Intergroup Relations

The nineteenth-century scholar George Monro Grant likened Catholic-Protestant relations in Canada to two mighty rivers: “The two currents of religious life flow side by side as distinct from each other as the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa right after their junction. But the two rivers blend into one. The two currents of religious life do not.” Much has been written about the divisive nature of religious life in nineteenth-century Canada: the fisticuffs between the Orange (Irish Protestants) and the Green (Irish Catholics), the rioting in Toronto – the alleged “Belfast of North America” – and the institutionalized discrimination exercised against Catholics. Until recently, historians have fed popular myths that often place Irish Catholics at the centre of this sectarian violence. Somewhat similar to provocative sketches in the United States of the Irish male as simian-like, intemperate, and pugnacious is the Canadian stereotype of the Irish Catholics’ violent relationship with their Protestant neighbours. On the other hand, one should not dismiss completely the tension between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants as simply “small differences” or what has been called “ritualized violence” that would eventually give way to class solidarity among all Irish. Somehow neither the historians who concentrate on confrontation nor those who have been labelled as the “irenic and ecumenical” seem to capture the many dimensions and layers of Catholic-Protestant relations in the Irish community.

Relations between the proverbial “Orange and Green” should be described carefully within the context of the historical period, region, and social setting in question. In terms of the last category, three classifications define the boundaries of Irish Catholic/Protestant relations: the institutional forum, the public forum, and the private forum. Institutional relations refer to the level of sectarian peace or tension within the legal system, constitutions, and legislative bodies. The public manifestation of the same is identified in the popular press, politics, education, and social and political associations. The most amorphous and, as a result, the most infrequently explored dimension of sectarian behaviour is the private one – day-to-day relations between Catholics and Protestants, on the shop floor, in families, in neighbourhoods, and between individuals. Treatment accorded to Irish Catholics by Protestants, and vice versa, can differ between these categories and, as well, can vary even further depending on time and place.

A period of official institutional prejudice against Irish Catholics (and all Catholics for that matter) existed in the British North American colonies until 1829, the year of Catholic Emancipation in the United Kingdom. Yet penal laws against Irish Catholics were not uniform or applied scrupulously throughout British North America. In Upper and Lower Canada, for example, the Quebec Act of 1774 opened the door to institutionalized toleration of Catholics, toleration that was reinforced when Catholics were permitted to vote and sit in the Legislative Assembly after the Constitutional Act of 1791. In Newfoundland, however, penal laws were enforced harshly by Governor Hugh Palliser between 1764 and 1779. The coming of Governor Richard Edwards reversed this persecution, and, by an instruction from King George IV in 1779, religious toleration was extended to Newfoundland’s “papists.” In Nova Scotia, though Catholics were allowed freedom of religion under the relief act of 1783, it was not until 1823 that an Irish Catholic was permitted to take a seat in the colonial legislature. In the 1780s restrictive oaths curtailed Catholic voting in New Brunswick, and even full emancipation in 1830 failed to signal a rise in Catholic participation in provincial public life.

Official toleration in most of the colonies did not signify mutual acceptance by Catholics and Protestants of each other’s doctrines, but it did ensure denominational equality before the law. In private life, Catholic and Protestant leaders worked together, and rank-and-file Christians met with one another in such associations as the Charitable Irish Society in Halifax or the St Patrick’s Society in Toronto. In the public sphere, toleration extended to the inclusion of Bishop Alexander Macdonell in the Legislative Council of Upper Canada, and he and episcopal colleagues in Lower Canada and Newfoundland were included on the government payroll.

The era of toleration that marked the early nineteenth century was shattered by the frequent public explosions of Irish Catholic/Protestant violence in the 1840s and 1850s. The causes were both of an international and of a domestic nature, with each community appearing to have reasons of its own for sectarian bitterness. Internationally, the rise of ultramontane Catholicism sparked sincere mistrust among English-speaking Protestants, who were themselves undergoing evangelical renewal. In Britain the Oxford Movement appeared to be bringing medieval romanism, and perhaps popery itself, into the heart of the Church of England. This threat of a “papist” fifth column appeared justified when several of the Oxford Movement’s leaders, including John Henry Newman, left Anglicanism for Roman Catholicism in the 1840s. In the same decade the mass migration of Catholics from Ireland to the Americas raised suspicion that a papal conquest was well under way, with Irish Catholics acting as the shock troops. The danger seemed most acute in 1850, when Rome re-established its hierarchy in Great Britain, a move that the Catholic primate, Nicholas Wiseman, heralded as the beginning of the end of the Reformation in the British Isles. British North Americans were well aware of the ultramontane revival and the threat it posed to Protestantism, and their impressions of these international developments further exacerbated local sectarian problems.

