A Western World Modern Crisis: Suicide

Forks in the road.  It appears Western society is taking the wrong one.

I've started and then stopped this thread at least three times.  That isn't that uncommon frankly, I have about 200 threads of varying stages of non completion that are lingering.  If they hang around, it's mostly because I intend to get back to them and just haven't.

I started this one shortly after the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, but I'd contemplated it before that.  I've never really abandoned the thread, but as I track things of a century ago and I actually spend very little time blogging (darned near everything written here has been written before 8:00 a.m.), I just haven't gotten back around to it.

I got back to it, however, because the other morning I saw two Internet headlines that grabbed my eye.

The first one was a headline which noted that Americans are dying of suicide and alcoholism at all time record highs.

U.S. deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide hit highest level since record-keeping began

Alcoholism, if that's correct, would be amazing, and I'd at least somewhat question that figure as the alcoholic rates before Prohibition were stunning.  But the suicide one deserves some attention, and an increasing rate of alcoholism also does.

Of course, we have to be aware that statistics are only relevant in the context of the period they address, and this one only addresses a fairly compact period of time.  The USA Today article noted:

The number of deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide in 2017 hit the highest level since federal data collection started in 1999, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data by two public health nonprofits.

The national rate for deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide rose from 43.9 to 46.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017, a 6 percent increase, the Trust for America's Health and the Well Being Trust reported Tuesday. That was a slower increase than in the previous two years, but it was greater than the 4 percent average annual increase since 1999.

Deaths from suicides rose from 13.9 to 14.5 deaths per 100,000, a 4 percent increase. That was double the average annual pace over the previous decade.

The other headline was one from the excellent magazine The Atlantic which stated:

IDEAS

Workism Is Making Americans Miserable

For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising transcendence and community, but failing to deliver.

FEB 24, 2019

Yep.  The Boomer affliction on American society.

Houston Texas, the very model of a modern American city.  It seems we're not really meant to live like this.

I have an upcoming thread on that, which is morphed from a thread I was writing but which I'm hesitating to post, but which lead me to a wider view on where we are as a society.  But then, like a lot of posts, I have a lot of posts on this or that coming up. . . maybe.  But particularly interesting in The Atlantic's observations are this:

The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.

Anyhow, starting up where I last left off, I work in a profession in which there has been, over the past decade, an increasing awareness that its conditions are really messed up and something needs to be done.  In fact, during the lapse of time from which I first started this thread and my current writing there's been at least two soul searching articles in our local bar journal about lawyer mental health, and one of them specifically references a lawyer suicide.

Not that something is effectively being done.  Indeed, based on my casual observations, the conditions in which we work. . . i.e., lawyers that is, is worse now than it was ten years ago.  Not that the profession has been idle either.  Wyoming, like most states, maybe all states, has started a lawyer assistance program for those who are in distress.  As  part of this, in recent months, they've ran articles in The Wyoming Lawyer from lawyers who have been in crisis, which is a good thing for the bar and brave on the part of the lawyers.

There's an intrinsic problem with all of this, however, in that the profession around the country has gone from "problem, what problem?", to the concept that the approach to the problem is to run a self reporting field hospital.  The solution, we've decided, is to have people who are in trouble come ask for help, and then patch them up and send them back into the legal battlefield.

Now, I've posted on this before, and that's not really my point in posting here.  I'm going to do a broader topic this time.  But I'm starting with the old one.  What if the problem isn't that people have become wounded under the strain, but the profession is so broken that it's eating its own?

Indeed, as a minor example of this, I received Saturday evening an cheery post from an opposing lawyer sending me discovery that was noted as not served under some weird pretext.  Sending it out then, even with a cheery message, is an example of either being a real jerk or that the sender is working late on a Saturday at a soulless task.  I'm pretty certain the Bar Field Hospitals don't take something on like that with "why are you making yourself into a jerk and the profession worse?"

To carry on, however, as I've now modified what I'm addressing, what if not only that is the problem, but if there's an even wider problem, and that problem is an existential one in Western society as a whole?

