When you think of St. Patrick’s Day, what leaps to mind?
Maybe I should ask the question like this: When you think about mainstream-press news coverage of St. Patrick’s Day, what leaps to mind?
Green beer? Corned beef and cabbage (during Lent)?
Great masses of people — primarily in big cities in the Acela Zone and the Rustbelt — going more than a little crazy? Politicians trying to march next to the Catholic archbishop of New York, when they disagree with him on most hot-button issues? Lawsuits about LGBTQ groups demanding to march in a parade that, once upon a time, had something to do with Christian hero?
Questions like these were at the heart of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which got rather personal — since my family embraced the Celtic saints when we converted to Orthodox Christianity. My patron saint is St. Brendan and my daughter’s is St. Brigid (more on this later).
The Big Idea of this podcast was quite simple: It is totally valid for journalists to focus on civic celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day and other modern variations on the veneration (not worship) of the great Celtic saints. The problem is when they leave readers in the dark about the details in the lives of these saints (along with debates about those details), along with the prayers and rites linked to them.
For example, when you think about St. Patrick do these words come to mind?
My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many. My father was Calpornius. He was a deacon; his father was Potitus, a priest, who lived at Bannavem Taburniae. ... His home was near there, and that is where I was taken prisoner. I was about sixteen at the time. At that time, I did not know the true God. I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others.
That’s the first few lines of the Confession of St. Patrick, a document that historians take quite seriously — in part because it focuses on the faith and history of this great missionary bishop, while ignoring all kinds mythological details that came later.
If you want to know more about St. Patrick, you can read a small number of documents directly linked to his life and even his own writings.
Readers get to hear small bites of this information every now and then when journalists produce stories that set out to debunk some of the St. Patrick myths (think shamrocks and snakes). These stories are valid, but it helps if journalists also tell readers what historians believe that they know about this man.
Consider this recent USA Today story: “Saint Patrick, the man behind St. Patrick's Day holiday, wasn't even Irish.” Here is the overture:
Saint Patrick went from being sold into slavery to being credited to bringing Christianity to Ireland, according to Elizabeth Stack, executive director for the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany, New York.
"He had a dream that the Irish were crying for him that they needed him," Stack said. "He returns to Ireland and brings Christianity with him. He is who made the Celts and the pagans into Christians."
St. Patrick's Day is celebrated on March 17, the day he is assumed to have died. The holiday originally was tied to religious ideals but now is also a symbol of Irish pride.
According to Stack, until around 40 years ago, it was a very traditional, religious and solemn time in Ireland. Bars even remained closed.
This story even mentions the Confession of St. Patrick. And, by the way, what about the “dream” that was one of the two major turning points in this saint’s life?
That comes after Patrick was kidnapped and became a slave in Ireland, after he managed to escape and after he travels to France, in ordained, and then returns home to Britain. Patrick describes this in vivid detail. Why not quote him?
A few years later I was again with my parents in Britain. They welcomed me as a son, and they pleaded with me that, after all the many tribulations I had undergone, I should never leave them again. It was while I was there that I saw, in a vision in the night, a man whose name was Victoricus coming as it were from Ireland with so many letters they could not be counted. He gave me one of these, and I read the beginning of the letter, the voice of the Irish people. While I was reading out the beginning of the letter, I thought I heard at that moment the voice of those who were beside the wood of Voclut, near the western sea. They called out as it were with one voice: “We beg you, holy boy, to come and walk again among us.” This touched my heart deeply, and I could not read any further; I woke up then.
Thus, here is one of the Eastern Orthodox prayers associated with the Feast of St. Patrick:
From slavery you escaped to freedom in Christ's service:
He sent you to deliver Ireland from the devil's bondage.
You planted the Word of the Gospel in pagan hearts.
In your journeys and hardships you rivaled the Apostle Paul!
Having received the reward for your labors in heaven,
Never cease to pray for the flock you have gathered on earth,
Holy bishop Patrick!
