This great Saint resurrected at least 39 people from the dead on his way to evangelising our country. I came across this in a book about 400 resurrection miracles by Saints. The author Fr Albert Herbert SJ said St. Patrick is one of the greatest of the Apostles!
I live in Dublin and we have been to the St. Paddy's Day parade when the kids were little. Now we go for a walk and stay away from city centre. I think if Patrick showed up in Dublin on this day there would a little 'cleansing of the temple' action!
Anyone with a bit of faith at the moment is an edgeland Christian, hanging onto a rock in a storm trying to get ready for eternity with the one who made it all.
Thanks for the link to the previous post, Paul, which I seem to have missed.
I will treasure the Shield Prayer, and try to say it aloud.
On Rome... maybe we shall try to be charitable, seeing how Rome is collapsing right now, underneath our eyes ? Maybe it, too, was a shield, in its particular way ? Who can say ? And is Christ in the city exactly the same as Christ out in the wild places ? Can He be ?
I don't know. I prefer... the wild(er) places right now, that's for sure...
"We are the pagans now" certainly rings true. I liked this video "A Prayer for Spiritual War: St. Patrick's Breastplate" recently posted to YouTube by Jamie Bambrick of Northern Ireland: https://youtu.be/bLb4bR2HHrU?si=nTHaUC2TVPzVostV "This 1500 year old prayer is arguably the greatest in all church history outside of the Bible itself. Exalt the glory of God and trample on all manner of wickedness with this daily confession."
The rhythm of the words translates well to that modern arrangement (and spoken in the thumpingly musical Belfast accent! At least I think it's Belfast). My favourite version is sung by Benedictine nuns and is a light in dark times: https://youtu.be/uVk_lGUGSus?si=VidraXJVUYj4MNkf
Important stuff, and on an important day today - Thanks. ( Footballers on the march in the cities of Ireland; smile).
I think you could buy that folk art at the local garden centre in England, and a pot of paint, but the crozier got me searching. Plenty of shepherd crooks for real on sale in UK, and as walking sticks,, but St Patrick's is something else. I did not know that Anglicans burnt the 'original' outside Dublin Christ Church Cathedral in 1538 (Bachal Isu / Wikipedia).
Add my thanks to Debra's for the link to your earlier essay on St Patrick. I see interesting and important notions on governance; for example Brits are subjects not citizens, but I think Patrick would have been a citizen, like St Paul those centuries before him whose citizenship conferred a significant legal passport. (I wonder about EU passports: quite a number of UK subjects have taken advantage of eligibility for Irish citizenship in order to retain the privileges of EU citizenship).
PS CoE (Anglican) parishes in England in 20thC benefitted from a flow of Welshmen as priests, but the spring seems to have dried up. (See charity Friends of Friendless Churches for examples of wonderful churches and their relics, many surviving from before the Reformation, now abandoned because of economic and demographic changes). These days CoE seems to have turned to women with a sprinkling from the old Empire. I am giving a nod these days to a Toynbee view of history.
Somehow that word "pagan" made me think of the old Waterboys track 'A Pagan Place'. My favorite honorary Irishman is frontman Mike Scott. The Waterboys' legendary album 'Fisherman's Blues' was recorded in the town of Spiddal, Galway. It's funny, I hear Waterboys songs playing everywhere in pubs and shops in Ireland, but almost never any by the far more commercially successful U2. The Irish have very good taste in music.
Speaking of, for any Waterboys fans who have not heard, the great musician and one-time Waterboy Karl Wallinger died last Sunday. I met him once, outside the Diamond Club in Toronto after a 1985 Waterboys show and he struck me as an incredibly kind guy. Always loved this great track, which sadly becomes only more and more relevant and prescient:
Had a dinner party with friends last night and Fisherman's Blues was our soundtrack. Karl Wallinger R.I.P. The Waterboys definitely tapped into that Atlantic Isles wildness. U2, at their best, are more universal, in their defence.
Yes. I had friends who hated 'Fisherman's Blues' and just wanted more of the "big music" of their earlier days, which would have seen the band continuing along a U2 trajectory. Scott's autobiography is very good, by the way, and worth picking up if you haven't read it.
I first saw the Waterboys when they opened for U2 at a show in Canada in 1984. That band was stellar up through 'The Unforgettable Fire' but then the wheels seemed to come off and they became very uninteresting (to me, at least). I knew before I arrived in Ireland several years ago to never bring up Bono with an Irish person, which was fine by me. What I expect is that after we lose Bono or the Edge the Irish will slowly forgive and forget and allow themselves to be genuinely proud of, rather than embarrassed by, that band.