Now, I'm not casting stones at these efforts such as noted above.  I'm glad they've arrived.  But here I'll go one step further.  Indeed, I have on various occasions already, but as the news is full of the discussions on Katherine Spade and Anthony Bourdain, perhaps it's time to accept something even larger and more disturbing.  Indeed, I touched on that more then once on this blog (and when I first started this post, referenced something posted "yesterday", which I no longer know what it  was).

Modern society, or whatever we like to call it (the hip and cool like to call it post modern, even though nothing can be "post modern") is powerfully screwed up.*  That's what's needs to be fixed.  It's open and partially obvious, although it frankly is not fully obvious to those living in it today, who are highly acclimated and numbed to its decayed state.  This seems to be becoming more and more obvious to some people, but only in part, and by and large the current trend is to amplify the ways in which our society is messed up to make it even more messed up.

A lot of what needs to be fixed in that is what was broken by "progress" and the "progressives".  Indeed, progressives are busy breaking it even more, in the idea that once you have the patient in a coma on the floor due to the misapplication of the medicine you gave him, the solution is to give him more of the same.   And then part of what needs to be fixed dates back to the commencement of the onset of the current progressive way of thinking but reflects it back in a mirror darkly, in the form of a culture and society that went from counter culture to consumer culture in its primary focus seemingly in a blink of an eye in the same generation.

Now, let me first state a disclaimer before proceeding.  I don't know either of these people personally and I'd never even heard of Katherine Spade before she hit the news due to her death. And the death of Anthony Bourdain somewhat surprised me as his public personal simply didn't give us any clues, it seems to me, that he might be in despair.

But let's put this all in context.

There's a seeming epidemic of suicide in the Western World.  In at least one area of the East, Japan, suicide has been at blistering levels for decades.

This is not true, however, of all societies everywhere.  Most specifically, it isn't true of those areas of the world that remain more rural than the West, and frankly more agrarian, and more authentically religious.  And by religious, I mean in the real sense, not the vague meaningless "spiritual but not religious" sense that Western "moderns" sometimes profess or in the Western Hollywood Buddhist sense.**

Our species has been around for a really long time.  It'll turn out, I'm confident, that as a species we've been around a lot longer than we now believe we were. But we have only lived the way most of us do now for a very, very, brief time.  For almost our entire history as a species we were nomadic.  Following that, we were agrarians for a long time.  We've become what we are not, urbanized, only very briefly and we've become urbanized in our current massive way only very, very recently.

Well so what, you may ask.  Haven't sociologist determined that agrarian life was miserable and people moved to the cities to be super happy?

No, well not any more anyhow.

There was at one time a running line of sociological thought, propaganda really, that basically ran just that way.  But more recent research has determined that nomadic people today, who are admittedly very few in number, are the happiest people on earth hands down.  Next to them, people who are basically agrarian in nature fit that category.  The least happy people on Earth are those who live in highly urbanized societies.  And as we now know Western suicide is beginning to become a plague, meaning we're joining the highly urbanized Japanese in that tragic classification.

Why would that be?

It really doesn't require all that much thought.  But we won't think about it as it runs entirely contrary to the concept of "progress" and the intellectual dictatorship of progressivism we are now in.

Let's break it down even further.

We're a really smart animal, but an animal none the less, and we were evolved to live out in the wilds.  That's where, it truly turns out, we are the happiest.  In our native state we hunted and gathered, which more accurately means we hunted, gathered and existed in subsistence nomadic agriculture.  We at some point evolved the latter into a more fixed form, but often missed in that is that early agriculture was an adjustment of the existing pattern, not an abolishment of it.  In hunter gatherer societies, the men principally engaged in hunting and the women in gathering and both in some farming, quite often.  In agrarian societies, even fairly modern ones, the men engaged in the farming, the women supported the farming, but the men were almost always still hunters.  If you look at a society that was agrarian fairly recently, such as Finland or Norway,  you'll find that hunting and fishing is always common.  Even in Ireland, which was agrarian to a large extent up until the Celtic Tiger changed that and began to change Ireland to its ultimate misery, that was more true than we might suppose, with fishing, bird hunting and small game hunting common in a land that was otherwise obsessed with depriving the population of the means of rebelling in the same fashion which it had only recently against the English.

