THIS WEEK by Mgr BRUCE KENT

My country right or right
There has been an understandable desire on the part of many church leaders to maintain that the Irish conflict has nothing to do with religion. "It wasn't me, Miss" is an attitude we all learned at school. Interestingly enough, in his excellent book, "States of Ireland," Conor Cruise O'Brien takes a qualified but contrary line.
"What I have in mind," he says, "is something more general: the role of the Churches in encouraging, exalting and extending.the kind of
tribal-sectarian selfrighteousness which forms a culture in which violence so easily multiplies."
Ho ho ho, says the trendy English liberal. So you see the Churches have prepared the ground in which nationalism and violence so easily flourish. Except that the same trendy English liberal, being so much the product of the same value system of exalted nationalism, is hardly aware of the way that it distorts his particular vision of the truth.
No English withers are wrung, nobody loses any sleep, over the locking up in deplorable conditions (c.f. International Red Cross), with convicted criminals, of over 500 men against whom no charge has been laid.
When our nationalism demands it "innocent until proved guilty" becomes "guilty until proved innocent". When our nationalism demands it, we are quite ready to do things to people that everyone else calls torture, while we get upset at so nasty a word. Because of the distorting effect of the different nationalisms which Christians world-wide have not only tolerated, but encouraged, over the years. it is with great pleasure that I lift my biretta high to salute Church leaders generally in Rhodesia, and Catholic Church leaders particularly in South Africa, for their bravery in the face of the diseased nationalism with which their countries ar afflicted.
Thus the Rhodesians, with Archbishop Markall as a principal signatory, recently issued "an appeal to conscience" in which they tackled the issue of the behaviour of security forces, affirming "a pattern of persisting and deliberate illegal conduct by certain members of the security forces". In the situation of today's Rhodesia that can't have been easy to say. And the biretta stays well up for Cardinal McCann and the Bishops of South Africa who condemned a draft Government bill aimed at preventing any advice being given about conscientious objection, under penalty of £6,000 or 10 years in jail. The suppression of discussion. they said, was incompatible with Christ's gospel of peace.
Archbishop Hurley went Further later, stating that in so unjust a situation, to defend apartheid was to defend an unjust cause, and that "conscientious objection seems the only possible Christian stand."
That can't have been easy to say either. The attitudes of both hierarchies should encourage us to think in world. terms rather than in local terms. Thinking in local terms has too often, and with unhappy results, led us all to bend the rule of law and the pattern of Christian morality in our own favour.