Irish joke: What's the difference between Bono and God?
God doesn't walk around Dublin pretending he's Bono.
That was a great read - yes, there's many easy ways to dislike Bono. My personal vendetta is based on his aligning himself with a particular political party in the 80s (a party not known for their care of the poor and downtrodden). I've seen them play 3 times and, despite all the Bono bashing, they've great songs that defined my teens and early adulthood. But I wouldn't be flying to Vegas to see them *shudder* Nostalgia is a heck of a drug!
When U2 toured in 2017, their "walk on" song was Waterboys' "Whole of the Moon." The boys from the north side of Dublin have great respect for The Waterboys.
There is a good section in Scott's bio about meeting Bono for the first time, and Scott's impression that Bono was warily sizing him up as a potential rival in the bombastic and earnest rock band sweepstakes of the mid-eighties (which included others such as Big Country). It's telling U2 would walk on to "The Whole of the Moon" and not "Fisherman's Blues" as the later Waterboys became almost a critique of the perils of remaining like U2.
“I hadn’t realised until recently that Nigeria was originally evangelised by Irish Christians. Now it seems the favour is being returned. We are the pagans now, and we need all the help we can get.“
What a delightfully simple story. Presumably it’s your commitment to your faith that compels you to gloss colonialism so brightly, but it’s not actually all that Christian - as so often, clinging to dogma betrays the spirit.
My aunt was a nun and nurse in Nigeria. She brought her faith and trained generations of Nigerian girls in her faith and in medicine. No coersion, no violence. But presume you mean 19th Century with religion as part of the "civilising" colonial steamroller. In the context of the time, can we blame a Patrick or zealous Jesuit for doing what they think their God is asking? Yes but; yes and; well maybe. What do you think?
I’m not especially interested in blaming anyone, so much as trying to understand, to avoid perpetuating the violence. Thank you for sharing that about your aunt. Of course evangelism doesn’t always mean coercion - but as you suggest, it clearly was part of the coercive colonial package deal, indeed the essential element in how these things have been rationalised, and if we’re not careful, continue to be.
I'm not glossing anything. Do you know a great deal about the history of Christianity in Nigeria? I can't say I do, but I do know that Christianity has spread like wildfire in that country in recent decades; a spread which has nothing to do with Europeans. I've met a good few Nigerian Christians. If their faith had simply been a result of the evils of 'colonialism' I imagine it would not have survived, so you might want to consider that there is something else going on.
You might want to consider also what kind of practices Christianity (and indeed Islam) displaced there, and how 'violent' they were in comparison to Christianity. You might even find that the 'delightfully simply story' of European 'colonialism' is a bit more complex than we're currently hearing.
Africa, incidentally, was Christian many centuries before Europe. The Ethiopian church is one of the oldest in the world, and was not created by 'colonialism'.
I didn’t say that Christianity taking root in Nigeria is simply the result of the evils of colonialism, as I don’t believe that. Nor is it immediately clear to me what the history of Ethiopia has to do with European missions in Nigeria. What I ask for is nuance. Whatever you think of the religious practices that were displaced, there is a context of violent coercion behind the conversion. It’s not everything, but it’s a big factor. Unless we’re going to say that the ends justify the means, which to me, is the opposite of a Christian ethic.
'Presumably it’s your commitment to your faith that compels you to gloss colonialism so brightly, but it’s not actually all that Christian.'
Not a great example of 'nuance'. I didn't mention colonialism at all, and i certainly didn't 'gloss' it. You on the other hand made a specific, unevidenced connection between Christianity and 'colonialism' in Nigeria, with no other factors mentioned. You are now talking about 'violent coercion', whilst providing no evidence of this either. Your views appear to be based on prejudice rather than history.
For all I know, coercion may have been involved in this case, but you are offering no evidence of it, and neither are you explaining why that history would be relevant to what I've written. You are just comment-bombing a piece about holy wells with a typically unsupported assertion about Christian violence. This neither displays 'nuance' nor moves anything forward. You may want to take some of your own advice.
Comment bombing? I wrote a short critical response to something you wrote, you and another commenter replied and I replied back to each of you. That doesn’t seem out of bounds to me but then, it’s your party.
Indeed, you didn’t mention colonialism - that’s my whole point. You described the Nigerian priest in Ireland as ‘returning the favour’ of missionaries who converted Nigeria from paganism, as if imperial conquest and free migration were somehow equivalent vectors. To me, it hit a dud note.
I didn’t realise it was controversial to assert that the British empire’s means of anglicising and Christianising their ‘subject peoples’ was very often down the barrel of a gun.