What are the features of such a life?

Close connection to nature is one thing.  Nature for such populations is everyday and immediate, not something that they encounter, probably in a sanitized form, on vacation somewhere.  Not the safe nature that people who pay to ride on a zip line in Costa Rica encounter either.

Archangel Russia, 1919.  Even in that then modern city, transportation and life was closer to nature, as it was in much of the world.  Indeed, as it was in all the world compared to now.  We can't put happy faces on what was tense, this was a Russia in the midst of civil war.  But several elements here of what made for a happier life for many people than offered today are symbolized by this photo, including outdoor occupations, a life close to animals in their real, not "comfort animal" sense, and a church.

With that a profound sense of religion is another.  Among such populations an immediate sense of the divine is always present.  American Indian populations prior to 1900, Quebecois prior to their urbanization, the Irish prior to the Celtic Tiger, and Scandinavians before wealth, all had the sense of the immediate divine as evidenced by nature.  It was the direct encounter with the divine that did that, not a remote metaphysical debate on it, no matter how metaphysical the definitions in the same societies were.

Shrine of St. Anne de Beapre in Quebec in the 1940s. At this time Quebec was more rural, more isolated, highly agrarian, deeply religious, and by all measured accounts, much happier than it is today.

That sense of the divine, moreover, was one in which it was acknowledged that the divine was just that, not man was divine. There was no concept that God operated on democratic principals, but rather that man had to conform his being to God.  And that went back to what we've just noted about nature.  A Natural Law was conceived of as having been the creation of God which in turn had determined man's nature.  People could and did act contrary to that nature, but that man had a right to do so was not a concept nor was there any concept that men could vote to change their natures or impose a change of view on the part of God.

And immediate purpose was another.  Even now people who work in agriculture have an immediate purpose.  People who subsistence hunt do as well.  Knowing what you are doing and why that matters is common among all of these people.

And, and interestingly, among the less developed societies, leisure is common.  Hunting and gathering societies hardly work at all, by the modern context. Agrarian ones certainly do, and did, but not to the same extent as we do today.

Indeed, in spite of urbanization being a long running trend in the West, and for that matter the East, where agrarian and agricultural pursuits remained strong near the cities much of this continued to be true well into the 20th Century.  Small towns were full of people who in addition to their work day labors engaged in much of what we noted above.  Indeed, usually all of it, or nearly so.

Now we've replaced that with an antiseptic world in which live surrounded by glass, concrete and steel and inject nature only in a very safe and often completely false fashion.  As we've done that, in our despair, we've waged war on nature it self in the form of our natural selves. We have developed false diets as we've become unable to handle the fact of death in the bizarre belief that the more extreme and unnatural the diet the more likely we will be to live forever.  As we've developed surplus income and have nothing worthwhile to do with it, we've become obsessed with doing whatever we want, particularly in regards to sex, which, through the introduction of pharmaceuticals, we've been able to defeat the nature of.  As we've done that, we've become confused about the very nature of sex and have elevated an aspect of it to define our characters, particularly when our desires become disordered.  And our work has lost its immediate meaning.  Many people work because they must, with no concept that it has any extrinsic value.  Added to it all, living surrounded as we are in what amount to near mausoleums, afraid of death, and resentful of anything that might restrain our desperate efforts to distract ourselves from the meaningless nature of modern life, we've rejected the lessons of faith even when they are obvious, replacing those in many instances with watered down religions that do little but cheer and not suggest any restraint or correction, or none at all, leaving ourselves to elevate our desires to deities.

Indeed, as we've noted the suicide rate climb we've also found ourselves in an accelerated phase of this.  Progressiveness took on the last legitimate enemies of equality of man a couple of decades ago.  That left the radical to keep on keeping on with no real purpose or focus, so new radical ones have been advanced.  We keep "progressing", but to what? We now actually define who we are by our appetites, both our dietary and our sexual ones.  People are always just people, but now people insist on having their appetites accepted as their defining characteristics.

And we wonder why so many have reached despair?

