The Church of Ireland General Synod 2025 got underway this morning (Friday May 9) in Lawlor’s Hotel in Naas in the Diocese of Meath and Kildare. This is the first time Synod has taken place in the dioceses and it will continue tomorrow with an online session to follow on Tuesday evening.
Before the business of Synod got underway, the Synod Eucharist took place in St David’s Church in Naas where the preacher was the Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, the Rt Revd Dr Paul Colton.
Synod proceedings opened this morning with Morning Worship led by Archdeacon Leslie Stevenson.
The Primate Archbishop John McDowell has delivered his Presidential Address. This year he highlighted leadership, reconciliation and solidarity.
He spoke on the qualities of confidence, humility and resilience – confidence that “people are saved through Christ forever and that to be his friend and his disciple is the greatest privilege in life” … and also “the humility to know that God’s ways are not our ways and to learn the discipline of self–suspicion” that our plans need to be realigned from our own priorities to those of God; and resilience to face the inevitable occasions when things go wrong: “For every resurrection to celebrate, there will be a cross first to carry.”
Archbishop McDowell acknowledged the Church and Society Commission’s work on assisting people most affected by the legacy of the Troubles. Reconciliation “cannot draw a line under the past but it can somehow incorporate or miraculously integrate the past, with all its shadows and injuries, into future life.”
He also spoke on two issues on the theme of social solidarity – immigration and the care of vulnerable people as parliaments consider allowing assisted suicide in Britain and Ireland.
Welcoming the contribution of migrants to diversity (and productivity) in society, the archbishop remarked: “It is not the fault of people coming into this island or anywhere else in the western world that governments have failed to seriously address … immigration in a way that respects treaty obligations and legal norms.” Approving assisted suicide legislation, as proposed, would, the noted, involve “not just a technical change in medical procedure but would amount to a kind of cultural revolution in the relationship between doctor and patient, and also in the basis on which judgements and decisions about the value of human life are made.” The underfunding of the hospice movement by the State, in his view, “remains a collective disgrace”. The archbishop restated the Church of Ireland’s position that “life in its entirety is a gift from God and that what sustains people even in the most horrible of terminal illness is the certainty of human love and support right to the end.”
In the course of his remarks, Archbishop McDowell also looked forward to the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Belfast in 2026, and concluded with a quote from the late Pope Francis.