John of Woking:
The Orange Order is vehemently anti-Catholic in roots. The group is so named after William of Orange who was instrumental in the massacre and suppression of the True Faith. Furthermore even non Catholics should have concern about such a society due to its association with freemasonry.
“Massacre” ?
The Glencoe Massacre of 1692, wicked as it was, was not primarily religious, but political. What others are there ? William III did nothing to kill Catholics for being Catholics - he did renew already-existing laws, as did his two immediate successors. There were no martyrdoms - unless one is to include a priest who died in prison in 1692, who had been imprisoned about 13 years before.
in the days of Charles II. AFAIK, he is the latest in time of those who have been put forward for beatification (his cause is dormant, like that of many others). But that is scraping the barrel - William III was no friend of RCism, but neither was he a persecutor. In fact, one of the great goods of his reign is the Act of Toleration - it excluded Catholics, because they were perceived, not unreasonably in the circumstances, as a Roman “fifth column”. In practice, they got on with practicing the Faith - there was plenty of toleration in fact, though not in theory.
After all, what the monarch did was often less important than how the decisions of throne and parliament were carried out in the country at large. Laws against a religion are only as fierce as those who enforce them. By 1690, Catholics were a negligible minority in England - authorities could afford to be relatively relaxed, so they often were. Ther was no unceasing persecution of English Catholics from 1535 to (say) 1700, any more than there was during the centuries before Constantine.
The anti-Catholicism of the Order is very strong, true - but it’s a reaction to the fear of Catholicism and foreign invasion in the 1690s. There was plenty of justification for Protestant fears of Rome - just a few years earlier, in 1685, was the Edict of Nantes, which at a stroke deprived French Protestants of all legal security, and in practice involved many massacres by troops sent to enforce Catholicism - the whole thing was part of a grand plan of Louis XIV to eliminate all non-Catholicism in France; and it misfired spectacularly. And the Pope congratulated him. Which has not been forgotten. Neither have the massacres in Ireland in the 1640s, and the invlvement in them of Papally-sponsored troops
These things are not soon forgotten - a lot of the hatred for Catholicism in the Order comes from the fear that underneath all the fine words, Rome has not changed, and is still as dangerous as it used to be to the security of the United Kingdom.
ISTM that the hatred of the Order for Catholicism is like the hatred of the Orthodox for it - there is the same living in the past, and the same twitchiness about everything Rome does.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Orange Order - it’s very hard not to, given the murderous behaviour of the IRA, who are supposedly Catholics; their attempts (sometimes successful) to murder members of the Royal Family and the Government merely go to confirm the bad character of Catholicism in the eyes of its severer Protestant critics - such as the Orangemen.
I don’t expect US Catholics to be able understand any of this. So we shall have to agree to disagree. ##