Well, back to the recent news.  I don't know that I can relate either of these deaths to what I've noted, but I wonder.  Katherine Spade may have simply been afflicted by a mental illness and nothing more.  Indeed, there's real reason to suspect that.  But I will note that she was employed in an industry, the "fashion industry", which is completely pointless.  I don't know that she saw it that way, and I hope she didn't, but it really is.  Fashion is a human triviality.  And for decades now, while I know nothing of her work at all and therefore wouldn't characterize it in this fashion (indeed she personally dressed very modestly) it has produced clothing for women that often debased them.  Again, I know nothing of her work at all.

I would note that, interestingly, the other details of her life are hard to come by, which is fine as she may have simply been highly private.  She was married to just one spouse her in her adult life and had one child.  Her funeral was in her home town in Kansas at a Catholic church, and she was raised Catholic.  That tells me little, however.  Did she remain faithful to a faith that is deep in metaphysical thought or did she stray?  Did she fall victim to careerism, the snake oil of modern society that the Baby Boomer generation became addicted to, with men spreading it to women in the 1970s, after that generation's fascination with drugs waned?  Was one child a conscious and regretted limiting choice or a personal tragedy?  There's no easy way to know.  What we do know is that her business has kept on keeping on without her, which is a bit of a tragedy in and of itself.  An industry that is purely consumerist in nature keeps on without its founder in a field that's of little real importance hardly without a glitch.  That tells us something.

Bourdain I also don't know much about, being only familiar with him due to television where he always seemed cheerful and where he was very interesting.  He was obviously very interested in people.  But if you look into his life you'll find that he grew up in a home of mixed heritage in terms of religion but where he was raised with no religion at all. As a young man he embraced drugs and alcohol, things that have a lasting impact and which some never really free themselves from (indeed on his show drinking was common, and it's the case that people who have suffered from alcohol addiction are urged not to partake at all).  At least in his earlier life he seems to have struggled to grope for something and perhaps that struggle never left him.  Sadly, the opposite traits seemed there as well as he was clearly outgoing and dynamic and had at one time a long lasting marriage before that fell apart and he remarried twice and then engaged in a non married relationship with a third woman.

On that, he was dedicated to his daughter whom he had late in life but I wonder about this element of our society now as well. So many simply try to avoid children, if they have some money and "careers" in the thought that those things will make life one big happy party.  It doesn't, so you see them come to more meaning, and often children, later. But you can't have it all and life closes doors every single day without reopening new ones.  Things delayed are frankly simply passed by, as a rule.

And as time has passed since his death, it's become more and more clear that Bourdain could not avoid the call of the natural in all things, because none of us can no matter how hard we try, while at the same time   Bourdain's personal life is sort of oddly emblematic in that sense.

Bourdain's first wife was his high school sweetheart and he graduated early in order to follow her from high school.  They were married for about two decades which suggests that the relationship was pretty stable, but it apparently lacked something, which I suspect was a greater foundation on something else. During that twenty years they never had children.  His second wife was Ottavia Busia, a Sardinian mixed martial arts fighter with whom he had one child.  They were married for about a decade and had one child, whom as we noted he was very close to.  Following that he had a long relationship with Asia Argento, an Italian actress many years his junior and also divorced.  At least according to the Rumornet Argento and Bourdain didn't have an exclusive relationship, at least in so far as Argento was concerned.

Now, a person may wonder what that has to do with anything, but at least at some level it has the appearance of probably reflecting Bourdain's deeper desires and instincts, which he never completely yielded to.  Bourdain's father was Catholic, as noted, but apparently non practicing.  His mother was a non observant Jew.  Bourdain claimed not to believe in anything but none the less claimed to be Jewish, which woudl be problematic from at least the Orthodox prospective as at least hte Orthodox count Judaism paternally.  Anyhow, Bourdain's family was non observant and that seems fairly clearly to be the missing large piece of the puzzle of his life.  His first wife was an American actress of Polish, and tehrefore Catholic, extraction.  His second wife was Sardinian, which is an Italian island which has been described as "fiercely Catholic" and a culture so defined in that sense that even non observant Sardinians observe religious feasts and festivals.  His third wife likewise was Italian, which is a culture which has been so defined by Catholicism that it has been joked that even Italian communists, and at one time the Italian Communist Party was a fairly strong party, were Catholic in their outlook and behavior.  So Bourdain seems to have cast out for cultures which are reflected by observance to a larger faith, even while choosing members of those cultures which left him safe from having to commit.

