Dear Reader,

In a land far to the north, the druids and witch-doctors were nervous. The prophets had foretold the coming of a foreigner bringing a strange religion:

“Pole-headed shall come from over the sea,
His staff crook-headed, his garment hole-headed,
His servants shall sit in the east of his house,
And they shall say amen amen.”

Little did they know! “Crook-headed” indeed…a crozier! “Garment hole-headed”…a chasuble! The hand of God was moving: the worldly nephew of St. Martin had been taken prisoner and enslaved on Mount Slemish. He had been drawn to the desert…far from the worldliness of Roman Britain. “And he watched over me before I knew him…and consoled me as a father would his son,” he later wrote in his Confession. He found God. He escaped, never to go back, he thought…

Then, one night, “I saw a man coming as if from Ireland with innumerable letters, and he gave me one of them, and I read the beginning of the letter: ‘The Voice of the Irish’, and as I was reading the beginning of the letter I seemed at that moment to hear the voice of those who were beside the forest which is near the western sea, and they were crying as if with one voice: ‘We beg you, holy youth, that you come and walk among us once more.’”

Sent by the Pope in 431, he brought the light of Christ to the end of the Earth “where they never had any knowledge of God but, always, until now, cherished idols and unclean things. They are lately become a people of the Lord, and are called children of God; the sons and the daughters of the chieftains are to be seen as monks and virgins of Christ.” The Island of Saints and Scholars! Cradle of the re-Christianized Europe…until the English invaded, and then apostatized. What of Ireland now? Would it remain faithful?

And the heretical English conquered the world for earthly glory—even as far as the ends of the earth. And wherever the English went, they were followed by the sons of Patrick. They brought the light of Christ, and the Holy Sacrifice was offered, and sins were forgiven, and souls were saved. And these souls “beyond any doubt on that day shall rise again in the brightness of the sun, that is, in the glory of Christ Jesus our Redeemer, as children of the living God and co-heirs of Christ, made in His image; for we shall reign through Him and for Him and in Him.”

Fr. David Sherry