Happy St. Patrick's Day

Growing up we played Irish music (really American-Irish music) and marched around the house and danced. My sister Judy drew an almost lifesize picture of St. Patrick and I drew the Irish coat of arms on a piece of wood mounted to a hockey stick. These two items were used to lead the parade. My grandmother - Nana - had come from the Connemara country and had stowed away on a ship at 12 coming to America. My grandfather was Irish, but he died so young we know almost nothing about him. I used to spend hours discussing Ireland with Nana. She died when I was in 4th grade. She left some $400 to me so I could visit the "old country". I never have, but hope to someday.

Today we will stop work a little early and break the somberness of Lent for a couple hours in the evening to sing some songs and dance a little.

Here is today's installment from O'Reilly's "Lives". It is from the Preface:

In no country was this practice of preserving the memorials of the saints more carefully observed than in Ireland. Our earliest and most authentic records since the days of St. Patrick are the lives of our saints; and from Jocelyn to Colgan to record their deeds was a labor of love. It was a remarkable fact that, in all these collections, up to the sixteenth century one class of saints found no representatives. The Church of Ireland had produced a "glorious choir of apostles" who bore the good tid­ings to many a distant land; the "number of her prophets who uttered praise" was not small; but she numbered in her calen­dar no representative of "the white-robed army of martyrs." By a singular prerogative her conversion had not cost the life of a single one of her teachers, and it seemed probable that, were she left to herself; no blood of her children, shed for the faith, would ever stain her soil. But the litany of her saints was to be completed, and he who was the "Master of her apostles," the "Teacher of her evangelists," the "Purity of her virgins," was also to be the "Light of her confessors" and the "Strength of her martyrs;" and the church, whose foundations had been laid in peace, was to see her persecution-shaken walls cemented and rebuilt with the blood of her martyrs.

The sixteenth century saw in Ireland the commencement of a persecution which, gradually increasing in intensity, culminated in the middle of the seventeenth in what was probably the most exterminating attack ever endured by a Christian church. The fanatical followers Of Mohammed, in the seventh century, propa­gated their faith by the sword; but the hordes of Cromwell aban­doned the attempt to make the Irish converts, and turned all their energies to blotting out Catholicity in Ireland by the destruction of the Irish race: the Irish were recognized as ineradicably Catholic, and were slain or banished to wildernesses where it was believed they must become extinct. While this persecution was one mainly and essentially of Catholicity, it was embittered and prolonged by every other element which could exacerbate and increase its ferocity; the differences of race, of conquest, of government, all added their elements of bitterness to intensify and prolong the strife.

From the small holding in Bethune on this feast of St. Patrick ....

Oremus pro invicem!