Northern Ireland: A Land of Warring Christians

By John Leo

Northern Ireland has too many Catholics and twice as many Protestants, but very few Christians. -- Anonymous

Protestant and Roman Catholic Christmas shoppers scurried warily past one another in drab, sooty Belfast, grimly preparing to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. Without much conviction, carolers sang Joy to the World outside Belfast's city hall, where a Union Jack hung limply from its pole and a signboard listed the latest number of military and civilian deaths--1,140 since 1969. Even the seasonal slogan jointly adopted by Ulster's Catholic and Protestant church leaders had a desperate quality about it: "For God's sake, let peace begin in our land this Christmas time."

After more than five years of sporadic terrorism and civil strife, few Ulstermen, regardless of their faith, had much hope that the slogan would ever reflect reality. This Christmas, however, promises to be a bit more tranquil than some that Northern Ireland has suffered in the past. Last week the leaders of the Irish Republican Army agreed to an eleven-day cease-fire starting Dec. 22. Terrorist operations were suspended, the I.R.A. announced, to let the British government consider the I.R.A.'s conditions for a permanent ceasefire.

Whether or not the truce holds, Ulster-men will celebrate Christmas in a mood of nervous suspense. Many a Christmas present will be refused or opened gingerly: it may contain a bomb. Children will not be getting toy guns as gifts: too often edgy British soldiers have mistaken youngsters in the gloomy streets of the Lower Falls Road or the Bogside for Provo gunmen.

As always, Christmas services will subtly reflect a seemingly irreconcilable dispute between two inimical bodies of partisan Christians: Christ the Catholic will be honored in one church, Christ the Protestant in another. As both sides hymn Christian peace, they are also hesitant and fearful about the prospect of Christian war. For if the truce does not hold and violence erupts on a large enough scale, it will be a religious war as well as a political one, a throwback to the bloody Catholic-Protestant battles that followed the Reformation.

Christian disunity has always been a shame and a scandal.

Even greater a blot on the memory and message of Jesus is mortal strife between two groups of so-called believers--and for that reason the bitterness in Ulster is spiritually as ugly as the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

In a sense, the troubles in the North are religious in name only: there is no theological quarrel involved, no real fear of religious persecution, and many of the militant extremists on both sides have little or no religious commitment. Throughout most of the struggle, the churches have seemed to be impotent bystanders, occasionally deploring the violence but grudgingly supporting the troops. The troubles began with a struggle by Ulster's 500,000 Catholics to gain equality with the 1 million Protestants, and the issues involve such conventional reasons for civil war as tribalism, economic injustice and political quarrels about who is to rule Ulster and how.

Yet any purely politico-economic description of Ulster's troubles is incomplete. Religion pervades every aspect of Northern Ireland; there are, for example, more than 4,000 churches and chapels, or roughly one for every 375 citizens of the province. "Even an atheist," says Professor of Politics Richard Rose, "must be a Protestant atheist or Catholic atheist in order to have status in the society." Being a Catholic or a Protestant means belonging to a community, a community always at war with the other, openly or potentially. Each side perceives the other in religious caricatures that incorporate and express the historical and political resentments: to Protestants, Taigs (Catholics) are unthinking and overbreeding peasants, serfs of the Pope, disloyal politically, barbarous insurgents hopelessly mired in outdated moral rigidities; to Catholics, Prods (Protestants) are arrogant usurpers, moneygrubbing destroyers of religious and political unity.

The churches bear some of the blame for causing this collision of moral superiorities. By an accident of history, both the Catholicism and Protestantism of the North are among the sterner manifestations of Christianity. The dominant Presbyterianism traces back to John Calvin through John Knox. Irish Catholicism, flavored for generations by Jansenism, is one of Rome's more rigid branches. Speaking of religion in the North, Irish Diplomat-Politician Conor Cruise O'Brien, who was raised a Catholic, writes: "You were supposed to love your neighbor, even of the 'opposite' religion, but as his beliefs and behavior were obviously so offensive as to mark him out for hellfire, it didn't seem to matter if you knocked him about a bit in this life, if only to prepare him for what was coming in the next." This attitude, he adds, has "helped to shape the present scene, extending local tribal ill-feelings to cos mic dimensions."

The churches, in another way, bear part of the responsibility for keeping the two communities apart. Priests and ministers alike favor continuation of the separate school systems that have produced generations of narrowly partisan graduates. The clergy also seem more concerned about maintaining a hold on their own small flocks than taking risks for peace. Not su prisingly, the churches of Ulster remain largely impervious to the growing warmth of Catholic-Protestant ecumenical relations that are apparent almost everywhere else in the world. In general, events are so far out of the hands of the churches that messages from the pu pits are closely watched by each community for any sign of backsliding. A wrong word may lose the trust of the faithful. In some areas, I.R.A. terrorists discreetly stay away from Mass while a campaign is on. When they return, they expect not to hear a thing about it from the priest.

Ulster has produced a few religious heroes who have risen above sectarian concerns. Among them, surely, are the eight Protestant churchmen who met secretly with I.R.A. leaders two weeks ago and encouraged them to order the ceasefire. Another is Canon Padraig Murphy, whose peace efforts have led him to become increasingly critical of the Provos, many of whom live in his Catholic parish in West Belfast. Yet another is the Rev. Joseph D. Parker, an Anglican minister, whose son Stephen, 14, was blown to bits during the explosion of Belfast's Bloody Friday, July 21, 1972. In one of their last conversations the son asked: "Why does this keep happening?

Can no one stop it? What will it be like when I'm 17?" After his son's murder, Parker crusaded in Northern Ireland for interdenominational peace and nonviolence. He met with some sympathy, a fair amount of publicity and, in the end, indifference. Next month he leaves for Canada. "We are prisoners of our own history and religion," he says sadly. "We are all prisoners of Ireland now."

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