our Lady\u2019s and the doors were bolted. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}