Taking the focus out from the close to the larger, i.e, reducing our telephoto lens, what we have is that the entire West right now is really in denial about nature in every sense and has, instead, focused on the superficial.  People have removed themselves from nature to glass and steel, even though they hate it.  In order to compensate for that they have adopted a false plastic nature which doesn't reflect the real, and often bloody, one.  As they've done that they've become hugely self indulgent focused on material acquisition and self indulgent sex removed from the nature of sex.  Lately that's even expanded to self alteration in a hyper self focused way in which its imagined that temporary self reflection should be reflected in surgery to alter a person's very self and reinforced with pharmaceuticals to obtain a fake, non natural, reality.  Capping it all off people have abandoned real faiths, which require a person to acknowledge the external and large and primary, for false self created individual ones that allow them to at least concede a "spiritual" while denying that the spiritual may in fact make demands on the individual.

There's no way that people can be happy in that condition.

If all of this is bleak on a larger scale, none of this has to be this way, either for society at large or for anyone individual.  People who are in despair should seek help.  Lifestyles that create despair need not be engaged in.  Indeed, the entire concept of a "lifestyle" is absurd, and people should instead seek a life that's authentic.  That would mean rejecting almost all of the popular concept of life in the Western World today, but so be it.  A career will not make you happy, while a calling, which might mean much less in the way of income, will assist in that.  You are not the center of the universe but there is such a center.  There is no real liberty in being a libertine and a libertine society produces, instead, slavery to appetites which is slavery.  If people seemed more content, quite often, in the past, that's because they really were, knowing those things.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*Modern is a word that comes to us from Latin, through French.  It literally means "of or pertaining to the current time", having as its root "modo", meaning "just now".  The Latin form of the word modernus was used in Roman times. The English version appears in Shakespeare.  It simply means the current time.  Whenever you live, you are in "modern times".  Things can never be "post modern" as "post modern" is, by its very nature, the distant future that you will never live in, ever.  When that time arrives, whenever you may consider it to have arrived, it will in fact be modern times.

**Save for Buddhist monks who have immigrated to the United States, there are no Buddhist in the United States. The sort of Buddhism that American Buddhist claim to profess isn't Buddhims, its a do it yourself pretend Buddhims that takes the discplined and scary parts out of Buddhism.  It's a lot like modern "spiritual but not religious" in that fashion, or Christianity Lite that a lot of American Christians sort of profess.

March 19, 1919. Red Cross Post Office in Paris.

Red Cross post office department in Paris, March 19, 1919.

The limits of knowledge.

A professional knows the limits of his knowledge. An amateur does not know the limits of his knowledge. A dilettante does not know that there are any limits to his knowledge.

 Edward Peters, JD, JCD, Ref. Sig. Ap.

Blog Mirror: Mont Saint André, March 18, 1919

Mont Saint André, March 18, 1919

March 18, 1919. Pershing inspects. King Albert loans. Red Cross drives.

General Pershing adderessed the 4th Division at Kaiseresch, March 18, 1919.

 Red Cross garage at Rue Laugier, Paris.  March 18, 1919.

Red Cross garage at Buffalo Park, Paris.  March 18, 1919.

Red Cross dining room at St. Germaine en Laye, a chateau that was loaned to the Red  Cross by the King of Belgium.

Chesterton on Courage.

Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Naomh Pádraig, St. Patrick, S. Patricius. The Man.

At Tara today in this fateful hour
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And fire with all the strength it hath,
And lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness
All these I place,
By God's almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

The Rune of St. Patrick, condensed from the much longer Lorica.

 

St. Patrick's Day, the Feast of St. Patrick, is such a popular civil holiday that it practically drowns out the saint himself.  

