Sir, —
I am grateful to Mr Dundas for engaging with my article, ‘Speaking with a Foreign Accent: Recovering Moral Courage, True Leadership, and the Language of the Gospel’. In a culture increasingly characterised by reaction rather than reflection, engagement remains preferable to silence.
That said, I was left wondering whether my article had been read as a theological reflection or as a political Rorschach test.
The piece itself was an extended reflection on resilience, leadership, moral formation, responsibility, and the Church’s fluency — or lack thereof — in the demanding language of Christian discipleship. Yet Mr Dundas’s response manages to reduce several thousand words of theological argument to a handful of words concerning newly arrived families and hotel accommodation.
This is, in its own way, rather impressive.The irony is that having warned readers against the language of grievance, Mr Dundas appears to have found sufficient grievance in a passing observation to overlook the article’s principal argument entirely. One is reminded that it is possible to become so preoccupied with a footnote that one never encounters the text.
What intrigued me most, however, was the speed with which an observation about human suffering was transformed into a political declaration.
I made no claims regarding the causes of housing shortages. I offered no analysis of migration policy. I proposed no economic solutions. Yet somehow, I found myself positioned within a political category that, in over fifty years of life, nobody has previously suggested I occupy.
This was particularly enlightening given that the article itself was inspired by the benefits of foreign accents, and that I myself am an immigrant. Despite my name’s Irish origins, I arrived on these shores from elsewhere, continue to speak with a foreign accent, and remain deeply grateful for the welcome I have received.
One might therefore have hoped for a more charitable reading. The deeper issue, however, concerns the nature of grace itself.
Mr Dundas presents grace and grievance as though they are self-evident opposites. Yet Christian theology has historically understood grace not as the refusal to acknowledge suffering but as the refusal to weaponise it. Grace begins with attentiveness. It requires us first to see what is there.
The Incarnation is not God’s avoidance of human pain. It is God’s entry into it.
The Cross is not divine discomfort with grievance. It is God’s willingness to confront the full reality of human brokenness without either sentimentalising it or looking away.
This was precisely the point of my reflections on homelessness, grooming-gang victims, and families affected by defective housing. These examples were not introduced as political symbols but as people. Their inclusion was an attempt to ask whether the Church still possesses the moral attentiveness to notice suffering that falls outside fashionable categories of concern.
At what point did noticing suffering become an ideological act? That question remains unanswered.
Indeed, I suspect the most revealing feature of Mr Dundas’s response is not what it says about my article, but what it says about our contemporary habits of reading. Increasingly, arguments are not evaluated on their merits but assigned to tribes. We no longer ask, ‘Is this true?’ but ‘Which side might benefit from this observation?’
Such an approach may be politically efficient, but it is intellectually fragile and theologically inadequate.
The Gospel has always been deeply inconvenient for those who prefer their moral universe neatly organised. Christ displayed an infuriating tendency to notice people whom respectable society had already categorised. His ministry was one long disruption of accepted assumptions regarding who deserved attention and who did not.
My article sought to ask whether the Church has retained that capacity. As for grace, I confess I find it difficult to receive lectures on its meaning from a position considerably more comfortable than those margins from which my own family and I have often had to navigate. Those who have experienced institutional neglect, financial uncertainty, or the slow disintegration of a family home through circumstances beyond their control sometimes acquire a rather different understanding of grace.
They discover that grace is not a refusal to speak about suffering. Grace is what prevents suffering from making us bitter. Grace is what allows us to notice the wounds of others without denying our own. Grace is what permits truth and compassion to occupy the same sentence.
In that spirit, I thank Mr Dundas for his engagement and readily forgive his misreading of my argument. Clergy, after all, spend much of their lives being misunderstood; it comes with the collar.
I simply remain unconvinced that reducing a reflection on leadership, resilience, discipleship, and moral courage to a political football advances the conversation very far.
Yours, etc.,
The Reverend Seán Murphy
(Geashill)
