Saint Brigid now has her own state-sanctioned bank holiday in Ireland, which this year falls on Monday, 5 February, following the saint’s feast day on 1 February.
Along with St Patrick and St Columcille (Columba), St Brigid is one of Ireland’s three patron saints. Her recent “promotion” follows the organisation Herstory mounting a three-year campaign to get the public holiday – “the first Irish bank holiday to be named after a woman” – introduced and established, the BBC reports.
Herstory, which is backed by a panoply of NGOs and Irish governmental bodies, notes in its mission statement that it aims to “spark sister movements across the world” and that “the amnesia of women’s stories is not just an Irish problem – this is a global phenomenon” [italics original].
Sadly, like St Patrick’s Day, the new bank holiday that proclaims to celebrate St Brigid is fast being appropriated to celebrate pagan culture in the form of “Brigit”. There will be a “Brigit festival” in Dublin that “honours the Celtic goddess Brigit, who embodies inspiration, healing, magic, smithcraft, wisdom, poetry, protection, fire and earth”.
In contrast, St Brigid is the patron saint of babies, children whose parents are not married, dairy workers, farmers, Ireland, midwives, nuns, poets, printers and sailors. There is a big distinction going on here with the shift – as has happened with St Patrick.
St Patrick remains Ireland’s best-known patron saint, celebrated on 17 March. He is – or was – known for liberating the Irish from their pagan ways by explaining the Holy Trinity using a shamrock: three Persons in One.
But St Patrick’s Day has long been appropriated by commercial and secular forces. It is now a day to consume vast amounts of alcohol and wear leprechaun hats. Very few people go to mass on the day meant to mark how St Patrick famously converted the pagan Irish to Christianity.
That paganism is now creeping back into Irish culture. The reason why this is happening is obvious: an unrelenting desire to break Ireland away from its Catholic past, which the media never stop telling us was unheedingly wrong and oppressive.
“Brigid is a figure in Ireland that represents feminism; and with patriarchy, colonisation and the Church, the feminine has been written out of history and out of our society,” a campaigner behind the new bank holiday told the BBC.
“So, the symbolic significance of honouring a woman and a woman as eminent as Brigid is about signalling a new era for Ireland based on her principles of equality, unity, truth, compassion and love.”
It follows that Catholic traditions should be discarded. Though it shouldn’t be forgotten that the Catholic Church was useful for a time in Ireland. First for breaking from The Great Oppressor, Britain, with the distinction from English Protestantism emphasised at every opportunity.
The Church was also useful as a proxy welfare state during the Irish Republic’s hard-up fledgling days. It founded and maintained schools, hospitals and mother and baby homes (the latter of which are now universally reviled in mainstream opinion). This saved on welfare payments so was most convenient. But once Ireland got richer and the child abuse scandals broke, the Church was demonised.
As such, the Church also then served as a useful replacement to the Great Oppressor. Just switch Britain for Catholicism and you get a fresh source of self-righteous indignation alongside a fresh face to blame for all your problems.
Irish politicians continue to tie anything they want to get rid of to the Catholic Church, while you can be sure most people will back any proposed change no matter how ill-advised. The proposed referendum on women and the family is a clear example of this.
As Catholic tradition and rituals continue to fall out of fashion, though, people still must have a heritage to draw on and some link to the past. Currently that link is to Ireland’s mythological and pagan past.
Halloween is the most hideous example of this. In the Catholic tradition, 31 October is the eve of All Saints Day, followed by All Souls Day on 2 November. In the past, Christians would use this time to pray for and remember their family and friends who have passed away. It is sad to see such an important tradition today overwhelmed by fake blood, increasingly titillating costumes, discarded plastic and mountains of sweets pushed by the same insipid forces that usurped St Patrick’s Day.
At the same time, throughout Ireland there has also been a noticeable increase in murals to Celtic gods. This was what St Patrick was meant to have liberated us from, but in my local town which holds the relics of the martyr St Oliver Plunket, there are many pagan murals. The most recent was a mural that depicts the Cailleach, who we are told is “a divine sorceress who is associated with the creation of the land and weather”.
Catholics must strive to avoid the pagan and demonic that is returning. You might even say there appears an attempt to “re-convert” the Christian Irish back to paganism.
“A self-critical person will soon be increasingly aware that the imagination at work is his own; he knows he is only weaving a fantasy,” CS Lewis wrote at the end of The Four Loves: An Exploration of the Nature of Love. “And simpler souls will find the phantoms they try to feed on void of all comfort and nourishment, only to be stimulated into some semblance of reality by pitiful errors of self-hypnotism, and perhaps by the aid of ignoble pictures and hymns and (what is worse) witches.”
We should hold fast to our rich Christian traditions, and to attending mass and having simple, wholesome family meals on the great feast days of St Patrick and St Brigid.
(Photo by Julia Caesar on Unsplash.)
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