TRANSPLANTED IRISH INSTITUTIONS - University of Canterbury

again, nativism was prevalent and anti-Catholicism was a part of its ideology.11
82
It is
significant that the catalysts for establishing new P.P.A. branches were ex-nuns and expriests
who travelled around Canada espousing their anti-Catholic rhetoric.
A prominent
ex-nun who influenced the growth of the P.P.A. was Margaret Lisle Shepherd who was
described by a Canadian newspaper, the Catholic Register, as "the foundress of the P.P.A. in
Canada." I 2
Despite initial fears throughout Canada that a publicly anti-Catholic
organization was achieving political success, by 1897 the P.P.A. was in demise. 13
The Protestant's anti-Catholic sentiments originated from a series of contentions
and questions surrounding Catholic belief and practice. G.F.A. Best in his influential article
'Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain' sets out the theoretical base for this anti-Catholic
tradition which he incorporated under 'Popular Protestantism.'
A major objection to
'Popery' was the issue of divided allegiance.
Were their loyalties not shared between Monarch and Pope?- and would not their spiritual
allegiance, in the event of any conflict of claims, have to be the superior? Protestants had no
doubt that, for a conscientious and virtuous Papist, the spiritual indeed should be the superior
allegiance; they admired such religious seriousness, while deploring its premises. 14
This 'divided allegiance' belief was widely prevalent. Gladstone's case against the Decrees in
the First Vatican Council was that the civil liberty of the English Catholics was compromised
by this divided allegiance. IS Best outlines further objections which were moral in character
such as the issues of celibacy, convents and confessionals. These subjects, in the hands of
imaginative writers and lecturers became crucial in the debate of Catholicism and were the
"pornography of the Puritan."16 The Protestant's fascination with the alleged immoral
I IJames T. Watt, 'Anti-Catholic Nativism in Canada: The Protestant Protective Association', Canadian
Historical Review, vol. 48, no. 1, March 1967, p. 45.
12Ibid., p. 51.
13Ibid., p. 57. The P.P.A. in Canada did not survive because the "political atmosphere in Canada
changed in the period following 1896 as a result of the relative absence of divisive religious controversies
and the consequent dwindling of the harsh strains of anti-Catholic nativism."
140.F.A. Best, 'Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain,' in Robert Benson (ed.), Ideas and
Institutions of Victorian Britain. London, O. Bell & Sons Ltd, 1967, p. 122.
ISOp. cit., Norman, p. 17
16R. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, New York, Vintage Books,
1967, p. 21.