From the final defeat of the Ulster chieftains at the hands of the British to the remarkable success of Sinn Fein - the political wing of the Irish Republican Army - in the 1983 Westminster elections, Catholicism in Ulster, 1603-1983 tells the story of the Roman Catholic community in the Irish province of northeast Ulster.

In his comprehensive chronicle, Oliver Rafferty contends that the unique historical experience of Ulster Catholics sheds light on the sectarian roots of a crisis that has become a paradigm for religious and ethnic conflicts throughout the world.

Rafferty explains that to understand the Northern Irish Catholic community, one must first understand its view of itself as a community under siege - a mentality he traces to a seventeenth-century settlement and plantation system that left Ulster as the only Irish province with a significant Protestant population.

Bereft of political power and economic security, the Irish community grasped Catholicism as the only means of preserving its identity, and according to Rafferty, this attachment, gave Ulster Catholics a cohesion that they retain today.

Rafferty points out that despite poverty and persecution, Ulster Catholics historically have not supported nationalist sentiment with the same fervency as their co-religionists in the Republic. He discusses how only a minority of Ulster Catholics supported IRA efforts from the 1920s through the early 1960s and how, in the midst of Protestant majority oppression, Catholicism flourished in Northern Ireland.

Rafferty evaluates the influence of the Catholic hierarchy and tracks the rise of the lay middle class Civil Rights movement. Concluding that Protestant hostility toward Catholics is greater than Catholic animosity toward Protestants, Rafferty cites Protestant fanaticism and misconception as the true stumbling blocks to reconciliation in the region.