Protestant-Catholic Conflict from the Reformation to the 21st Century

The Dynamics of Religious Difference

John Wolffe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137289735
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

Taking a fresh look at the roots and implications of the enduring major historic fissure in Western Christianity, this book presents new insights into the historical dynamics of Protestant-Catholic conflict while illuminating present-day contexts and suggesting comparisons for approaching other entrenched conflicts in which religion is implicated.

1

Exploring the History of Protestant–Catholic Conflict

John Wolffe

In recent years the countryside west of Drogheda has been expensively re-landscaped and opened up to tourism. This was the valley that on 1 July 1690 echoed to the clash of armies at the Battle of Boyne. Within sight of the elegant new bridge carrying the M1 Dublin–Belfast motorway high over the river, children play on the green lawns of Oldbridge House, and their elders explore a visitor centre that offers a conscientiously even-handed account of the battle and its significance in Irish and European history. There is a manifest aspiration to reinvent the battle as a focus for reconciliation rather than division in early twenty-first-century Ireland. This vision was made explicit in May 2007, when Ian Paisley, the recently appointed First Minister of Northern Ireland, and the Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, met at the site. Paisley then spoke as follows:

It would be a good thing for nationalists to know orange history and for Unionists to know green history. At last we can embrace this battle site as part of our shared history. Understanding our past is the only sure way to understand our present. Instead of reverberating to the roar of cannon fire, the charge of men, the shot of musket or the clash of sword steel, today we have tranquillity of still water where we can contemplate the past and look forward to the future.¹

In the context of Paisley’s earlier career of diehard resistance to any concession to Irish nationalism, this speech, like his remarkable decision to share power with Sinn Fein, represented a major turning point in contemporary Irish politics. For the historian of religion, too, it appeared to symbolize the closing of a long era in which the division of Catholic and Protestant, seen as defining the opposing forces at the Boyne, and which Paisley himself had hitherto maintained with notable polemical vigour,² determined the shape of Irish culture and society.

However, the straightforward narrative of conflict and bridgebuilding conceals considerable complexities. A more critical reading of the Boyne Visitor Centre would see it not so much as a focus for reconciliation, but rather as a manifestation of the tendency of the burgeoning heritage and tourist industries to insulate the traveller from the more uncomfortable realities of the past.³ Meanwhile, traditional perceptions of the battle carry their own mythologies. The Battle of the Boyne was a significant victory for the forces of William III against those of the exiled James II, but it did not conclude the war. Decisive military success only came with the Battle of Aughrim, fought just over a year later on 12 July 1691.⁴ The Protestant celebrations on the Twelfth, which conflated the two battles, gradually emerged during the course of the eighteenth century, and only developed fully after the formation of the Orange Order in 1795. They were shaped by contemporary circumstances quite as much as by authentic recollection and commemoration of the past.⁵ As a vibrant evolving tradition they have continued to acquire numerous cultural, political and religious resonances that are remote from the original context of 1690–91.⁶

Protestant–Catholic conflict already had a long history in 1690, being rooted in the confrontations of the Reformation era itself, and crystallized by events such as the Marian persecutions in England and the Massacre of St Bartholomew in France in August 1572. Charles IX’s council initiated this wave of killings apparently because, in a context of considerable existing religious tension and distrust, they believed, probably erroneously, that they faced an imminent Huguenot (Protestant) uprising. The government’s ‘preemptive strike’ against the Huguenot leadership triggered a wave of popular violence against Protestants, which left an estimated two to three thousand people dead in Paris, and a similar number of victims in provincial cities.⁷ While recent historical scholarship on the events of 23 and 24 August 1572 highlights how much remains unexplained, not least regarding the king’s exact role and motives, the massacre generated a powerful and abiding mythology, in which the slaughtered Protestants were cast as martyrs, and Charles IX portrayed as the willing and treacherous tool of a Roman Catholic Church determined to extirpate heresy by mean of violent persecution.⁸ Thus in 1812, a pamphleteer drew an explicit analogy between the recent assassination of the British prime minister, Spencer Perceval, and that of the Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny, which had begun the slaughter in 1572. The massacre, the writer suggested, operated as ‘AN AWFUL WARNING … to Protestants of this and every age, – to convince posterity, but more especially the supine, we cannot say blind, of 1812, of the great truth that PAPISTS KEEP NO FAITH WITH PROTESTANTS!!’⁹ In 1872 at Renfrew near Glasgow, the tercentenary was commemorated with affirmations that the event ‘is full of lessons for the present time’ and that the ‘principles of the Church of Rome … are infallibly unchanged and unchangeable’. A speaker highlighted the perceived treachery of Charles IX, asserted that ‘not even a king, when a Papist, can keep faith with heretics’, gave a grossly exaggerated estimate of the dead at 70,000 to 100,000, and claimed that by having a celebratory medal struck Pope Gregory XIII accepted ‘fully the responsibility of this enormous crime’.¹⁰ Thus the recollection of an already distant history served to fuel contemporary antagonisms.

The decline in recent decades of the divisive resonance of such events might suggest that in the twenty-first century Protestant– Catholic conflict is becoming a marginal phenomenon. On the other hand, recent years have seen the publication of two substantial books demonstrating the continued prevalence of anti-Catholic attitudes in the United States,¹¹ while in Scotland sectarianism remains a substantial perceived problem, which has received considerable attention from the Edinburgh government.¹² In Northern Ireland, despite the political progress of the last 15 years, there remains considerable grassroots suspicion and mutual incomprehension between the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ communities.¹³ On the wider international stage, the diverse confessional heritages of the European Union arguably continue to have an impact on attitudes to integration and on national and religious plurality. A tension between an historic Anglo-American Protestant axis and a continental European Catholic block remains discernible.¹⁴ In such a context, Paisley’s perception that ‘Understanding our past is the only sure way to understand our present’ has a continuing resonance far outside Ireland.

