As a child I was really fascinated with the sinking of the Titanic.  I read stories about it and in a strange sort of way wanted to know "all the details".  I never saw the movie because I don't care for movies but was really surprised at the following article that was on a website tonight:

Did anti-Catholic sentiment of Titanic workforce help doom the unsinkable ship?

Reports of anti-Catholic secret messages on the Titanic in Belfast were widespread

By

KERRY O’SHEA,

IrishCentral Staff Writer

Published Friday, April 13, 2012, 7:31 AM

Updated Friday, April 13, 2012, 7:49 AM

  

 

A Titanic wall mural in Belfast City

Photo by Roger Price

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.