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

This excellent collection of essays arises from a conference in 2011, intended to illuminate not only the five-hundred-year history of Catholic–Protestant relations, but also contemporary religious conflicts. The editor, John Wolffe, draws some of these parallels in two very helpful introductory and concluding chapters, but otherwise the contributors stick to the history. They start with the French ‘Wars of Religion’, cogently analysed by Mark Greengrass, and end with an equally thoughtful interview-based study of contemporary Northern Ireland by John Bell. Other papers focus on Germany (an outstanding overview by Helmut Walser Smith), England, Ireland, Sweden and the United States. In such collections, the parts are often more satisfying than the whole, but here Wolffe does a good job of tying the geographically and chronologically scattered contributions together—and there is, perhaps, an unusual degree of congruence between them. All aim to refute the familiar narrative according to which relations between Protestants and Catholics have always been inherently antagonistic, and often violent, but have been gradually ameliorated by a growing spirit of tolerance, before becoming irrelevant with the triumph of secularism or indifference at some point in the twentieth century. All the authors stress discontinuities: the extent of, and forms of, antagonism have varied greatly over time and space and there is no linear trend towards greater tolerance. Thus Greengrass notes that the kind of violence seen in France (and later in Ireland) was an extreme case: in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe ‘there were plenty of places where Protestants and Catholics or other kinds of religious or confessional pluralism could exist without conflict ... This is not to say that it was easy; rather, that the process of negotiating social space and building the boundaries within which communities of different religious persuasion could live together was possible and common’ (pp. 28–9). Smith is one of several writers who notes the increase in confessional tensions in the nineteenth century—in the German case after about 1830, paradoxically at a time of increasing interconfessional marriage. He links this both with the increasing role of the papacy and the associated rise of Ultramontanism, and with the growth of a mainly Protestant or secular Liberalism, which, in many parts of nineteenth-century Europe, had a decidedly anti-Catholic character. Wolffe notes the role of nationalism: ‘As nationalists sought explicit definitions and conceptualizations of the nation, religious identities were asserted and contested anew’ (p. 13). Like others, they argue that it was not so much doctrinal or liturgical divisions per se that turned difference (often combined with a degree of mutual suspicion) into open confrontation, but the politicisation of these differences. Indeed, this politicisation might continue in spite of a considerable degree of secularisation. Bell’s interviews show that many Republicans or Loyalists retain a strong ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’ identity while having little or no connection with any church. Nor, Wolffe argues, has secularism led to greater tolerance: militant opponents of organised religion in general have often focused their attacks on Roman Catholicism in particular. (While Wolffe implies that this is a continuation of older kinds of Protestant polemic, it may be that many of these critics are so anti-Catholic because they have rejected a Catholic upbringing.) Politics could also mitigate antagonism. Thus Thomas Carty provides a sympathetic account of Ronald Reagan’s attempt to draw both conservative Protestants and conservative Catholics into an alliance against the cultural radicals—which he contrasts with John Kennedy’s attempt, as a presidential candidate, to show that his Catholic faith was irrelevant to his politics

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