The regional outbreaks of violence between Irish Catholics and their Protestant neighbours stemmed from causes specific to each locale. In Nova Scotia, Protestants feared that backward Irish Catholic migrants were an obstacle to the colony’s economic growth. This fear was coupled with the view that Catholics were inherently disloyal to Britain, a view that for many was confirmed when Irish Catholic leaders exposed Reform leader Joseph Howe’s illicit efforts to recruit reinforcements in the United States for the British forces fighting in Crimea. The acrimony played itself out in the political arena when, in the elections of 1856 and 1859, Protestants combined to stop “Catholic ascendancy” at the polls. In these campaigns, actual violence was kept to a minimum.

Other Atlantic colonies experienced sectarian squabbles and occasional violence, much of which was set against the international backdrop of “Papal Aggression.” In 1847, at Belfast, Prince Edward Island, an election contested between Irish Catholics and Scots Presbyterians resulted in three deaths. Yet, although sectarian prejudice helped fuel this clash, the “Belfast Riot” was an exaggerated affair; the real issue in P.E.I. politics was not religion but land. In Newfoundland, sectarian tension, exacerbated by charges of undue Catholic influence in the Liberal government, ignited violence in the election of 1861. Fighting was so fierce in Harbour Grace that one Catholic was killed. In New Brunswick Irish Protestant nativist sentiment was characterized by disdain for the impoverished Catholic famine migrants in Saint John. When this hostility was amplified by a local depression in the 1840s, rhetoric turned to violence, which in large part was perpetrated by the Orange Order.

One issue that especially provoked sectarian bitterness and occasional violence was the demand by French and Irish Catholics for state-funded Catholic separate schools, or the impression that Catholics were given too much of a say in public schools. In Prince Edward Island, the matter of an endowment for St Dunstan’s College and the general issue of Catholic influence in island politics raised the ugly head of intolerance from 1860 to 1863. In Upper and Lower Canada, the schools issue was fought bitterly between Irish and French Catholics and the Protestant supporters of non-sectarian schools. The Taché Act of 1855 and the Scott Act of 1863, both of which extended the publicly funded separate school system in Upper Canada, created an explosive atmosphere in the colonies.

Controversies over separate schools, however, merely added to a set of unique circumstances that infected denominational relations in the Canadas. The itinerant anti-Catholic preacher Alessandro Gavazzi sparked several riots between Irish Catholics and local Protestants during his Canadian tour of 1853. Likewise, the murder of Protestant convert Robert Corrigan at St Sylvestre, Lower Canada, in 1856, and the subsequent acquittal of his Catholic assailants, inflamed Protestant passions and gave rise to the popular opinion that there was one type of justice for Catholics and another for Protestants. Finally, for many members of the legislature of the United Province of Canada, particularly George Brown’s Clear Grits, the separate school bills were examples of how the French Catholic majority of Lower Canada and their Irish allies were forcing the “Romish” Church on the Protestant population of the upper province. Given all of this, it was little wonder that violence and murder punctuated the St Patrick’s Day festivities and “Glorious Twelfth” celebrations held annually in central Canada’s principal cities.

In light of the diverse causes of sectarian bitterness in British North America between 1840 and Confederation, the frequent characterization of Irish Catholics as a violent people is clearly a distortion. The sectarian conflict within which they found themselves was a tangled web of economic, religious, social, and political strands. Moreover, the public face of the violent interchanges – manifested either physically or rhetorically – was not sustained over long periods of time. In the wake of elections, parades, violent meetings, or brief newspaper campaigns, Irish Catholics and their Protestant neighbours usually returned to their day-to-day routines. Occasionally, the altercations could lead to long-term sectarian segregation, as was the case in P.E.I. after the commotions of 1860–63, but, generally speaking, public peace was maintained and institutional toleration preserved. Only periodic lightning-rods – the insurrections led by Louis Riel in western Canada in 1869–70 and 1885, the controversy over Jesuit landed endowments in 1889, and local schools issues – sparked significant bouts of sectarian warfare.

