Early on May 7, 2006, a gang of teenagers beat Michael McIlveen with baseball bats and jumped on his head. A day and a half later, McIlveen, a 15-year-old schoolboy from Ballymena, Northern Ireland, died in the hospital. It quickly emerged that McIlveen had almost certainly been attacked for wearing a green-and-white striped football shirt.1 In the charged world of Irish republicanism and unionism, this was not just another shirt; it was a Celtic jersey. Celtic is a Glasgow soccer team fervently supported by Catholics. Celtic's rival, the Glasgow Rangers, wear red jerseys and are equally fervently supported by Protestants.

McIlveen's tragic death adds to the long and sad story of religious conflict in Ireland, where everything from naming babies to cheering soccer teams carries a confessional label. Under the headline "Sectarian divide has not healed," David Adams commented in The Irish Times that it was only a matter of time until someone else was killed in sectarian violence in the North. In this divided land, Adams wrote, "Protestant and Catholic youngsters do not live on the same streets, they do not play together, they do not go to school together and they do not socialise together."2

The religious and cultural antagonisms displayed in McIlveen's murder have long roots, reaching back to the 16th century. But while it's fairly easy to find accounts of 20th- and 21st-century sectarianism in Northern Ireland, finding an explanation for the origins of violent sectarianism is more difficult. The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland, a collection of conference essays edited by Alan Ford and John McCafferty, aims to correct that deficit.

Sectarianism in Ireland can be seen as the result of Ireland's two Reformations: one supported by the English crown, and one supported by most Irish people. These two Reformations shared many goals—celebrating the sacraments, preaching the Gospel, instructing the laity—and often ran parallel to each other. For example, in 1592 Queen Elizabeth established Trinity College Dublin to educate young Irish Protestants. In the same year Father Thomas White, sj, founded the Irish College at Salamanca to train Catholic priests for Ireland.

For all their similarities, however, two concurrent Reformations, each exclusively claiming to represent the true faith, did not get along well. In the concluding essay, John Morrill points out that Protestants and Catholics in Ireland couldn't even agree on the date. Catholics in Ireland were quick to adopt Gregorian calendar reform, instituted near the end of the 16th century, which moved the calendar forward ten days. Irish Protestants stuck with England, which clung to the Julian calendar until 1751, by which time the difference between the two reckonings amounted to 11 days.

At first glance, finding the origins of sectarianism seems quite easy; it simply requires two confessions. With closer examination, the issue appears more complicated. Sectarianism stems from the ways in which the Protestant Reformation was propagated in Ireland and the Catholic population resisted it. The Protestant Church of Ireland was established by English fiat. Had the entire Irish population defied royal command there would have been no sectarianism. Likewise, if the entire population had accepted Protestantism (or the English crown had been able to enforce Protestantism), there would have been no sectarianism. In the event, most did not accept Protestantism, but some did, setting the stage for sectarian conflict. Understanding how Protestantism was propagated and how Catholicism was maintained is the key to the origins of sectarianism. Regrettably this book leaves these questions about the very beginnings of sectarianism unanswered.

Since the book does not get to the origins of sectarianism, a better title for it might be The Entrenchment of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland or, as John Morrill suggests, Papists and Heretics: Debates within and between the Churches of Ireland, 1540-1660. His proposed title gets to the heart of the matter. The book describes what Protestants thought of Catholics, what Catholics thought of Protestants, and how Catholics and Protestants related amongst themselves, but not how sectarianism arose or why Irish sectarianism has outlived its Dutch, German, or French counterparts.

The book's strength is describing the political and theological life of the Catholic church in Ireland. Catholics in Ireland struggled to reconcile loyalty to the Catholic church with allegiance to a state headed by a heretical monarch. In the aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, James I issued an oath of allegiance that all Catholics had to affirm. The oath stated that King James was the "lawfull and rightfull King of this Realme," and that the pope had no right to depose the king, invade his territories, or absolve his subjects of their allegiance.

Michael MacCraith's essay describes various solutions that Catholic writers found to the dilemmas posed by the oath. Peter Lombard, the titular archbishop of Armagh, proposed that Catholics needed to distinguish between objective and subjective heresy. Objectively James was a heretic, but subjectively he was not responsible for his heresy since he had been raised in heresy. Therefore Catholics could accept him as their rightful monarch in temporalibus and take the oath.

Hugh McCaughwell reiterated Lombard's position. James was a heretic, but the real fault lay with his teachers and preachers who taught him heretical doctrine. McCaughwell even quoted selectively from James's Praefatio Monitoria to illustrate that the king endorsed the fundamental doctrines of the church as agreed on at the councils of Nicea, Constantinople, Chalcedon, and Ephesus.

