bonfire night?

[bluesqueak]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Joe Bento" <joseph at k...> 
wrote:
> 
> --- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "bluesqueak" 
<pipdowns at e...>
> wrote:
> 
> > Pip!Squeak:
> > Remember, remember, the Fifth of November
> > Gunpowder Treason and Plot
> > There is no reason why gunpowder treason
> > Should ever be forgot.
> > {g}
> > (There are lots of small variations on this song; that's the one 
> > I know)
> >
> Joe writes:
> There's a lot of various verses to the song.  Here's one that is 
> most profound - one that relates directly to the Catholics, whose
> mistreatment was the reasoning behind Guy's plot:
> 
> "Burn him in a tub of tar
> Burn him like a blazing star
> Burn his body from his head
> Then we'll say the old Pope's dead"
> 
> I'm American, and went to a Catholic grammer school in 
California.  We
> actually learned several verses of the song, and about the 
> religious persecution that existed in Britain at the time, 
> especially between the Anglicans and the Catholics.  I learned 
> the "Remember, remember" as you quoted it.

Pip!Squeak:
Religious persecution is almost too mild a phrase; Europe in the 
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries was a constantly bubbling 
religious war. England, as one of the Protestant countries, had 
several invasion attempts made against her by Catholic powers (Drake 
and the Spanish Armada is the most famous). 

So the Catholics within England were under automatic suspicion - it 
was invariably assumed that they didn't see the Protestant 
government as a legitimate government and would therefore support 
the Catholic enemy powers. Which some did. Giving the basically 
loyal rest a very bad name. It wasn't until the early nineteenth 
century that we got full political emancipation; and the dying 
embers of the religious wars can still be seen in Northern Ireland. 

Probably the closest modern equivalent to those English Roman 
Catholics is that of the Palestinians within Israel  - there's an 
automatic (and untrue) assumption that they're *all* opposed to the 
existence of the state of Israel, and *all* potential terrorists.



<snip>
> Joe:
> Guy Fawkes Night, Bonfire Night, etc was also practised in early
> Colonial America, and scattered areas of the USA still apparently
> celebrate.  It was, for reasons I don't know, commonly referred to 
> as Pope's Night in America.  
> 
> What I'm curious to know is if this is a day everyone celebrates 
> today in Britain.  Would the Catholics, for example, participate 
> in a festival that was originally a sign of persecution against 
them?

Pip!Squeak:
Well, I was educated in a Convent school, so the answer is 
probably 'yes'. But frankly, Guy Fawkes is remembered in popular 
British lore simply as a traitor - the man who tried to blow up 
Parliament. It's generally only when kids study the origins of 
Bonfire Night that they find out that the Catholic/Protestant wars 
were behind the treason. 

Pip!Squeak