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In August, less than a month after the second cease-fire took hold in Northern Ireland, thousands of Presbyterian pastors and lay leaders gathered in Belfast to make a historic public recommitment to peacemaking between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

Michael Cassidy, a South African evangelical influential in producing open elections and the end to apartheid in South Africa, challenged them to a new level of personal responsibility for bringing about reconciliation and tolerance. At his invitation, nearly two-thirds of the 3,000 in the audience stood up to signal their pledge to peacemaking. Earlier this year, the Anglican Church of Ireland took similar steps when its general synod voted to condemn the presence of sectarian views within their denomination and to conduct an inquiry to determine how severe the problem is.

"Many of my friends are now becoming leaders in the movement of reconciliation. Some are working on the commission on marches, some in mediation," says Cecil Kerr, an Anglican priest who founded the Christian Renewal Center, one of several reconciliation groups that minister to the survivors of the sectarian violence, which has been responsible for 3,225 deaths since 1969.

RESTARTING PEACE TALKS: As religious leaders concentrate on personal efforts at reconciliation, official talks began September 15. For the first time since 1921, the British government is allowing Sinn Fein, the political counterpart to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), into multiparty political discussions on the future of the six counties that make up Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland, which was created by partition from the Republic of Ireland 76 years ago.

Ray Burke, Irish foreign minister, called on Northern Ireland's pro-British leaders to take a "leap of faith" in participating in the official negotiations on a political solution as well as the surrender of guns, bombs, and other weapons.

But already two of three leading pro-British political groups are hesitant, including the Democratic Ulster Party, headed by conservative politician Ian Paisley, the renowned fundamentalist Presbyterian minister and prolific author. However, the largest of the pro-British parties, the Ulster Unionists, as of early September was willing to participate in "proximity talks" in which differing parties are in separate rooms, while intermediaries shuttle between them.

ONGOING BLOOD FEUDS: The climate for the talks has slowly improved despite ongoing brutalities and killings. In July, the Protestant Orange Order, under extreme public pressure, agreed to reroute marches away from Catholic areas. These marches, commemorating the 1690 Battle of the Boyne military victory of Protestant William of Orange over Catholic James II, each year revive long-standing sectarian animosities. In 1996, two people were killed and hundreds of vehicles and buildings destroyed in the wake of the Protestant marches (CT, Dec. 9, 1996, p. 69).

For some Northern Irish people, the terms Catholic or Protestant are essentially tribal labels. But by no means are church leaders indifferent to the struggle over Northern Ireland's fate. "The churches on both sides of the divide want to have political power and want the state to reflect the ethos of their religious and theological convictions," says David Porter, executive director of the Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland (ECONI), a leading peace organization based in Belfast.

Although both the IRA and pro-British paramilitary groups are abiding by a cease-fire, personal blood feuds endure. In July, a Catholic teenager was murdered in her Protestant boyfriend's home, apparently by an anti-Catholic militant. In June, a gunman shot and killed Robert Bates, reformed member of the Shankill Butchers gang responsible for murdering 19 Catholics in the 1970s. Bates, who served 19 years in prison and had become a born-again Christian, was working at a Belfast ministry in prisoner rehabilitation when the fatal shooting occurred. "Bates was trying to help young people in the Shankill to give up violence," notes Sam Burch, active in the Cornerstone reconciliation group. "This was a vengeance killing." Authorities suspect a murder victim's son carried out the killing.

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October 6 1997, Vol. 41, No. 11