Well, again, you're making assertions you don't seem to be able to back up. That's your party also! Feel free. But I was writing about Christian exchange. You seem to want to relentlessly interject with objections about the British Empire, regardless of what that might have to do with the subject at hand. Which, considering the Portuguese got to Nigeria first and the Irish were themselves a subject people, might not be very much. Of course, I am no expert in this case. We seem at least to have that in common.
Again, if you're going to 'ask for nuance' you might want to start by offering some.
You're correct that, like you, I'm not a specialist, but I know enough about the tactics of the British Empire to make an inference. I'll leave it to your readers to judge whether your Cartesian skepticism on the question of whether there was violent coercion 'in this case' is intellectually honest.
What does it have to do with the subject at hand? My point, simply, is that the success of European missions was aided by imperial domination achieved, in large part, through military and technological means - the levers of the Machine you wrote about in a previous series. And the process of conversion, in turn, slicked the gears. This is not to deny agency to the missionaries themselves who mostly, no doubt, had a purer goal in mind, nor to disrespect the sincere faith of Nigerian Christians then and now - but to acknowledge some of the complexity underlying this 'Christian exchange'.
St Patrick’s being a holiday mostly celebrated by Americans many generations removed from Irish immigrant ancestors, let me tell you of an American in Ireland who would make a great companion for replicating your tour of these 50 wells.
This great Saint resurrected at least 39 people from the dead on his way to evangelising our country. I came across this in a book about 400 resurrection miracles by Saints. The author Fr Albert Herbert SJ said St. Patrick is one of the greatest of the Apostles!
https://youtu.be/5U_L16_mQpw?si=w3ChPmYjOtRAQFgi
There is also a very well kept well of St. Patrick in Clonmel.
Really enjoyed this - highlights were the reference to Folk Art and also the influx of priests from overseas due to a dearth of native priests.
I live in Dublin and we have been to the St. Paddy's Day parade when the kids were little. Now we go for a walk and stay away from city centre. I think if Patrick showed up in Dublin on this day there would a little 'cleansing of the temple' action!
Anyone with a bit of faith at the moment is an edgeland Christian, hanging onto a rock in a storm trying to get ready for eternity with the one who made it all.
For a while, I thought St. Patrick had moved to the Canary Islands for a well earned retirement; maybe he is still active.
Thanks for the link to the previous post, Paul, which I seem to have missed.
I will treasure the Shield Prayer, and try to say it aloud.
On Rome... maybe we shall try to be charitable, seeing how Rome is collapsing right now, underneath our eyes ? Maybe it, too, was a shield, in its particular way ? Who can say ? And is Christ in the city exactly the same as Christ out in the wild places ? Can He be ?
I don't know. I prefer... the wild(er) places right now, that's for sure...
"We are the pagans now" certainly rings true. I liked this video "A Prayer for Spiritual War: St. Patrick's Breastplate" recently posted to YouTube by Jamie Bambrick of Northern Ireland: https://youtu.be/bLb4bR2HHrU?si=nTHaUC2TVPzVostV "This 1500 year old prayer is arguably the greatest in all church history outside of the Bible itself. Exalt the glory of God and trample on all manner of wickedness with this daily confession."
The rhythm of the words translates well to that modern arrangement (and spoken in the thumpingly musical Belfast accent! At least I think it's Belfast). My favourite version is sung by Benedictine nuns and is a light in dark times: https://youtu.be/uVk_lGUGSus?si=VidraXJVUYj4MNkf
Beautiful, thank you!
I love the nuns’ song! Thank you. They are using the same tune I learned and sang on my daily walks for a year or two after my husband died. 🙏
💓 it's a beautiful, beautiful melody. I'm so sorry for your loss.
Thank you for this beautiful song! Looking into how to buy their music
Important stuff, and on an important day today - Thanks. ( Footballers on the march in the cities of Ireland; smile).
I think you could buy that folk art at the local garden centre in England, and a pot of paint, but the crozier got me searching. Plenty of shepherd crooks for real on sale in UK, and as walking sticks,, but St Patrick's is something else. I did not know that Anglicans burnt the 'original' outside Dublin Christ Church Cathedral in 1538 (Bachal Isu / Wikipedia).
Add my thanks to Debra's for the link to your earlier essay on St Patrick. I see interesting and important notions on governance; for example Brits are subjects not citizens, but I think Patrick would have been a citizen, like St Paul those centuries before him whose citizenship conferred a significant legal passport. (I wonder about EU passports: quite a number of UK subjects have taken advantage of eligibility for Irish citizenship in order to retain the privileges of EU citizenship).