By 1900 sectarian tension between Catholics and Protestants had begun to subside. English-speaking Catholic bishops in the Maritimes and Ontario reported that overt Protestant proselytism was a thing of the past and that Catholics and Protestants lived in relative peace. While the public and institutional dimensions of sectarian relations seemed to be of little concern to prelates, they were troubled by the growing social interaction between Catholics of Irish and Scottish descent and their Protestant neighbours. It was these subtle relations, in schools, associations, neighbourhoods, and workplaces, that posed the threat of assimilation of the Catholic population into the non-Catholic milieu. Archbishop Paul Bruchési of Montreal, in particular, was concerned about the potential assimilation of the 30,000 non-francophone Catholics into the powerful English-Protestant minority.

Examination of Catholic-Protestant relations in the private sphere, however, may offer some important correctives to more traditional approaches that focus on the institutional and public forums. Perhaps the most interesting examples of rapprochement and integration between the Irish Catholic descendants and their Protestant neighbours, and one rarely mentioned without a sense of embarrassment or shame by the families involved, was mixed or interfaith marriage. From the 1890s through to the 1920s Irish Catholic descendants across Canada increasingly chose spouses from the other side of the sectarian divide. This occurred despite ecclesiastical warnings, parental anger, and canonical red tape. In many areas of Canada, the tendency towards interfaith marriages was simply a matter of necessity, since there were far more non-Catholics than Catholics from whom to choose a mate. As new generations of Irish Catholics mingled with non-Catholics in clubs, schools, and neighbourhoods, the chance of a romantic rendezvous between young Catholics and Protestants increased. At the turn of the century, most Catholic bishops who administered to Canada’s Irish Catholics considered interfaith marriages to be an even greater danger to the Catholic community than overt Protestant proselytization.

While Toronto’s Archbishop O’Connor responded to this danger in the early 1900s by eliminating dispensations for mixed marriage in his diocese, Catholics circumvented his controls by marrying outside the Church. In 1905 alone, for example, there were 120 such unions in the Toronto archdiocese compared to only 13 dispensed mixed marriages. Whereas, prior to O’Connor’s episcopate, the ratio of mixed marriages celebrated in a Roman Catholic church compared to those officiated elsewhere was 1:3, during his tenure as bishop the ratio jumped to 1:7. In some ecclesiastical jurisdictions, Irish Catholics would not be told whom they could marry or with whom they could associate. And in some cases, the Catholic party to a marriage and the children departed the Church entirely. In 1913 priests of the Diocese of Peterborough informed newly appointed Bishop Michael O’Brien that many Catholics in interfaith relationships in their parishes refused any relationship with Catholicism. In the long term, growing contact between Catholic and Protestant families in the Toronto archdiocese helped ameliorate Protestant-Catholic relations and aided the assimilation of Irish Catholics into the mainstream of English-Canadian society.

The issue of mixed marriages was not restricted to the Toronto region; it affected Irish Catholic descendants in nearly every part of Ontario and elsewhere in Canada as well. Between 1911 and 1921 Ontario’s rate of mixed marriages fluctuated between 25 and 36 percent of all Catholic marriages. Cities such as London, Peterborough, and Kingston regularly saw rates in excess of 40 percent. A sampling from small-town Ontario in 1911 reveals similar results: Lindsay (40 percent), Brockville (35 percent), Chatham (43 percent), and Parry Sound (47 percent). Rural statistics, although more fragmentary, indicate lower numbers of marriages generally and lower rates of mixed marriages specifically. Elsewhere in Canada, by the 1920s, 15 to 18 percent of Catholics outside Quebec and notable francophone or ethnic enclaves married outside the faith. This was far in excess of the rate among French-speaking Catholics in Quebec, of whom less than 2 percent married outside the faith in the same decade. The much higher rate of inter-denominational marriage among anglophone Catholics prompted some French-Canadian critics to accuse their Irish co-religionists of jeopardizing the faith.

