by Deborah Thomas BISHOP Edward Daly of Deny has urged terrorists and their supporters to leave the Church. "They are excommunicating themselves", he said in•a sermon on Sunday.
Bishop Daly stressed that Christ preached against violence and hatred and charged those involved in taking innocent human life with "following the gospel of Satan". He referred to the IRA murder in Derry last week of a young Protestant electrician because the man had worked in a British Army base, and commented: "Many other people are guilty as well as those who pull the trigger or prime the bomb . . . ".
In his sermon at St Eugene's Cathedral in Derry, Bishop Daly made clear that he was not formally excommunicating anyone but called upon such people not to come back into the fold of the Church until they had fully repented.
The Bishop's stance has provoked an angry response from Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional IRA. Mr Martin McGuinness this week accused the sermon of being "selective, biased and flawed". He added that Bishop Daly was giving succour to the British and perpetuating repression.
Meanwhile, the first integrated Protestant-Catholic school in Northern Ireland to be founded outside Belfast opened its doors this week to 89 children of both denominations.
Some 95 per cent of Ulster's children are educated along denominational lines in either Catholic or Protestant schools; the opening of the aptly named All Children Primary School in Newcastle, County Down, brings the total of integrated schools in the province to five.
Local fund-raising and donations from unnamed British-based trusts have helped provide £100,000 to launch the school, where the denominational mix of both staff and pupils will be carefully controlled to remain at about fifty-fifty.
• THE Dungannon priest, Fr Denis Faul, has claimed that the 92 prisoners refusing prison food at Crumlin Road Jail are fasting because of brutality by warders against inmates who are not aligned to paramilitary organisations.