Even though he early and openly rebelled against the Catholic Church, Joyce continued throughout his career to write about the religion of his youth. This was not merely a self-centered obsession with his own personal doubts and fears, but a tackling of one of the most prominent features of Irish culture. Catholicism was not just a religion in Ireland; it was the religion of the indigenous Irish. And because the privileged classes in Dublin were relatively recently arrived British Protestants, Catholicism was strongly related to grassroots Irish cultural and political identity. While the Irish Protestants themselves had major political conflicts with their English counterparts, the Catholic majority in Ireland had been discriminated against for centuries on account of their religion.
The factional strife that set Catholics against Protestants in Joyce's Ireland had its roots in medieval politics and Renaissance religious wars in Europe. Lying so close to England, Ireland almost inevitably became drawn into the political ambitions of its aggressive neighbor. The tight rein kept on the nearby Irish by the powerful English monarchy grew tighter during the Protestant Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when, for a variety of political reasons having to do with conflict between the king and the pope, England outlawed the Catholic religion.
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