"Top O' the Mornin' to Ye!" a Day Late.

And the proper response is: "And the rest o' the day to yerself."

Tis the Season for Confirmation! All you Saints of God, pray for us.

Two of our grandchildren, Zack and Grace, are making Confirmation next week. Zack chose St. Benedict for his patron and Grace chose St. Teresa of Calcutta. In their honor I post these pictures with the promise that we will be praying for them to their adopted saints with the confidence that they will grow in the virtues shown so powerfully by their selected special friends among the prayer warriors of God.

St. Patrick's Breastplate: A Surprise to Me.

I've always loved St. Patrick's Breastplate, but it seems I've been under a false impression. In the wee hours of the morning at adoration, I wanted to say the prayer so I looked it up on my phone. Lo and behold, I found that what I thought was the entire prayer is only the tail end of a much longer piece that resembles a litany.

On one website, I read that St. Patrick imitated the form of a druid incantation which reminds me of the way the Church has always taken pagan practices and transformed them.

The Land of Saints and Scholars: Happy St. Patrick's Day!

The Wasps of the United States who were contemporaries of my parents had a great contempt for Ireland. I remember my mother talking about a conversation she had with an acquaintance about the backwards Irish having their "pigs in the kitchen." But in reality Ireland is a country of great learning that was spared the assault of the barbarian invasions and so avoided the darkness during the middle ages. The Irish are poets and story tellers with a rich tradition both oral and written.

Even before St. Patrick, Catholic missionaries had seeded Ireland with Christianity and St. Patrick found a people ready to hear the word of God. Patrick's evangilization inspired the monasteries, great centers of learning, whose ruins pepper the entire land. The pre-Christian culture of Ireland was also steeped in education because it respected men of learning.

The Church in the U.S. reflects the bounty exported from Ireland. When I was a girl I remember Irish immigrant priests, preaching in their lilting brogue, in almost every parish we attended as my dad was  transferred from place to place with the Navy.

I had the blessing of visiting Ireland in the early 90s and remember it most for the warmth of the people and the children, everywhere the children. But even then you could see the seeds of dissolution taking hold with the newspapers discussing homosexuality and pushing for legalization of divorce. I don't think I would want to return to Ireland today to see the devastation inflicted by the European Union, the Irish sex abuse scandals, and the general collapse into moral relativism that plagues most countries.

Let us intercede with St. Patrick to raise up descendents to re-Christianize Ireland and the world.