Florence Conry, the archbishop of Tuam, held a more radical stance. He distinguished between temporal (belonging to kings) and spiritual (belong to bishops) powers. Temporal power comes from the people (in a generalized sense, MacCraith explains, not in a democratic sense), whereas spiritual power comes from Christ. Conry argued that as king, James had no spiritual power, and his temporal power depended on the will of the Irish people. Therefore Conry advised Catholics to refuse to take the oath of allegiance.

Figuring out how to be a loyal Catholic was not only a theological question, it was a cultural question as well. Sections of different essays chart the rise of confession as the primary mark of cultural identification. Declan Downey outlines Irish connections to Spain, ties based on a shared mythical identity, shared confession, and shared political outlook. In the most enlightening essay of the book, David Edwards highlights the influx of English Catholic settlers, thereby picking apart the historical assumption that English settlement equals plantations equals Protestant. He points out that anti-Catholic measures were laxer in Ireland than in England, making it easier to live as a Catholic in Ireland and making Ireland an attractive destination for English Catholics. Edwards suggests that between 1540 and 1570, there were more Catholic than Protestant English immigrants; between 1570-1590, Protestant and Catholic immigration were roughly equal, with possibly slightly more Protestants; and that only from 1590 onwards, Protestant immigrants outnumbered Catholics.

Edwards shows that Catholic English immigrants integrated into Irish society more fully than their Protestant counterparts, illustrating that confession was becoming more important than country. In the 1641 rebellion in Ulster, where Irish Catholics attacked English and Scottish Protestants, English Catholics were relatively safe. In addition, Edwards estimates that between five to eight percent of the Irish Catholic rebels were in fact English Catholics. He claims that the rebellion was a conflict between confessions, not between ethnicities.

Edwards' essay addresses the essence of Irish sectarianism: the definition of groups based on confessional categories. This state of affairs helps explain Marc Caball's findings: although the Anglican catechism and the New Testament were eventually translated into Irish, this did little to sway Catholic Irish bards, who retained an "essentially traditional Christianity" that stuck to Catholic themes. Caball's essay demonstrates again that religious identity as Catholic came first and trumped even linguistic identity.

Most of the essays in The Origins of Sectarianism focus on the development of Catholicism in Ireland; a few look at the growth of Protestantism. Alan Ford outlines how Protestants regarded the history of the church in Ireland. Some, like Meredith Hanmer, a prebendary of Christ Church Dublin, endorsed the faith of St. Patrick and urged Irish Protestants to redeem the best of Irish Christianity. Others, like Edmund Spenser, found Patrick's faith degenerate and advocated a religious cleansing of Ireland. John McCafferty documents how Protestant clergymen in Ireland were torn between their duties to their congregations and to ecclesiastical and secular authorities. He sees the decreasing number of Protestant clergymen who could speak Irish as proof that ecclesiastical concerns were more important than pastoral ones.

At the end of the book, John Morrill suggests that both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations can be seen as successes and failures. The Protestant Reformation succeeded in that a Protestant church was established in Ireland, but it failed to turn the entire population into Protestants. The Catholic Reformation succeeded in that most people who were born Catholic stayed Catholic; it failed in adding new members or winning back the Church of Ireland. If either Reformation had been completely successful or unsuccessful, the bitter sectarianism of Irish history could have been avoided.

In his introduction, Alan Ford notes that this book about sectarianism tells only half of the story. A companion volume needs to be written on how Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics coexisted peaceably. The same could be said for Michael McIlveen's death. Although Michael was murdered for wearing a Celtic jersey, his family pleaded that there be no sectarian retaliation and publicly invited the Rev. Ian Paisley, the mp for the area and de facto leader of Northern unionists, to Michael's funeral. The Ballykeel Loyal Sons of Ulster Flute Band, a unionist marching band, rerouted a parade away from where Michael was attacked. And at Michael McIlveen's funeral, his Catholic and Protestant friends wore Celtic and Rangers jerseys. Alongside all the sectarianism documented in this book and many others, there is also the often untold history of Protestants and Catholics living together in Ireland—a story that may have pertinence for other times and places as well.

Mary Noll Venables is a historian living in Ireland.

1. Dan Keenan, "Mother grieves for murdered teenage son," Irish Times [Dublin], May 10, 2006; Dan Keenan, "Five charged with killing Ballymena schoolboy," Irish Times [Dublin], May 12, 2006.

2. David Adams, "Sectarian divide has not healed," Irish Times [Dublin], May 12, 2006.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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