PS CoE (Anglican) parishes in England in 20thC benefitted from a flow of Welshmen as priests, but the spring seems to have dried up. (See charity Friends of Friendless Churches for examples of wonderful churches and their relics, many surviving from before the Reformation, now abandoned because of economic and demographic changes). These days CoE seems to have turned to women with a sprinkling from the old Empire. I am giving a nod these days to a Toynbee view of history.
Somehow that word "pagan" made me think of the old Waterboys track 'A Pagan Place'. My favorite honorary Irishman is frontman Mike Scott. The Waterboys' legendary album 'Fisherman's Blues' was recorded in the town of Spiddal, Galway. It's funny, I hear Waterboys songs playing everywhere in pubs and shops in Ireland, but almost never any by the far more commercially successful U2. The Irish have very good taste in music.
Speaking of, for any Waterboys fans who have not heard, the great musician and one-time Waterboy Karl Wallinger died last Sunday. I met him once, outside the Diamond Club in Toronto after a 1985 Waterboys show and he struck me as an incredibly kind guy. Always loved this great track, which sadly becomes only more and more relevant and prescient:
World Party 'Ship of Fools': https://youtu.be/ZHh0V7UjVXI?feature=shared
The Irish Times - Karl Wallinger, frontman of World Party and Sinead O’Connor collaborator, dies at 66:
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/2024/03/12/karl-wallinger-frontman-of-world-party-and-sinead-oconnor-collaborator-dies-at-66/
Had a dinner party with friends last night and Fisherman's Blues was our soundtrack. Karl Wallinger R.I.P. The Waterboys definitely tapped into that Atlantic Isles wildness. U2, at their best, are more universal, in their defence.
Yes. I had friends who hated 'Fisherman's Blues' and just wanted more of the "big music" of their earlier days, which would have seen the band continuing along a U2 trajectory. Scott's autobiography is very good, by the way, and worth picking up if you haven't read it.
I first saw the Waterboys when they opened for U2 at a show in Canada in 1984. That band was stellar up through 'The Unforgettable Fire' but then the wheels seemed to come off and they became very uninteresting (to me, at least). I knew before I arrived in Ireland several years ago to never bring up Bono with an Irish person, which was fine by me. What I expect is that after we lose Bono or the Edge the Irish will slowly forgive and forget and allow themselves to be genuinely proud of, rather than embarrassed by, that band.
Irish joke: What's the difference between Bono and God?
God doesn't walk around Dublin pretending he's Bono.
You have a good grasp on our mortification with celebrities! I wonder if U2 drank and failed better more, would we love them more!
I mean, it's not as if the Irish hate Saoirse Ronan. The whole U2 hate thing is complex. This is a decent overview:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jul/12/where-the-streets-have-no-statues-why-do-the-irish-hate-u2
That was a great read - yes, there's many easy ways to dislike Bono. My personal vendetta is based on his aligning himself with a particular political party in the 80s (a party not known for their care of the poor and downtrodden). I've seen them play 3 times and, despite all the Bono bashing, they've great songs that defined my teens and early adulthood. But I wouldn't be flying to Vegas to see them *shudder* Nostalgia is a heck of a drug!
When U2 toured in 2017, their "walk on" song was Waterboys' "Whole of the Moon." The boys from the north side of Dublin have great respect for The Waterboys.
There is a good section in Scott's bio about meeting Bono for the first time, and Scott's impression that Bono was warily sizing him up as a potential rival in the bombastic and earnest rock band sweepstakes of the mid-eighties (which included others such as Big Country). It's telling U2 would walk on to "The Whole of the Moon" and not "Fisherman's Blues" as the later Waterboys became almost a critique of the perils of remaining like U2.
“I hadn’t realised until recently that Nigeria was originally evangelised by Irish Christians. Now it seems the favour is being returned. We are the pagans now, and we need all the help we can get.“
What a delightfully simple story. Presumably it’s your commitment to your faith that compels you to gloss colonialism so brightly, but it’s not actually all that Christian - as so often, clinging to dogma betrays the spirit.
My aunt was a nun and nurse in Nigeria. She brought her faith and trained generations of Nigerian girls in her faith and in medicine. No coersion, no violence. But presume you mean 19th Century with religion as part of the "civilising" colonial steamroller. In the context of the time, can we blame a Patrick or zealous Jesuit for doing what they think their God is asking? Yes but; yes and; well maybe. What do you think?
