The theme of this year’s St Patrick’s Festival is “Roots” – as in our heritage, history and culture. However, given the line-up for the four-day celebration, one could be forgiven for thinking that Christianity forms no part of that culture, heritage or history. St Patrick, first bishop of Armagh, whose chief accomplishment was the spread of Christianity in Ireland, is incidental at best.
On the St Patrick’s Festival website, there is no tribute to the saint. No Hail Glorious St Patrick. No invitation to his direct successor, the Archbishop of Armagh, to preside over the parade, as the cardinal archbishop does in New York.
Not content with relegating St Patrick and all that he stood for to irrelevance, the organisers insist on irreverence. That which St Patrick would have regarded as bad is now good. We have a festival which, according to its website, celebrates “a world of Celtic magic”, a “drag brunch”, “a fallen angel, expelled from heaven for playing with fire”, an exploration of cures and curses, and dancers who “channel the witches of Ireland”. Perhaps we should expect this from a festival whose logo is a rainbow-coloured snake. Perhaps the organisers think it an act of intolerance that St Patrick expelled them from Ireland.
In fairness, there are “family-friendly” events advertised. However, in the eight web pages of events, in which there are many international dancing acts, only one Irish dancing troupe is listed. There is an event entitled “In the Footsteps of St Patrick” and another called “St Pat and Snakey McSnakeface” but other than that, and despite the theme of “Roots”, there is little in the way of Irish Christian tradition.
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Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy learning about the traditions of other countries, hearing their music, and admiring their national costumes and dances. I love seeing the pride they take in displaying their traditions. But where is ours? Why are we so down on our own cultural heritage – especially its Christian elements – on the very day we should be celebrating it? The festival seems to be a celebration of everything other than Christianity, and the list of festivities reads more like a Government-sponsored hook-up weekend.
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The HSE joins in to advise “anyone who uses powder and crystal forms of drugs in Ireland” to “start low, go slow”. What do drag queen brunches have to do with St Patrick? Why is the festival logo a snake rather than the saint? Whose idea was all of this and why is everyone okay with it?
On the theme of roots and heritage, the Irish language is enjoying something of a revival – or it is being promoted at least – as a fundamental part of our heritage. But what about our religious beliefs and customs? Christianity is at least as influential a part of our heritage as the language – arguably more so.
Thanks to St Patrick and the monks who followed him, the light of learning and scholarship was kept alive in the Middle Ages in Europe. More than any other western European language, the Irish language and the Christian tradition are intertwined. The oldest written sources in Irish – even ogham inscriptions – testify to the influence of the Christian vocabulary.
According to Fr Conor McDonough OP, a doctoral researcher at the University of Galway and host of Treasure Ireland on the Irish Dominicans YouTube channel, Old and Middle Irish have by far the most substantial body of Christian literature: saints’ lives, histories, biblical poetry, prayers, riddles and legal texts. No other vernacular language in western Europe has anything like it in the first millennium. An exploration of this would make for an interesting – and relevant – event in the St Patrick’s festivities.
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As regards our heritage as a sovereign nation, it is arguable that it is precisely because of our religious differences with Protestant Britain that we became an independent nation with our own flag. If Henry VIII had not got fed up with his wife, we might very well still be a part of a United Kingdom, like Scotland and Wales. Had it not been for a patriotism that was often intertwined with a fervent Catholic identity, we might never have broken away.
Even in modern-day secular Ireland there is evidence of our Christian, and specifically Catholic, heritage: there are more people who go to Mass weekly than speak Irish as often. Yet when it comes to the promotion and celebration of our heritage, the Irish language is acceptable, but Christianity is not – not even for the one day in the year when we commemorate our patron saint.
There are those who would rather see us return to a superstitious, uneducated pre-Christian era of Druids and magic, rather than the science, logic and scholarship of Christianity, with its sophisticated and systematic philosophy and theology. There are some who simply refuse to accept that our country is overwhelmingly better off for having been Christian: a case of cutting off our nose to spite our face, if ever there was one.
I will go to Mass on St Patrick’s Day, still a holy day of obligation in this country, join in one of my favourite hymns, Hail Glorious St Patrick, and ponder its words. I will allow my heart to be stirred by its melody. And I will do it for God and St Patrick and our native home.
