Anti-Protestantism
Anti-Protestantism is bias, hatred or distrust against some or all branches of Protestantism and/or its followers, especially when amplified in legal, political, ethic or military measures.
However, the tolerance stopped after the Thirty Years' War in Germany, the persecution of Huguenots and the French Wars of Religion in France, the change in power between Protestant and Roman Catholic rulers after the death of Henry VIII of England in England, and the launch of the Counter-Reformation in Italy, Spain, Habsburg Austria and Poland-Lithuania.
Anabaptism arose as a part of the Radical Reformation, lacking the support of the state which Lutheranism and Calvinism enjoyed, and thus was persecuted.
Protestants, especially public ones, could be denounced as heretics and subject to prosecution in those territories, such as Spain, Italy and the Netherlands in which the Catholics were the dominant power.
Militant anti-Protestantism originated in a reaction by states and societies alarmed at the spread of Protestantism following the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, frequently dated from Martin Luther's 95 Theses of 1517.
While Elizabeth I had initially tolerated private Catholic worship, this ended after Pope Pius V, in his 1570 papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, pronounced her to be illegitimate and unworthy of her subjects' allegiance.
The Penal Laws, first introduced in the early 17th century, were initially designed to force the native elite to conform to the state church by excluding non-Conformists and Roman Catholics from public office, and restricting land ownership, but were later, starting under Queen Elizabeth, also used to confiscate virtually all Catholic owned land and grant it to Protestant settlers from England and Scotland.
Sectarian conflict was continued in the late 18th century in the form of communal violence between rival Catholic and Protestant factions over land and trading rights (see Defenders (Ireland), Peep O'Day Boys and Orange Institution).
In Northern Ireland, since the foundation of the Free State in 1921, Catholics, who were mainly nationalists, suffered systematic discrimination from the Protestant unionist majority.
[16] In 1976, eleven Protestant workmen were shot by a group which was identified in a telephone call as the "South Armagh Republican Action Force".
"[18] In 1983, members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) shot 10 worshippers who were attending a Protestant church service near the village of Darkley in County Armagh.
They demanded that loyalist paramilitarites "call an immediate halt to their vicious indiscriminate campaign against innocent Catholics", or the gunmen would "make the Darkley killings look like a picnic.
"[19] In the period following the signing of the 1929 Lateran Pact, which declared Catholicism as Italy's state religion in the context of a comprehensive regulation of Vatican and Italian government relations, Catholic cultural support for Mussolini is consolidated.
