Modern Ireland and St. Patrick

Dear Editor:

Recently, during a general election, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar insisted that Ireland was now a more compassionate, more-inclusive place and more in tune with the rest of the world.

All this despite more murders, more violence, more drug use, more suicides, more fear in the countryside, more divorce and now government funding for abortions.

Amazingly, there is still a small remnant of St. Patrick’s flock existing in Irish society. They are constantly under attack from the secular-atheists who tell them that they want to be done with all this Catholic-bothering so as to live in “truthfulness,” unsupported by “superstition.”

Yet, when people say around funerals that they envy people of simple faith, implying that they themselves have become too clever for such thinking. One wonders if they are certain they have considered all the evidence. Is it possible that the skeptics, agnostics and pessimists, have missed something — maybe even close to everything — about human life; especially our origin and destiny?

Births, marriages and deaths: there are no secular rituals which can invest such moments with the same perspective as the church does.

Secular funerals are random affairs and secular weddings ring hollow, lacking mystery which the Irish love. Baptism for many is a day out and a welcome party for the newborn. It is not because God is absent — that cannot be helped — but because a fake effort is made to keep up the trappings of religiosity where the promises of faith do not apply.

The church somehow remains strong in the soul of the poor, salt of the earth Irish. Deep down, people intuit that without these Catholic understandings, and the customs and ceremonies that go with them, they would be lost in confronting the implications of birth, marriage and death.

How else might they face the future afterwards?

Can Ireland regain again her sense of humour and escape the over seriousness and confusion of the modern world?

Applied, even at the most simple level of understanding, to our human life, the proposal of St. Patrick has lent faith, hope and love of God to the Irish soul and a hundred other qualities that can scarcely be imagined otherwise.

In his memoirs, entitled “Confessions,” St. Patrick wrote to the Irish, “When you consider my work in Ireland and you have taken note of its development, let your conclusion be that it was truly a work of God.”

For this reason alone, it can happen again in a world now so fragile that it is brought to its knees by the power of a virus.

St. Patrick left the Irish with a special conviction, very relevant for today — nothing can destroy friendship built with God. Father Harry Clarke Kelowna