That USA Today story on St. Patrick was pretty solid. If you want to see a perfect example of modern (maybe postmodern) coverage of the Celtic saints, all you need to do is dig into this recent New York Times story about St. Brigid: “As Ireland’s Church Retreats, the Cult of a Female Saint Thrives.”
This is one of those trend stories in which something that is very several decades old is described as a rather shocking new trend because it was new to the reporters and editors who did this story.
I have been reading about feminist and even neopagan interpretations of St. Brigid and other Celtic saints since, oh, the late 1980s and I am sure that this trend is older than that.
So here we go again. Once again, the theme is that something old and rather traditional (and thus bad) has become something new and progressive (and thus good). Here is the overture:
KILDARE, Ireland — Around the year 480, as legend has it, a freed slave named Brigid founded a convent under an oak in the east of Ireland. To feed her followers, she asked the King of Leinster, who ruled the area, for a grant of land.
When the pagan king refused, she asked him to give her as much land as her cloak would cover. Thinking she was joking, he agreed. But when Brigid threw her cloak on the ground, it spread across 5,000 acres — creating the Curragh plains, which still stretch beside the religious settlement she founded at Kildare (from the Irish Cill Dara, “church of the oak”).
A millennium and a half later, a renewed cult of Saint Brigid is thriving in Kildare, even at a time when the Roman Catholic church is in retreat in Ireland, weakened by clerical sex abuse scandals, growing secularism and — Catholic feminists say — by its refusal, despite a collapse in the numbers of its all-male priesthood, to give equal status to women.
Much of the revitalized interest is the result of the Brigidines’ emphasis on nature, ecology and healing, and their shift away from the patriarchal faith of traditional Irish Catholicism.
Let me stress that this rather New Age story angle is valid, even if it is quite old. The question is whether this lengthy feature ignores the centuries of faith surrounding the older views of St. Brigid.
The solution? Ignore the past and, if possible, even jump up and down on it. Check out this passage:
At dusk on the eve of Saint Brigid’s Day this year, in place of muttered rosaries, several hundred worshipers, mostly women, lit candles from a central flame by the well. They watched as Angela Seoighe, a retired local teacher, hand-wove a giant Saint Brigid’s Cross — a twist of rushes or straw that many Irish households still hang every year to protect against illness and fire. Another nun from Solas Bhride, Sister Phil O’Shea, recited a new type of prayer.
“The earth is waking from its winter sleep,” she intoned. “Just listen — Brigid brings the spring.”
It’s all about the word “muttered.” Here’s another example:
Margaret Hebblethwaite, a leading English writer on Catholic matters, attended this year’s vigil at Saint Brigid’s Well.
While she had heard the name of Saint Brigid as a child, Ms. Hebblethwaite had only recently learned that, unusually, Brigid and her female successors governed not only nuns but male monks, as well. Moreover, it is believed that Brigid, despite being a woman, was ordained as a bishop.
Note the vague words — “it is believed” — that erase the need to any on-the-record material about the centuries of debate about the role of St. Brigid and other abbesses in some Celtic monasteries.
It is one thing, for example to “lead” a monastery that includes monks as well as nuns. It is something else to “govern” it. And, yes, St. Brigid is frequently seen, in icons, holding a staff — since she is an abbess. That does not mean that she was ordained as a priest or bishop.
But why discuss details and debates linked to church history when — speaking in vague, omniscient New York Times paraphrase — you can write pretty much anything that you want in the most influential newspaper on Planet Earth?
Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.
I feel the need for a blast of Celtic faith from St. Patrick, as in these bracing lines from the famous “Breastplate Prayer” associated with this saint.
Against the demon snares of sin,
The vice that gives temptation force,
The natural lusts that war within,
The hostile men that mar my course;
Or few or many, far or nigh,
In every place and in all hours,
Against their fierce hostility,
I bind to me these holy powers.Against all Satan's spells and wiles,
Against false words of heresy,
Against the knowledge that defiles,
Against the heart's idolatry,
Against the wizard's evil craft,
Against the death wound and the burning,
The choking wave and the poisoned shaft,
Protect me, Christ, till Thy returning.Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
New Agey? Not really.
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