After World War I the public dimension of Catholic-Protestant rivalry surfaced infrequently and usually without reference to the Irish. In the 1920s voices of intolerance demanded an end to immigration, including Catholic immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Later, during and after World War II, Thomas Todhunter Shields, the prominent fundamentalist pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church, Toronto, railed against the separate school system in Ontario; however, he and his Canadian Protestant League were unable to marshall much support in a nation that had witnessed the cooperation of all denominations through two wars and a major economic depression.

While Protestants and Catholics might still harbour prejudice against each other privately, such prejudice rarely was evident on the public stage. A sign of the changing times was the public response to the 1984 decision of the Ontario government to extend full funding to Catholic separate schools. With the exception of a few noisy outbursts, all major political parties endorsed the decision, thereby removing one of the principal irritants between Catholics and non-Catholics in Ontario. In 1995 Ontario’s Catholic bishops supported the requests of other religious groups for access to state funds for their schools, requests that the state is not yet prepared to grant.

The gradual improvement in Catholic-Protestant relations over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries revealed the extent to which Irish Catholics had come to identify with English-Canadian society as a whole – its language, socio-economic ethos, laws, and politics. Another side to this story was the growing division between the two main branches of the Canadian Catholic family, the Irish and the French. After making a collective, yet unsuccessful, stand in defence of Manitoba’s Catholic schools in the 1890s, French- and Irish Catholic Canadians became increasingly estranged in terms of their visions of Canada. Irish Catholic lay leaders and clergy, in alliance with Scots Catholics, more and more saw their mission as preserving the faith among Catholic immigrants to Canada, demonstrating loyalty to British principles of law and governance, and securing the dominance of the English language in Canada outside Quebec. This emergent English-Canadian Catholic nationalism, expressed often in the early twentieth century, was most forcefully summed up in 1915 by the Catholic Register (Toronto, 1893– ): “Propinquity to the United States, the preponderance of Britain in the world, the commercial character of this age and of the age to come, will make for a common vehicle of intercourse and that will not be French but English. We may like it or not, but we cannot and would be foolish to shut our eyes to what is coming or fail to prepare for it . . . The way of our statesmen and Churchmen is bestrewn with difficulty, but it must be kept clear for the advance of British civilization and effective religion.”

In the early twentieth century, the growing French-Catholic populations in New Brunswick and Ontario posed a formidable threat to the dominance of Irish and Scots Catholics over the Church outside Quebec. The most obvious manifestation of the rivalry between the two groups was the struggle over episcopal sees. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Acadians, accounting in 1901 for 64 percent of New Brunswick’s Catholic population, sought their own francophone bishop, particularly for the Madawaska and Miramichi regions which traditionally had come under the Irish Catholic direction from the Diocese of Chatham. In 1920 Cape Breton native Patrice-Alexandre Chiasson was elected bishop, an appointment that signalled the replacement of Irish leadership by Acadian. Similarly, in 1953, after the death of Archbishop John T. McNally of Halifax, the Acadians received their own see at Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

The Irish were somewhat more successful in holding on to their episcopal dominance in Ontario. In 1904 David J. Scollard was elected bishop of Sault Ste Marie, a diocese that covered much of north-central and northwestern Ontario and one that contained a francophone majority. Bishops of Irish Catholic background continued to hold this see until the late 1980s when Marcel Gervais was chosen to succeed the retired Alexander Carter. In two other regions of the province, London and Ottawa, French- and English-speaking factions competed for episcopal appointments. In 1909 the Irish faction, led by Archbishop Fergus Patrick McEvay of Toronto, secured the appointment as bishop of London of Michael Fallon, a man who had notoriously poor relations with Franco-Ontarians. Perhaps an even more significant victory for the Irish bishops was the appointment in 1910 of Charles Hugh Gauthier as archbishop of Ottawa. Gauthier was French in name, but to most he exemplified the Celtic sympathies and vision of his mother’s lineage. Although the French regained the see after Gauthier’s death in 1922, the Irish intent to remain in firm control of Ontario was clear.

Ill will between Catholics of Irish background and Franco-Ontarians was compounded by the bilingual schools issue in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In 1910 English-speaking Catholic bishops were in the midst of delicate negotiations with the provincial government for the extension of funding to Catholic schools when Franco-Ontarians publicly requested the extension of French-language education in the province.

