Contemporary Catholic and Protestant Irish America: social identities, forgiveness, and attitudes toward The Troubles

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2002 by Micheal D. Roe

Religiosity

Similar to trends in Northern Ireland, the Irish Americans in this study remained active in their faith traditions. (37) Forty percent of the Irish-American participants were affiliated with the Catholic Church, while another 40 percent were affiliated with a Protestant denomination. Fifty percent of all Irish Americans attended church once or more a week; this increased to about 73 percent attending church at least once every month. In both actual attendance at church and stated preference for attending church, Protestants outscored Catholics. Both groups were high in the orthodoxy of their Christian beliefs, (38) although the Protestants were significantly higher. Protestants were also significantly higher in the intrinsic dimension of their faith experience, while there were no differences between Catholics and Protestants on the extrinsic dimension.

Knowledge of Irish political and historical events

Table 1 displays the condensed content of the first set of historical items on the research instrument (i.e., the complete wording for each item is not provided). The content in the left column was presented in simple multiple-choice questions (e.g., "Who recently was elected President of the Republic of Ireland?"). The content in the right column was presented as a declarative statement to which the participants indicated agreement or not (e.g., "During the potato blight and famine, Protestants helped only those Catholics who were willing to renounce their religion and convert."). Irish-American Catholics demonstrated significantly more knowledge than their Protestant counterparts; of a total of sixteen points, the means were 9.6 and 6.7, respectively. (39)

Some additional cross-national findings from the Irish-American, Northern-Irish, and Irish samples were particularly noteworthy given their relationship to social memories. First, past suffering from penal laws is commonly associated with Catholic ethnic history and identity. In all three samples, few realized that Protestants outside the Church of Ireland also faced restrictions, albeit less severe and less rigorously enforced. The subgroup achieving the highest correct score (only about 30 percent) was Northern Irish Protestants. That such ethnic history affects daily life is evident in a rural Presbyterian church in Northern Ireland. In its sanctuary is displayed a plaque commemorating the persecution of a church member centuries ago. Although the persecution was at the hands of the Protestant Church of Ireland, a current member noted that most if not all of his fellow worshipers likely assume that Catholics were the cause of the man's torment. Second, the nineteenth-century potato famine is strongly associated with Catholic ethnic history and identity, as is the related image of Protestants forcing Catholics to convert in order to receive food (i.e., the so-called "souper" experience). That few Protestants behaved in such a manner was either not known or was unclear in the minds of many of the Catholic and Protestant participants alike. Interestingly, this was so in spite of the positive public image with which the Protestant Irish Quakers emerged from the famine period, due to their charitable response to all in need. (40) Sixty percent of Irish-American Catholics recognized this variability among Protestants, compared to minorities in all of the other subgroups, with Northern Irish Catholics the lowest at 17 percent correct. Finally, over 40 percent of Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics and over 50 percent of Irish-American Protestants in this study either denied or were unsure about the presence of Protestant leaders in nationalist causes, a significant finding given the actual histories of both communities.