Ulster Catholics Worship Under Fire Protestants Torment Parishioners, Torch School

Taunts, jeers and rocks at Mass every weekend, and now an arson attack on a church school at night: Our Lady the Mother of Christ is a congregation under siege.

The Rev. Eamonn Cowan, like the other three priests who live in the parish house beside the Roman Catholic church, sleeps somewhere else each night.

“We couldn’t take the risk, you know, of being burned alive,” says Cowan, who serves a dwindling Catholic minority in Harryville, on the south side of this mostly Protestant town.

It’s a stark example of how low community relations have sunk in parts of Northern Ireland since the British-ruled province was on the brink of peace in 1994, when gunmen on both sides called cease-fires.

Each Saturday for 12 weeks, Protestant hooligans have gathered outside the church before evening Mass, waving Union Jacks and hurling abuse, bottles, eggs and firecrackers. The church’s exterior is marred both by the steel grills protecting the windows and vulgar, misspelled graffiti.

Last week, arsonists damaged the Catholic elementary school and threw gasoline bombs at two houses - one belonging to a Catholic family, the other to a Protestant woman with a Catholic boyfriend. No one was injured, but both families were left homeless.

The siege of Our Lady began Sept. 14, hours after militant Catholics blocked the Orange Order, the province’s main pro-British Protestant organization, from marching to a Presbyterian church in Dunloy, a mostly Catholic village 12 miles away. Several previous parades had been blocked.

It follows a summer of widespread rioting in Northern Ireland after Catholics blocked traditional Protestant marches.

The Harryville pickets said Catholics couldn’t attend their churches if they wouldn’t let Protestants march to theirs. Only seven worshipers made it to Mass that first night.

“It is quite frightening to walk past a jeering, taunting crowd,” said parishioner Delia Close.

“And then once you’re inside the chapel, all may be quiet - perhaps the priest is preaching, perhaps we’re praying, perhaps singing - and then a firework will go off, or there’ll be a loud cheer, or maybe the sound of a crowd getting angry.

“It’s not the way you should have to go to Mass.”

The protests seemed to ebb - until Catholics again barred Orangemen from snowbound Dunloy on Nov. 23.

On Saturday, thugs threw gasoline bombs at 300 riot police outside the church, burned a bus and surrounded a Catholic woman’s car.

“I had to get out of the car. They were going to burn it,” said Beth Reid, choking back tears as she recalled how a gang of youths surrounded her car, demanded to know if she’d come from Mass and started kicking the doors.

“I screamed,” she said. “I thought maybe the police would hear me or somebody would come to help. But all of the onlookers … they were just out to watch.”

A few of the protesters were middle-aged men wearing Orange regalia under their jackets. Others were skinheads in their 20s who covered their faces and threw stones at photographers. They pelted police with empty beer cans and chanted “SS” to their faces just as Catholic militants do.

Sunday services have been left alone. But attendance at the church’s 6 p.m. Saturday service, which had been the most popular, has dropped from 700 to 200, Cowan said.

Most of Harryville’s Catholics have moved out in the past decade. Cowan said only six families or lone elderly Catholics remain, but hundreds drive in from outlying areas for Mass.

The Rev. Ian Paisley, a hard-line Protestant leader, called this week for the Harryville protests to stop because they were giving pro-British Protestants “a very bad name.” He denied that his Democratic Unionist Party ever led the protests, though his son Ian Jr. had attended most and defended them as a rational response to anti-Orange protests.

Ballymena’s mayor, James Currie, said Tuesday that he would help escort parishioners to the church door Saturday. It was the first active gesture by a Protestant toward the town’s Catholics, and brought him hate mail and insults in the streets.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Shawn Pogatchnik Associated Press