Feeling the pressure from the Orange members of his caucus, Conservative Premier James P. Whitney withdrew from negotiations with the English-speaking bishops and prepared the way for legislation to curtail French-language education – eventually embodied in the infamous Regulation 17. Furious, the English-speaking episcopacy blamed Franco-Ontarians for putting all separate schools in jeopardy. Bishop Fallon described bilingual schools as “inefficient” and asserted that it was “unjust, unwise and injudicious” to impose another language on English-speaking Catholic students, remarks that exacerbated the frosty relations between anglophone and francophone Catholics. Later, McEvay’s successor in Toronto, Archbishop Neil McNeil, explained to a colleague in Nova Scotia that “the real reason why the English-speaking Catholics of Ontario do not unite with their French brethren on the language question was the conviction that they would expose the whole school system to dangerous attack. The Orangemen would then have their opportunity to inaugurate a real campaign against the whole separate school system.” The alliance between English-speaking Catholic bishops and Ontario Protestants on the bilingual schools issue reflected the emergence of the Irish as English-speaking Catholics who were attempting to create a place for themselves in Canadian society that was distinct from that of their francophone co-religionists.

The massive influx of European Catholics, particularly into the Canadian west, from the early 1900s on strengthened the sense of an English-speaking Catholic identity and widened the breach between Irish Catholics and the French. Believing that they had little in common with these Catholics apart from faith, the Irish episcopacy responded to their presence by attempting to protect the religious identity of the newcomers while at the same time inculcating them with Canadian values and the English language. In the words of Archbishop McEvay of Toronto: “The foreign element, the main object of our solicitude can in the opinion of some of us be reached in only one of two ways, either through the medium of men who speak their own language, or through the offices of those who speak the English language which is that of the majority in the West and which is the language the foreigners must learn if they are successfully to procure a livelihood in the places in which they live.” Irish Catholics seemed to have no doubt that Catholic citizenship in Canada would fare best under the auspices of the English language.

Inspired by this vision of themselves as Canadians, English-speaking Catholics created several agencies for home-mission work among Catholic immigrants. In 1908 the Catholic Church Extension Society (CCES) was founded and established its headquarters in Toronto. The membership of this body read like a who’s who of Catholics of Irish descent; its president was Monsignor Alfred E. Burke, a native of Prince Edward Island; its chancellor was Archbishop McEvay; and its co-founder and governor was Sir Charles Fitzpatrick of Quebec. Claiming that its mission was both charitable and patriotic, it received strong financial backing from Catholics in the Maritimes, Newfoundland, Montreal, and across Ontario. Noticeable by their absence were French Canadians, who regarded the CCES as little more than a front for Irish assimilationist activities.

The Irish Catholic episcopacy hoped that new Catholic immigrants would learn English in addition to preserving their distinctive Catholic cultural life, and, to this end, local dioceses sponsored night classes and Irish-modelled voluntary associations to assist their adaptation to Canadian society. At the same time, however, the bishops, unlike their counterparts in the United States, took a forward-looking position on the issue of “national” parishes.

The thrust of episcopal policy in these years was to create self-sustaining Catholic immigrant communities at the parish level. Between 1912 and 1934, Archbishop Neil McNeil of Toronto, a Nova Scotian of Scottish and Irish heritage, circumvented canonical conventions to make certain that European Catholics, particularly Italians, Poles, Hungarians, and Ukrainians, had their own parishes as soon as possible. His successor, James McGuigan, a native of Prince Edward Island, had to request canonical permission for the creation of many of these parishes after the fact.

Irish Catholic descendants hoped that the newcomers would embrace the English language and acquire a healthy respect for and love of British law and parliamentary traditions, but this outlook never took the form of forcing the immigrants into English-speaking churches. In the west, the Irish-Canadian episcopacy believed that a twofold policy of Catholicization and Canadianization would ally the newcomer to the English-speaking wing of the Church as opposed to the French. Some of the Catholic immigrants, such as the Ukrainians, accepted an informal alliance with the anglophone Catholics as a safeguard against what they perceived as the dangerous assimilationist ambitions of French Canadians. Others, such as the Italians, resisted anglophone Catholic associations and clubs and used their national parishes as a bulwark against perceived anglicization.

By 1930 English-speaking Catholic bishops and the CCES had been instrumental in the creation of a network of national parishes – Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Syrian, Lithuanian – across Canada. The existence of such parishes today is a testament to the victory of multiculturalism over biculturalism in the Canadian Catholic Church.