Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600-1998: The Mote and the Beam by John D. Brewer and Garth I. Higgins (review)

BOOK REVIEWS637 more male religious than female;the proportions had been reversed by the time of the French Revolution. This study is somewhat undermined by its excessive length. A great deal of tedious information is presented in an undigested manner;much of it could better be placed in footnotes. At the same time, some interesting topics are passed over too quickly. For instance, in a section on monastic architecture, the author states that, in the seventeenth century, the monastery's common dormitory was often replaced by individual cells, while in the eighteenth century, comfortable rooms tended to replace the small, austere cells. Dinet apparently thinks that this is but a minor architectural detail; he says nothing about possible religious, social, and economic significance of such changes. In this and a number of cases, further discussion of the meaning of developments charted would have been welcome. These volumes do reward their readers with an up-close, sympathetic, and scholarly perspective on early modern French religious life. Libraries will surely want to obtain them. Thomas Worcester, SJ. College ofthe Holy Cross Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600-1998: The Mote and the Beam. ByJohn D. Brewer with Garth I. Higgins. (NewYork: St. Martin's Press, Inc. 1998. Pp. xi, 248. $69.95.) John Brewer, professor of sociology in Queen's University, Belfast, distinguishes three important modes of anti-Catholicism. The covenantal mode, represented by Reverend Ian Paisley and his constituency, is characterized by both high political content and high theological content. Covenantal anti-Catholics understand their world in Old Testament terms; God has chosen the Protestants as He earlier chose the Israelites, and it is their duty to defend their land against the apostate minions of the Roman antichrist. The secular mode, which typically informs the actions of middle-class Unionists as well as some Protestant paramilitaries, is high in political content but low in theological content. Its adherents abhor the Catholics' principal political objective, a united Ireland, and therefore accept a variety of negative stereotypes of them and of the Irish Republic . The Pharisaic mode, reflected in the official positions of the Presbyterian and other mainstream Protestant churches, is high in theological content and low in political content. Its proponents do not stigmatize Catholics but, confident in their own possession of the gospel truth, seek to convert them while being careful to separate their own political beliefs from their religious convictions. This tripartite conceptualization turns out to be a powerful and elegant device for understanding complexities of Ulster Protestant thinking. It enables 638BOOK REVIEWS Brewer to explain, in the light of the Protestant community's dominance within their society, the unique persistence into the late twentieth century of antiCatholicism as such a salient element in the political culture of Northern Ireland . This analysis of the contemporary situation is preceded by a lengthy review of the history of anti-Catholicism since the seventeenth-century plantations . For a work of academic sociology this is a remarkably passionate book. In the preface the author and his research assistant declare themselves "Christians and sociologists," and one of their principal concerns is to convince the objects of the study that the theological foundations of the latter's anti-Catholicism are as unwarranted by scripture as their perceptions of Catholic belief are unfounded . To engage three distinct disciplines—sociology, history, and theology —is a risky endeavor. (J can't help wondering, for example, whether a New Testament scholar would think the Pharisees receive fair treatment.) The historical section of the work reflects wide and sensible reading in the Irish historiography of the past generation and suffers from the flaws of that literature . In particular, Brewer echoes the tendency of recent historians, including sometimes this reviewer, to understate the significance of Presbyterian alienation from the Protestant establishment in the eighteenth century and to exaggerate the rapprochement of Dissenters and Anglicans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. However, his typology of anti-Catholicism may be just what we Irish historians need to think our way out of the puzzle we have created in this revisionist reaction against dewy-eyed nationalist history. Something like Brewer's oddly-named "Pharisaic" mode of anti-Catholicism, with an irenic and compassionate...