Boyle Roche Quotes

Reflection on the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1850

A force of 4,000 Spaniards, aided by Irish Catholics attempted to thwart the English Protestant Reformation forces in Ireland. They were defeated in their war by Lord Mountjoy. This is one of the many wars in history that was described as “holy” by one or both of its participants.

Many Protestant Englishmen were shocked to hear this, having little familiarity with the details of the functioning of the Church of England—the Established Church of Great Britain—in Ireland and the contribution of the Church to the discrimination against Irish Catholics and the poverty of Ireland.

Anne was a Protestant but her father James II was a Roman Catholic. There was always suspicion about her true religious allegiance by the extremists in the Church of England. The Act of Toleration, despite its name, required the Church of England to be the established church and the sovereign’s to be the heads of the church.

The Irish monks were loyal to the pope and were outraged when he was displaced by King Henry VIII. They were seen as a hotbed of disloyalty and therefore ordered to close. This is one of the many examples where an established government church dictated not only how people should worship but also prohibit other religions from functioning. These examples were well known to the American Founding Fathers and much of educated American opinion which was one of the drivers of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state.

This is an excellent example of the many public insults that the Irish religious leaders hurled at each other exacerbating the intercommunal tension between the Catholics and Protestants. There were amost no Irish leaders of either religion who tried to dampen the animosity and conflict.

5th Earl of Montrose. The public reaction to a new prayer book issued by the King and created by the King’s religious appointees. Although Protestant in nature, it was created without the early Scottish Protestant tradition of consultation with many levels of clergy and society. It was seen as authoritarian and much like the Catholic mass which was proscribed by Rome. The National Covenant was a document of protest. It was first drafted by Alexander Henderson and Johnston of Wariston, and signed by others, but Montrose was the first signer and the acknowledged leader of the Covenanters.

Those who claim that the founding fathers contemplated religion as a critical component of government often point to this article of the South Carolina Constitution. However, they ignore the almost simultaneous passage of the New York constitution as in {612166}. When the framers of the Constitution met in 1787 in Philadelphia the separation of church and state issue was not really resolved and awaited the Bill of Rights where the separatists won out.

1st Viscount Bolingbroke. This is the argument that was and still is given by most theocracies and nations opposed to pluralism. It was also a quotation which with the American founders were familiar and were targeting this view when they demanded the 1st Amendment.

The King Outlawed Protestant Worship.

Charles was a young man who ruled under the thumb of his mother, Catherine de Medici. She and the leading Catholic political figures had decided to have the army massacre the Huguenots—Protestants—of France. Charles knew the massacre was to begin that night and tried to save his friend Rochefoucault, a Protestant, who was a member of the King’s court. He suggested several times that Rochefoucault not go home that evening but stay at the Louvre. The unsuspecting Rochefoucault felt that he had to get home to his wife and left explaining that to the King. Hence the King’s remark. Rochefoucault and his family were murdered that night. In the end, 50,000 Protestants were massacred in what has come to be known as the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. Many of the palace servants were Protestants and were cut to ribbons throughout the palace. The King from a palace window shot a rifle at Protestants trying to swim the River Seine to escape, while his page kept reloading for him.

At the time he was referring to Protestants & Catholics. Today we have Muslims vs. Jews & Christians.

This special collection brought in the huge sum of 300,000 Guilders. The Protestants in Catholic Ireland were persecuted as were the Catholics in most Protestant dominated lands. The Vatican raised money and armies to strengthen the hand of Catholic states and to foment revolution in Protestant states. Some of the protestant churches used the same methods to “interfere in the internal affairs of other countries” however. The early Americans were well aware of this history of religious struggles to become the State Religion, and this was one of the reasons they wrote the First Amendment. Without it and the others in the Bill of Rights, there would have been no ratification of the Constitution.