I’m not especially interested in blaming anyone, so much as trying to understand, to avoid perpetuating the violence. Thank you for sharing that about your aunt. Of course evangelism doesn’t always mean coercion - but as you suggest, it clearly was part of the coercive colonial package deal, indeed the essential element in how these things have been rationalised, and if we’re not careful, continue to be.
I hear that. Good food for thought.
I'm not glossing anything. Do you know a great deal about the history of Christianity in Nigeria? I can't say I do, but I do know that Christianity has spread like wildfire in that country in recent decades; a spread which has nothing to do with Europeans. I've met a good few Nigerian Christians. If their faith had simply been a result of the evils of 'colonialism' I imagine it would not have survived, so you might want to consider that there is something else going on.
You might want to consider also what kind of practices Christianity (and indeed Islam) displaced there, and how 'violent' they were in comparison to Christianity. You might even find that the 'delightfully simply story' of European 'colonialism' is a bit more complex than we're currently hearing.
Africa, incidentally, was Christian many centuries before Europe. The Ethiopian church is one of the oldest in the world, and was not created by 'colonialism'.
Could our next Pope be Nigerian? A welcome possibility.
I didn’t say that Christianity taking root in Nigeria is simply the result of the evils of colonialism, as I don’t believe that. Nor is it immediately clear to me what the history of Ethiopia has to do with European missions in Nigeria. What I ask for is nuance. Whatever you think of the religious practices that were displaced, there is a context of violent coercion behind the conversion. It’s not everything, but it’s a big factor. Unless we’re going to say that the ends justify the means, which to me, is the opposite of a Christian ethic.
What you actually said was this:
'Presumably it’s your commitment to your faith that compels you to gloss colonialism so brightly, but it’s not actually all that Christian.'
Not a great example of 'nuance'. I didn't mention colonialism at all, and i certainly didn't 'gloss' it. You on the other hand made a specific, unevidenced connection between Christianity and 'colonialism' in Nigeria, with no other factors mentioned. You are now talking about 'violent coercion', whilst providing no evidence of this either. Your views appear to be based on prejudice rather than history.
For all I know, coercion may have been involved in this case, but you are offering no evidence of it, and neither are you explaining why that history would be relevant to what I've written. You are just comment-bombing a piece about holy wells with a typically unsupported assertion about Christian violence. This neither displays 'nuance' nor moves anything forward. You may want to take some of your own advice.
Comment bombing? I wrote a short critical response to something you wrote, you and another commenter replied and I replied back to each of you. That doesn’t seem out of bounds to me but then, it’s your party.
Indeed, you didn’t mention colonialism - that’s my whole point. You described the Nigerian priest in Ireland as ‘returning the favour’ of missionaries who converted Nigeria from paganism, as if imperial conquest and free migration were somehow equivalent vectors. To me, it hit a dud note.
I didn’t realise it was controversial to assert that the British empire’s means of anglicising and Christianising their ‘subject peoples’ was very often down the barrel of a gun.
Well, again, you're making assertions you don't seem to be able to back up. That's your party also! Feel free. But I was writing about Christian exchange. You seem to want to relentlessly interject with objections about the British Empire, regardless of what that might have to do with the subject at hand. Which, considering the Portuguese got to Nigeria first and the Irish were themselves a subject people, might not be very much. Of course, I am no expert in this case. We seem at least to have that in common.
Again, if you're going to 'ask for nuance' you might want to start by offering some.
You're correct that, like you, I'm not a specialist, but I know enough about the tactics of the British Empire to make an inference. I'll leave it to your readers to judge whether your Cartesian skepticism on the question of whether there was violent coercion 'in this case' is intellectually honest.
What does it have to do with the subject at hand? My point, simply, is that the success of European missions was aided by imperial domination achieved, in large part, through military and technological means - the levers of the Machine you wrote about in a previous series. And the process of conversion, in turn, slicked the gears. This is not to deny agency to the missionaries themselves who mostly, no doubt, had a purer goal in mind, nor to disrespect the sincere faith of Nigerian Christians then and now - but to acknowledge some of the complexity underlying this 'Christian exchange'.
And to you, Paul
Happy Saint Patrick's Day, Paul! Good strength as we begin the Great Fast ☦️
Holy Father Patrick, pray to God for us!
St Patrick’s being a holiday mostly celebrated by Americans many generations removed from Irish immigrant ancestors, let me tell you of an American in Ireland who would make a great companion for replicating your tour of these 50 wells.
https://www.overdriveonline.com/reader-rigs/article/15635946/the-only-known-working-kenworth-in-ireland
The chaos blocked out for a bit while reading and walking down a leafy lane to peer at the water.
Happy St Patrick's Day, Paul! And to all who read here. God bless you and yours.