As voters in the Republic of Ireland selected a new president, two news stories with deep connections to Northern Ireland also made headlines this month:

• Britain’s King Charles III prayed with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, the first joint worship of the English monarch and the Catholic pontiff since King Henry VIII broke away from Rome in 1534.
• “Soldier F,” a former member of the British Parachute Regiment, was found not guilty of murder and attempted murder for Bloody Sunday, 1972, in Derry (Londonderry), Northern Ireland.

As king, Charles is also supreme governor of the Church of England. He has met previous popes, but never prayed with them in public. “This would have been impossible just a generation ago,” Anglican Rev. James Hawkey, canon theologian of Westminster Abbey, told Reuters. “It represents how far our churches have come over the last 60 years of dialogue.”

In Northern Ireland, however, some Orangemen turned red with rage. “A sad day for Protestantism,” the fraternal group said. Rev. Kyle Paisley, son of the late unionist leader Ian Paisley, and other Protestant clergy condemned the visit. Paisley even suggested that Charles should abdicate the throne.

In 1988 Paisley’s father infamously interrupted Pope John Paul II during the pontiff’s address to the European Parliament. “I denounce you, antichrist. I refuse you as Christ’s enemy and antichrist with all your false doctrine,” shouted Paisley, firebrand founder of the Free Presbyterian Church. It was hardly his only anti-Catholic stunt.

Of course, religious prejudice can cut both ways. Defeated Irish presidential candidate Heather Humphreys, an Ulster Presbyterian whose husbanded once belonged to the Orange Order, told the Irish Times that she and her family “were subjected to some absolutely awful sectarian abuse” during the campaign.

Most people in Northern Ireland seem to have accepted the rapprochement between Leo and Charles with a shrug. Not that we are likely to see Belfast “Kick the Pope” bands suddenly replaced by ecumenical choirs. Sectarianism waxes and wanes, but it seldom disappears.

Bloody Sunday verdict

Thirteen people were shot dead and at least 15 others injured Jan. 30, 1972, at a civil rights demonstration in the Bogside area of Derry. Fifty-three years later Judge Patrick Lynch of the Belfast Crown Court said members of the Parachute Regiment “totally lost all sense of military discipline” and shot “unarmed civilians fleeing from them on the streets of a British city,” according to reporting by the BBC.

But the evidence against Soldier F, whose anonymity is protected by a court order, fell short of what is required for conviction, Judge Lynch ruled in the non-jury trial.

Reaction to the decision was predictably split along the usual republican and unionist lines. “Deeply disappointing” and “continued denial of justice”, said First Minister Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin. Democratic Unionist Party leader Gavin Robinson welcomed the “common sense judgement”, but said the trial had been “a painful and protracted process,” according to BBC.

The US-based Ancient Order of Hibernians, a Catholic fraternal group, issued a statement saying it was “saddened but not surprised” by the acquittal. “As we have for decades, the AOH will support the Bloody Sunday families as they take the next steps in their fight for justice, and we will stand with all victims’ relatives as they continue their fight for legacy truth.”

In 2010, then British Prime Minister David Cameron formally apologized for Bloody Sunday. The judges verdict is unlikely to be the last word on the matter, which has become the life’s work of the victims’ surviving family members and others on one side, with British veterans groups and hardline unionists on the other.

See my 2022 History News Network piece on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.