Monday, 3/17/14
On today, St. Patrick’s Day, it is not so much St. Patrick
whom we should honor as his Catholic children, those people who kept the faith
through the centuries. Let me take you on a brief tour of those centuries.
In all them there has been just one English pope, that was
Adrian IV. In 1155 he gave Ireland to England, which was an inappropriate thing
to do, because England’s King Henry II had caused St. Tomas a Becket to be cut
down at the altar.
Moving ahead five centuries, in 1649 England took the head
off their King Charles I, giving power to Oliver Cromwell whom they called
their Lord Protector. He was, a Puritan who saw his victory as a triumph over
Catholicism. When the followers of the dead King Charles I took refuge in
Ireland, Cromwell pursued them. Pushing over the defending walls in the city of
Drogheda, Cromwell had his men put to death everyone there: two thousand
soldiers and all the civilians.
The people at Wexford to the south, horrified by the
massacre of Drogheda, had their leader, David Sinnott, asking Cromwell for
surrender terms that would allow them to remain Catholic. Cromwell rejected
that, going on with the destruction of Wexford and its people. I feel, that since
those people refused to abandon their faith, we should honor them as martyrs,
maybe wearing red vestments today. I read an account of Cromwell’s soldiers
methodically cutting down three hundred women and children who had gathered
around a standing crucifix in the center of Wexford.
A decendant of that David Sinnott was mayor of Wexford sixty-five
years ago. His son, Father Michael Sinnott, has done great work protecting the
gypsies whom the Irish call “Travelling people.”
I don’t feel that admiration for the Irish should lead us turn
against the English. We owe much to them. If they had surrendered to the Nazi
Luftwaffe seventy years ago Hitler’s Nazis might have gone on conquer even the
U.S.
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