Indeed, that fact contributes to a lot of odd rumors and misimpressions about Patrick (I once had a high school chemistry teacher maintain that there was no evidence for his existence, which is a really remarkable statement about a man about whom so much is known and who left writings).  For example, some uniformed professor who published an article in the Salt Lake newspaper recently wrote that "he's not really a saint as he's never been canonized", showing that he had a nitwit's understanding of the definition of "saint".  None of the early saints were canonized, which is a more recent juretical process with the Catholic Church which does not, in any fashion, disrupt the saintly status of those who were saints before that.

St. Patrick is regarded as the Apostle of Ireland for establishing the Faith in that land.  He wasn't the first Catholic missionary there, but he was massively effective.  He was not Irish himself, but rather was Roman British, born near what is now called Kilpatrick near Dumbarton Scotland (which wouldn't have bee Scotland) in 387, prior to the Scots invasions of the north and prior to the collapse of the Roman Empire, but during that period of time during which Rome was becoming increasingly weak and had abandoned its British colony to its own fate. Indeed, the people who became the Scots, and who invaded northern Britain slightly after this period, were the Irish and Patrick, in his writings, referred to the Irish in Latin as the Scotti, the name that would later give us the term Scots for the people who live in Scotland today.

Patrick's actual name was Patricius, a name symbolizing that he was of significant patrician origin.  He came from a line that had strong affiliation with the Church, and indeed by his own account his father, Calphurnius, was a Deacon in the church and his grandfather a Priest, this being of course well before the Latin Rite of the Church imposed a rule of celibacy upon Priests. 

Patrick, by his own account, was not a religious man until he was kidnapped by the pirates as a sixteen-year-old and sold as a slave in Ireland.  It's often claimed that he was sold as a youth, but at that time, he would not have been really regarded as so much as a youth as a young man.  He spent six years as a slave in Ireland, the property of a cruel master. The experience was Providential, however, as the Roman youth learned Irish Gaelic and experienced a deep religious conversion.  Indeed, a metaphysical one.  He escaped, managed to return to Britain, having formed the intent to enter religious life and return.  He did just that, and was remarkably able at this mission, being a very tough man who was readily capable of dealing with a very tough people.  Remarkable in that, he lived a very long time in an age and occupation in which that would not have been expected, perhaps approaching or even exceeding a lifespan of 100 years.

In spite of that, at some period, Patrick suffered an attack by some who accused him of something of which we are now unaware.  He therefore suffered the trial that so many who are orthodox and effective do today of coming under accusations by others, even within the Church.  In his case, this motivated him to write his Confessio, in Latin, to defend himself.  It's survived, but the accusations against him have not.

We can pick up his own words from there:

I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many, had for father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a priest, of the settlement [vicus] of Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age. I did not, indeed, know the true God; and I was taken into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people, according to our deserts, for quite drawn away from God, we did not keep his precepts, nor were we obedient to our priests who used to remind us of our salvation. And the Lord brought down on us the fury of his being and scattered us among many nations, even to the ends of the earth, where I, in my smallness, am now to be found among foreigners.

And there the Lord opened my mind to an awareness of my unbelief, in order that, even so late, I might remember my transgressions and turn with all my heart to the Lord my God, who had regard for my insignificance and pitied my youth and ignorance. And he watched over me before I knew him, and before I learned sense or even distinguished between good and evil, and he protected me, and consoled me as a father would his son.

Therefore, indeed, I cannot keep silent, nor would it be proper, so many favours and graces has the Lord deigned to bestow on me in the land of my captivity. For after chastisement from God, and recognizing him, our way to repay him is to exalt him and confess his wonders before every nation under heaven.

For there is no other God, nor ever was before, nor shall be hereafter, but God the Father, unbegotten and without beginning, in whom all things began, whose are all things, as we have been taught; and his son Jesus Christ, who manifestly always existed with the Father, before the beginning of time in the spirit with the Father, indescribably begotten before all things, and all things visible and invisible were made by him. He was made man, conquered death and was received into Heaven, to the Father who gave him all power over every name in Heaven and on Earth and in Hell, so that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and God, in whom we believe. And we look to his imminent coming again, the judge of the living and the dead, who will render to each according to his deeds. And he poured out his Holy Spirit on us in abundance, the gift and pledge of immortality, which makes the believers and the obedient into sons of God and co-heirs of Christ who is revealed, and we worship one God in the Trinity of holy name.

