Divine intervention has long been a blamed by some for playing a role in the sinking of the Titanic during its maiden voyage in 1912.
Harland and Wolff, the East Belfast shipyard where the ship was manufactured, was notorious for not hiring Catholics.In the 1900’s the workforce was entirely Protestant and virulently anti -Catholic.
“At
Harland and Wolff it was not unknown for workers to paint on the sides
of ships under construction the words “NO POPE” in letters ten feet high
or more,” writes naval historian David Allen Butler.
There were widespread stories that each rivet hammered into the Titanic was accompanied by a ‘f.. the pope epithet
Any
Catholics who were hired were subject to blatant discrimination.Some
had hammers dropped on them from above and the atmosphere against
Catholics was described as “poisonous”
The
author and historian Daniel Allen Butler writes about a how
anti-Catholic sentiment in Northern Ireland at the time of the ship’s
construction was blamed by some for the tragedy.
“Very
active in Ulster politics at this time was one William James Pirrie,
who became the Chairman of Harland and Wolff in 1895. He instituted an
unwritten but strictly enforced policy that the firm would never
knowingly employ a Roman Catholic,” writes Butler about the era during
which the Titanic was being crafted in Belfast.
Butler
goes on to write how rumor has it that “a cryptic anti-Catholic message
was hidden in her [the Titanic’s] hull number, the one given to the
Titanic by her builder, Harland and Wolff. That mysterious number was
3909-04: when written out and viewed in a mirror, the number spells out
the words NO POPE–providing a certain bit of leeway is allowed with the
4.”
“There’s more than enough blame to go around in this story,” writes Butler, “and nobody’s hands are clean.”
While
there are differing reports as to whether or or not the hull bore the
number that could be read as an anti-Catholic cryptic message, Titanic
faithful at the time the ship set sail proclaimed earnestly that “not
even God himself could sink this ship.”
However an iceberg off the Canadian coast certainly did.
Source: Anti-Catholicism and the Titanic
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