This book, moreover, is designed to show how analysis of the historic Protestant–Catholic divide can suggest comparative insights that are useful for understanding other contexts of religious difference and antagonism. Even though Protestant–Catholic tensions remain an uncomfortable reality in specific contexts in the early twenty-first century, they are no longer implicated in major wars and massacres as they were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nor in the persecution and widespread civil unrest with which they were associated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the early and mid-twentieth century in many parts of the English-speaking world confessional loyalties could still largely determine political allegiances, and circumscribe social and cultural interactions. Consideration of how and why such tensions and estrangements have been mitigated and even removed may well have a part to play in informing peace-building in other conflict situations.

Indeed, over the last century, even as, outside Ireland, Protestant– Catholic tensions have gradually receded, the horrific potential of other forms of religious difference has been fully revealed. The roots of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry may well be found more in racist than in religious ideology, but perverted forms of Christianity played a significant part in providing spurious legitimation for the slaughter, and have continued to be a factor in recurrences of anti-Semitism. Much more recently a pathologically distorted reading of Islam motivated the actions of suicide bombers in the United States on 11 September 2001 and in London on 7 July 2005, while conversely in July 2011 the mass murder perpetrated in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik was illustrative of the highly disturbing potentialities of the extreme Islamophobia that is becoming more widespread in Europe.¹⁵ The echoes of historic Protestant–Catholic conflict can thus be seen in polarized religious and ethnic binaries that are implicit in much thinking and writing about the global resurgence of religion over the last quarter of a century. Both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia resemble anti-Catholicism and, indeed, anti-Protestantism, in the construction of a dangerous and irreconcilable religious ‘other’. Furthermore, conflicted views of the religious and secular, in which anti-Christian polemic has drawn on some traditional Protestant arguments against Catholicism, have become a further highly significant binary divide.¹⁶

These are important trends in international as well as in domestic affairs. Since the early 1990s and more particularly since 2001, the previously secular discipline of international relations has been discovering religion,¹⁷ although, as one prominent scholar has recently observed, ‘the complex interplays between security and religion remain a curiously under-researched area’.¹⁸ Hitherto it had been assumed that ever since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 concluded the Thirty Years War with an agreement that states could determine their own religious character provided minorities were allowed freedom of worship, religion was effectively neutralized as a factor in international relations. Since the Iranian revolution of 1978 on the other hand, the resurgence of religion in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world is perceived as a sea-change that has rendered this key post-Westphalian assumption obsolete as a model for understanding the contemporary situation.¹⁹ Samuel P. Huntington’s model of a polarized ‘clash of civilizations’, in particular between Christianity and Islam, has been the most high-profile, politically influential and controversial manifestation of this trend. However, alternative readings of the evidence have stressed rather the multifarious transnational linkages of religion and their potential to stimulate conflict within states as well as between them, but at the same time to promote international peace and security.²⁰ Among historians, moreover, this renewed awareness of religion as a force in contemporary international relations should surely prompt reassessment of its presumed marginality between 1648 and 1978. That enquiry is very relevant to present-day concerns insofar as ‘without an awareness of the past that generated it, the universal international society of the present can have no meaning’.²¹

Taken as a whole, the contributions to this book are intended both to facilitate enhanced understanding of the past on its own terms and to stimulate constructive reflection on its implications for the present. The chapters are all responses to a common agenda set by the following core questions:

• Under what specific circumstances have underlying differences in religious belief led to insecurity and conflict, both within and between nations?

• What were the actual roles of religious belief in the development of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ as tribal and political categories?

• How have historic conflicts of this kind been perpetuated, reactivated, and alleviated?

• How far is it possible to identify common characteristics of Protestant–Catholic conflict that transcend the specificities of particular geographical and historical contexts?

• What have been the roles of nation states and governments in inciting, countenancing and mitigating anti-Catholic conflict?

• To what extent do Protestant–Catholic tensions remain a substantive factor in current global and local uncertainties?

• What insights can be applied to the better understanding and resolution of religiously inspired conflicts in the contemporary world?

Chapters 2 to 8 offer a series of case studies spanning a variety of national contexts – France, Germany, England, Ireland, Scandinavia and the United States – and historical periods from the mid-sixteenth century to the late twentieth. Chapters 9 and 10 explore the contemporary situation and the implications of the past for the present, first through an examination of the pivotal case of Northern Ireland, and then in the Conclusion through explicitly revisiting the core questions in the light of the detailed evidence presented in the earlier chapters.

From the mid-sixteenth century until the mid-twentieth, from the ‘Wars of Religion’ of the Reformation era to the ‘Cold War’ of the 1950s, the Protestant–Catholic divide was the primary religious, political, cultural and social fissure in the European and North Atlantic worlds. Only with the internal transformation of the Roman Catholic Church bro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Exploring the History of Protestant–Catholic Conflict
• 2. Europe’s ‘Wars of Religion’ and their Legacies
• 3. Eighteenth-Century English Anti-Catholicism: Contexts, Continuity, and Diminution
• 4. The Longue Durée of German Religious Conflict?
• 5. Religious Conflict in Ulster, c. 1780–1886
• 6. Sectarianism and Evangelicalism in Birmingham and Liverpool, 1850–2010
• 7. ‘The Catholic Danger’: Liberal Theology and Anti-Catholicism in Sweden
• 8. Protestant–Catholic Conflict in the United States: The Cases of John F. Kennedy and Ronald W. Reagan
• 9. The Dynamics of Religious Difference in Contemporary Northern Ireland
• 10. Conclusion: Beyond Protestant–Catholic Conflict?
• Index