England fans riot in Portugual, sing "F the Pope and the IRA"

Anteayer wrote: »

I'd prefix this by saying I'm not Catholic, I went as far as formally defecting from the Catholic Church having being brought up in a household that never even went to mass. I wouldn't know one end of a tabernacle from the other.

As a somewhat outside observer, as Irishman who isn't catholic, my experience is that there's a significant issue in the UK with anti-Catholic sectarianism in a way that really isn't tolerated or dished out towards other religious groups and it seems to roll all the way back to Tudor-era propaganda when you start to pick it apart and some of it is undoubtedly anti-Irish too.

In a whole load of occasions while living in open minded, liberal, London I have had people trying to tell me about my "catholic guilt". I'm an atheist, openly gay, no fan of organised religion at of any sort, strongly believe in having a secular state and would be far less likely to have any 'catholic guilt' complex than most of the people who were doling this stuff out.

I've als had things like being told that "Ah you're not proper Irish - you're not even drunk mate!" and bing asked to pronounce 'th' over and over even though I don't don't pronounce it as D and even if I did, many of the people who were saying this pronounce it as "F" themselves, as in: "one, two, free! Uncle Arfur is in the barf!"

Even in respected academic and media circles, there's this constant banging on about religion, or more so the 1500s period, in the UK, in a way I don't see in Ireland anymore and I definitely don't see in France or the Benelux.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18789154

"Discussion among eurozone leaders about the future of their single currency has become an increasingly divisive affair. On the surface, religion has nothing to do with it - but could Protestant and Catholic leaders have deep-seated instincts that lead them to pull the eurozone in different directions, until it breaks?"

They don't even seem to bother to pay attention that many of the places they were deeming to be Catholic or Protestant aren't. Germany is decidedly mixed and some of its most economically conservative parts are very historically very Catholic, Austria's historically catholic, so's large chunks of the Netherlands, France is revolutionarily secular with a strongly Catholic history and the most impacted economy, Greece, is mostly Greek Orthodox, but sure why pay any attention to that when it gets in the way of a good stereotype about protestant work ethic and catholic confession boxes?

Meanwhile the Anglican Church is probably the least dramatic of any reformation, it still even describes itself as a catholic church, it's just forked away from the Roman Catholic church but it was never really quite the same as the churches that broke off on profound theological differences, it was about Tudor era power and the fact that Spain, Britain's then arch nemesis empire, basically ran the Catholic Church at the time.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I think the English / British in general could do with actually acknowledging they have a problem with sectarianism.

For all the looking on in horror at Northern Ireland's sectarian issues, a diluted, but still very present version of the same thing seems to crop up across English culture too, particularly after a feed of beers and a bit of jingoism - all of a sudden the filter's gone.