He himself said through the prophet: 'Call upon me in the day of' trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.' And again: 'It is right to reveal and publish abroad the works of God.'

I am imperfect in many things, nevertheless I want my brethren and kinsfolk to know my nature so that they may be able to perceive my soul's desire.

I am not ignorant of what is said of my Lord in the Psalm: 'You destroy those who speak a lie.' And again: 'A lying mouth deals death to the soul.' And likewise the Lord says in the Gospel: 'On the day of judgment men shall render account for every idle word they utter.'

So it is that I should mightily fear, with terror and trembling, this judgment on the day when no one shall be able to steal away or hide, but each and all shall render account for even our smallest sins before the judgment seat of Christ the Lord.

And therefore for some time I have thought of writing, but I have hesitated until now, for truly, I feared to expose myself to the criticism of men, because I have not studied like others, who have assimilated both Law and the Holy Scriptures equally and have never changed their idiom since their infancy, but instead were always learning it increasingly, to perfection, while my idiom and language have been translated into a foreign tongue. So it is easy to prove from a sample of my writing, my ability in rhetoric and the extent of my preparation and knowledge, for as it is said, 'wisdom shall be recognized in speech, and in understanding, and in knowledge and in the learning of truth.'

But why make excuses close to the truth, especially when now I am presuming to try to grasp in my old age what I did not gain in my youth because my sins prevented me from making what I had read my own? But who will believe me, even though I should say it again? A young man, almost a beardless boy, I was taken captive before I knew what I should desire and what I should shun. So, consequently, today I feel ashamed and I am mightily afraid to expose my ignorance, because, [not] eloquent, with a small vocabulary, I am unable to explain as the spirit is eager to do and as the soul and the mind indicate.

But had it been given to me as to others, in gratitude I should not have kept silent, and if it should appear that I put myself before others, with my ignorance and my slower speech, in truth, it is written: 'The tongue of the stammerers shall speak rapidly and distinctly.' How much harder must we try to attain it, we of whom it is said: 'You are an epistle of Christ in greeting to the ends of the earth ... written on your hearts, not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God.' And again, the Spirit witnessed that the rustic life was created by the Most High.

I am, then, first of all, countryfied, an exile, evidently unlearned, one who is not able to see into the future, but I know for certain, that before I was humbled I was like a stone lying in deep mire, and he that is mighty came and in his mercy raised me up and, indeed, lifted me high up and placed me on top of the wall. And from there I ought to shout out in gratitude to the Lord for his great favours in this world and for ever, that the mind of man cannot measure.

Therefore be amazed, you great and small who fear God, and you men of God, eloquent speakers, listen and contemplate. Who was it summoned me, a fool, from the midst of those who appear wise and learned in the law and powerful in rhetoric and in all things? Me, truly wretched in this world, he inspired before others that I could be-- if I would-- such a one who, with fear and reverence, and faithfully, without complaint, would come to the people to whom the love of Christ brought me and gave me in my lifetime, if I should be worthy, to serve them truly and with humility.

According, therefore, to the measure of one's faith in the Trinity, one should proceed without holding back from danger to make known the gift of God and everlasting consolation, to spread God's name everywhere with confidence and without fear, in order to leave behind, after my death, foundations for my brethren and sons whom I baptized in the Lord in so many thousands.

And I was not worthy, nor was I such that the Lord should grant his humble servant this, that after hardships and such great trials, after captivity, after many years, he should give me so much favour in these people, a thing which in the time of my youth I neither hoped for nor imagined.

But after I reached Ireland I used to pasture the flock each day and I used to pray many times a day. More and more did the love of God, and my fear of him and faith increase, and my spirit was moved so that in a day [I said] from one up to a hundred prayers, and in the night a like number; besides I used to stay out in the forests and on the mountain and I would wake up before daylight to pray in the snow, in icy coldness, in rain, and I used to feel neither ill nor any slothfulness, because, as I now see, the Spirit was burning in me at that time.

