Queen, Ulster’s clergy pray together for peace

— Queen Elizabeth II prayed together Tuesday with Catholic and Protestant leaders from across Northern Ireland as this long-divided land demonstrated its rising faith in a shared future and braced for a peacemaking milestone that has been a quarter-century in the making.

The British monarch visited the lakeside town of Enniskillen, scene of one of the Irish Republican Army’s most shocking atrocities, for events symbolizing how far Northern Ireland has come from its darkest days of bloodshed. Today she’s expected to meet and shake hands with Martin McGuinness, former commander of the dominant Provisional IRA faction, in what many see as the symbolic conclusion to a four-decade conflict.

Their first-ever contact, long avoided by McGuinness’ Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, follows the Provisional IRA’s killing of about 1,775 people since 1970, including the queen’s own cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten - a 1979 assassination that IRA experts say McGuinness himself sanctioned.

McGuinness today is the senior Catholic in Northern Ireland’s unity government, an institution forged after the Provisionals’ 2005 decision to renounce violence and disarm.

Yet the political difficulties that McGuinness faces are writ large on the Northern Ireland landscape. Catholics and Protestants alike are suddenly ribbing him. Many Protestant leaders and analysts likewise have asserted, triumphantly, that the peace process has left McGuinnesswith no choice but to bend the knee to the British monarch.

Supporters of small IRA g roups that still mount occasional shootings andbombings in Northern Ireland have daubed walls in McGuinness’ home city with slogans denouncing Sinn Fein as “sellouts.”

Such fears that a future IRA might rise out of alienated Catholic districts were nowhere to be heard Tuesday in Enniskillen as the queen arrived in a 10-car motorcade for an ecumenical church service in honor of her 60th anniversary on the throne.

Sinn Fein members stayed away from the event.

She and her husband, Prince Philip, received a standing ovation as she visited the town’s Catholic cathedral, her first visit to a Catholic church in her 20 visits to Northern Ireland as queen.

In the neighboring Protestant cathedral, a veritable who’s who of Northern Ireland religious life and politics gathered to pray for continued peace.

The queen greeted some of the thousands of locals who had spent hours standing on the packed, narrow sidewalks of Enniskillen’s Church Street. In a private meeting at a Protestant clergyman’s home, she met survivors of the Provisional IRA’s bomb attack on the town 25 years ago.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 06/27/2012

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