Irish Church Leaders mark 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement

On Thursday, 28 September 2023, the Secretary of the Dicastery for Christian Unity, Bishop Brian Farrell, participated in a special Service of the Word, marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. The service, at the Waldensian Evangelical Church in Piazza Cavour, took place in the context of a two-day visit to Rome by the Church Leaders Group (Ireland). The Agreement, signed in April 1998, and later endorsed in plebiscites on both sides of the Irish border, brought an end, for the most part, to thirty years of political and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

The service was led by the members of the Church Leaders Group (Ireland): Bishop Andrew Forster, President of the Irish Council of Churches; Archbishop Eamon Martin, Catholic Archbishop of Armagh; Archbishop John McDowell, Anglican Archbishop of Armagh; Revd Dr Sam Mawhinney, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland; and Rev David Turtle, President of the Methodist Church in Ireland.

Later on the same day, Bishop Farrell, together with Fr Martin Browne OSB, Official of the Western Section of the Dicastery, attended a seminar led by the Irish church leaders at the Pontifical Irish College. The seminar, organised jointly by the Embassies to the Holy See of Ireland of the United Kingdom, included the church leaders’ personal reflections on the anniversary and on the role which churches play in peace-making and reconciliation.