Patricius
I wasn’t going to post today. Saint Patrick’s feast has, like that of Saint Valentine, been co-opted by the culture, totally obscuring the person behind the day.
But there are folks where I work affecting fake Irish brogues, and it’s driven me over the edge.
Today is a day in America where we eat immigrant food and pretend it’s Irish, where most folks have their only Guinness of the year, and where everybody wears the most garish colour green imaginable on pain of, well, pain. Do they still dye the Chicago River green? They did when I was young.
What has this to do with Patrick?
First of all, he wasn’t even Irish. He was a Roman Briton, born about AD 387. As a teenager he was kidnapped and sold into slavery by Irish raiders.
Several years later he escaped from captivity, inspired by the vision of an Angel.
He went to the continent and became a became a monk and was ordained. As a bishop, he was sent back to Ireland to preach the Gospel and convert the people – and convert them he did.
In thirty years he covered Ireland with churches and monasteries, and in AD 444 he founded the metropolitan see of Armagh.
No leprechauns. No brogue. No corned beef and cabbage. Patrick was a Roman Catholic Bishop, appointed by the Pope for northern Ireland.
So if you insist on walking around speaking in a silly fake accent, at least do it with the words of the Saint:
I am greatly God’s debtor, because he granted me so much grace, that through me many people would be reborn in God, and soon after confirmed, and that clergy would be ordained everywhere for them, the masses lately come to belief, whom the Lord drew from the ends of the earth, just as he once promised through his prophets: “To you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Our fathers have inherited naught but lies, worthless things in which there is no profit.” And again: “I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles that you may bring salvation to the uttermost ends of the earth.”
(from the Confessions of Saint Patrick – today’s Office of Readings)
Full disclosure: while I am not wearing the slightest bit of green, I will certainly get together with friends this evening. Guinness will be involved, but certainly not my only Guinness of the year. Or even week, come to that.
Here’s a great source on the Catholic Patrick.
It is true that it’s terrible but if an immigrant group has a sign of truly ‘making it’ into US society it is getting a fake holiday to make money off of. I can’t wait till Diwali and Eid get to that point as well. I’m super disappointed that Tet isn’t more crackin’ around here.
But I do want to point out that Patrick was also a destroyer of religion. His destruction of the several levels of the bardagh contributed to the decline of Irish culture. WHen converted the Irish did not continue the telling of the old stories which was an attack on the faith that was there. Now he had been enslaved so I’ll give him that but cultural destruction is never pretty.
But to end on a high note he was one of the first to advocate for the full abolition of the institution of slavery in western writings. Which is pretty nice.