Erin Go Bragh

     Thanks to Greg Laughlin for sending this article on the "dilemma" facing Irish organizations that want to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day this year on the usual feast day, March 17.  Since Easter is as early this year as it can possibly be, March 17 falls on the Monday of Holy Week, a most inopportune time for lavish celebration, as Catholics are supposed to be preparing themselves for the solemn events of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion.  Indeed, at Mass on the day before, Palm Sunday, they will have heard the reading of the entire passion from one of the synoptic gospels, beginning with Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem and concluding with His burial.

     So Catholics in some of the American dioceses will be moving the celebrations forward to the Saturday before Palm Sunday.  But that's offensive to some Irish American groups.  As the leader of one organization said, it's as if the bishops were to order the NFL to change the date of the Super Bowl.  Of course it is nothing like that; there's no analogy at all.  Saint Patrick's Day is a Catholic feast day, a minor feast in most countries, but, naturally, a much-noted feast in America and Ireland.  If the feast were to fall on Good Friday (an impossibility, but suppose it could, for the sake of argument), would the organizers still insist on wearing green and parading half drunk down Main Street and singing boisterous songs?  At the least, you'd think they might show some consideration for their fellow Irishmen who take their Catholicism seriously.  They might say, "Not that it means much to me, as it's been that long since I've darkened a church door, but Paddy, now, it doesn't sit right on his stomach."  These are, after all, the Irish who used to teach their children to make the sign of the cross every time they passed by a church, in honor of the Savior who died to set them free.

     That is not even to mention the very meaning of the day, for the Irish nation.  Saint Patrick's claim on the hearts of the Irish -- if indeed it is Saint Patrick they are honoring, and not just a name or a geographical location -- is that he brought them the Christian faith, driving from the land the serpents of druidical superstitions and human sacrifice.  With that faith came Roman (and sometimes Greek; John the Scot from Ireland was almost the only Western man of his day who studied it) learning, and such evangelistic fervor from the Irish monasteries that western Europe itself was in large part saved, for the faith and for civilization itself, by those Irish outposts from beyond the seas.

     People will argue, though, that the celebration is "cultural," not religious.  There are of course a lot of things that are cultural though not, strictly speaking, religious: baseball used to be such a thing in the United States.  But I don't sense that that's the case here.  We don't have something to which the Irish consider themselves honor-bound to uphold, something whose beauty or essential meaning helps to shape their beliefs about the world and how it works and their own place in it.  You can say, "I love baseball; it's the great American sport; it unites Albert Pujols with Lou Gehrig with Dan Brouthers," and so on.  But it's hard to say, "I want to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day, but I want it to have nothing to do with Saints or Patrick or any Church."  That would represent not a demotion from religion to culture, but a demotion from both the cultural and religious to a kind of niche marketing, or niche purchasing.  The same phenomenon has occurred with self-styled "cultural" Jews.  If that is what you are -- if the Seder is just a nice family meal, and Kaddish the traditional thing you say when somebody has died -- then you are not really a Jew, and you're well on your way to having no culture, either.

     What Saint Patrick did mean to the Irish, though, is well captured in this famous hymn, whose lyrics many an Irishman could not now sing without choking on his whiskey:

All praise to Saint Patrick, who brought to our mountains
The gift of God's faith, the sweet light of His love.
All praise to the Shepherd who showed us the fountains
That rise in the Heart of the Saviour above.
For hundreds of years,
In smiles and in tears,
Our Saint hath been with us, our shield and our stay;
All else may have gone,
Saint Patrick alone.
He hath been to us light, when earth's lights were all set,
For the glories of faith they can never decay,
And the best of our glories is bright with us yet,
in the faith and the feast of Saint Patrick's day.

There is not a Saint in the bright courts of heaven,
More faithful than he to the land of his choice;
Oh well may the nation to whom he was given,
In the feast of their Sire and apostle rejoice.
In Glory above
True to his love,
He keeps the false faith from his children away.
The dark false faith
Far worse than death,
Oh he drives it far off from the green sunny shore,
Like the reptiles that fled from his curse in dismay,
And Erin when error's proud triumph is o'er,
Will still be found keeping Saint Patrick's day.

Then what shall we do for the heaven sent father?
What shall the proof of our loyalty be?
By all that is dear to our hearts we would rather
Be martyred, sweet Saint, than bring shame upon thee.
But oh, he will take
The promise we make,
So to live that our lives by God's help, may display
The light that he bore
To Erin's shore.
Oh, Father of Ireland! no son wilt thou own
Whose life is not lighted by grace on its way;
For they are true Irish, ah yes, they alone,
Whose hearts are all true on Saint Patrick's day.