Methodist pastor steps into paramilitary feud between Protestants
10/2/2002 News media contact: Linda Bloom · (646) 369-3759 · New York
NOTE: Photographs will be available with this story.
By Kathleen LaCamera*
BELFAST, Northern Ireland (UMNS) - One man is dead. Another has been shot in the face. Both belong to opposing Protestant paramilitary groups that are fighting a bloody turf war with each other. Both come from families who are part of the Rev. Gary Mason's Methodist church in East Belfast.
"Belfast is on a knife edge right now," Mason told United Methodist News Service in a Sept. 29 interview. "We're all waiting for something to happen."
For months, a growing rift between rival Protestant paramilitaries has shattered relations in the Loyalist community and slowed the peace process. Police and community leaders say a struggle to control the drug trade and other illegal activities is at the heart of the feud.
On Sept. 13, Stephen Warnock, a Loyalist Volunteer Force member, was shot dead in his own car, in front of his 3-year-old daughter. The family called on Mason, their pastor, to do the funeral service.
The night before Warnock's funeral, rival Ulster Defence Association member Jim Gray was shot in the face but survived. Mason also is pastor to Gray's family and only six months ago performed the funeral for Gray's 19-year-old son, who died in Thailand.
The shootings set off a flood of contradictory rumors claiming that both Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries were behind the shootings. No one could predict what would happen next.
By the time Mason arrived at his church on the morning of Stephen Warnock's funeral, he had received phone calls from both the London Times and the BBC asking if he would lead the service, given the "high potential for violence." He told them that unless someone literally blocked his way, he would be there. Then the pastor received a phone call telling him that a bomb scare hoax had blocked the road between him and the cemetery. "That's when I went to the UDA to discuss things," Mason told UMNS.
It is the rare pastor that can walk straight into a room full of men who have kept Northern Ireland awash in blood and bombs for decades.
"I arrived at this pub, where there must have been a hundred men downstairs at 11:30 in the morning," he said. "They were angry about the attack on their friend, Jim Gray, the night before, and said they were going to block Warnock's funeral. I explained I was going to be there as a representative of God, comforting the grieving families, which included women and children, and that I was not taking anyone's side.
"I said, 'Look, I've stood by some of you in some difficult and perplexing situations. Someday, I might be doing your funeral and your family would not want anything to stop it, would they?'"
Eventually, Mason left with assurances from the group's members that they would not block Warnock's funeral, a decision the pastor called "the right moral choice."
These events underscore concern about a growing trend. "There's sectarian violence here, but buried within communities there is an element using the shortage of policing and Northern Ireland's political instability to line their pockets," he explained.
It is easy to make the mistake of believing that the problems in Northern Ireland lay exclusively in the conflict between Catholics and Protestants. In fact, a recent editorial of a Belfast-based publication, the News Letter, pointed to the prevalence of "mafia-style shootings, beatings, racketeering and drug dealing" as part of the "Loyalist gang" agenda that has left Northern Ireland on the "highly dangerous precipice of serious civil unrest."
The human costs of that unrest are all too apparent to Mason and his Methodist congregation. At the highly contentious funeral Mason fought so hard to lead, Warnock's father simply clutched his son's coffin and sobbed. This was the third son he has lost in Northern Ireland's "Troubles."
"The saddest thing there was looking at all the pall-bearers carrying the coffin, draped in paramilitary colors (flags). They were so young, 17 maybe, and facing nothing better than this for their future. It left a bad taste in my mouth," Mason said with a sigh.
This is not the first paramilitary funeral, nor the last, that Mason is likely to perform. His family and members of his Methodist congregation are "edgy" about the fact that he works so closely with the paramilitaries. It is not work he ever expected to take on. "It gets kind of thrust on you. … Walking into that situation in that pub, you believe God is with you."
The mediating role Mason and the Methodist Church are playing in the current crisis has not gone unnoticed. When John Reid, the British government's top cabinet minister for Northern Ireland, visited Belfast a month ago, Mason was the person asked to spearhead Reid's visit to the Loyalist community.
"Ultimately, the church has to stand up for Christian values in the midst of these situations or else the Gospel becomes irrelevant," he said.
With possibly some of the hardest times still ahead for Northern Ireland, Mason hopes the world will continue praying for him and all people trying to live their faith against the odds.
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*LaCamera is a United Methodist News Service correspondent based in England.
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