And it was there of course that one night in my sleep I heard a voice saying to me: 'You do well to fast: soon you will depart for your home country.' And again, a very short time later, there was a voice prophesying: 'Behold, your ship is ready.' And it was not close by, but, as it happened, two hundred miles away, where I had never been nor knew any person. And shortly thereafter I turned about and fled from the man with whom I had been for six years, and I came, by the power of God who directed my route to advantage (and I was afraid o nothing), until I reached that ship.

And on the same day that I arrived, the ship was setting out from the place, and I said that I had the wherewithal to sail with them; and the steersman was displeased and replied in anger, sharply: 'By no means attempt to go with us.' Hearing this I left them to go to the hut where I was staying, and on the way I began to pray, and before the prayer was finished I heard one of them shouting loudly after me: 'Come quickly because the men are calling you.' And immediately I went back to them and they started to say to me: 'Come, because we are admitting you out of good faith; make friendship with us in any way you wish.' (And so, on that day, I refused to suck the breasts of these men from fear of God, but nevertheless I had hopes that they would come to faith in Jesus Christ, because they were barbarians.) And for this I continued with them, and forthwith we put to sea.

And after three days we reached land, and for twenty-eight days journeyed through uninhabited country, and the food ran out and hunger overtook them; and one day the steersman began saying: 'Why is it, Christian? You say your God is great and all-powerful; then why can you not pray for us? For we may perish of hunger; it is unlikely indeed that we shall ever see another human being.' In fact, I said to them, confidently: 'Be converted by faith with all your heart to my Lord God, because nothing is impossible for him, so that today he will send food for you on your road, until you be sated, because everywhere he abounds.' And with God's help this came to pass; and behold, a herd of swine appeared on the road before our eyes, and they slew many of them, and remained there for two nights, and the were full of their meat and well restored, for many of them had fainted and would otherwise have been left half dead by the wayside. And after this they gave the utmost thanks to God, and I was esteemed in their eyes, and from that day they had food abundantly. They discovered wild honey, besides, and they offered a share to me, and one of them said: 'It is a sacrifice.' Thanks be to God, I tasted none of it.

The very same night while I was sleeping Satan attacked me violently, as I will remember as long as I shall be in this body; and there fell on top of me as it were, a huge rock, and not one of my members had any force. But from whence did it come to me, ignorant in the spirit, to call upon 'Helias'? And meanwhile I saw the sun rising in the sky, and while I was crying out 'Helias, Helias' with all my might, lo, the brilliance of that sun fell upon me and immediately shook me free of all the weight; and I believe that I was aided by Christ my Lord, and that his Spirit then was crying out for me, and I hope that it will be so in the day of my affliction, just as it says in the Gospel: 'In that hour', the Lord declares, 'it is not you who speaks but the Spirit of your Father speaking in you.'

And a second time, after many years, I was taken captive. On the first night I accordingly remained with my captors, but I heard a divine prophecy, saying to me: 'You shall be with them for two months. So it happened. On the sixtieth night the Lord delivered me from their hands.

On the journey he provided us with food and fire and dry weather every day, until on the tenth day we came upon people. As I mentioned above, we had journeyed through an unpopulated country for twenty-eight days, and in fact the night that we came upon people we had no food.

And after a few 'ears I was again in Britain with my parents [kinsfolk], and the welcomed me as a son, and asked me, in faith, that after the great tribulations I had endured I should not go an where else away from them. And, of course, there, in a vision of the night, I saw a man whose name was Victoricus coming as it 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 of Foclut which is near the western sea, and the were crying as if with one voice: 'We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us.' And I was stung intensely in my heart so that I could read no more, and thus I awoke. Thanks be to God, because after so many ears the Lord bestowed on them according to their cry.

And another night-- God knows, I do not, whether within me or beside me-- ... most words + ... + which I heard and could not understand, except at the end of the speech it was represented thus: 'He who gave his life for you, he it is who speaks within you.' And thus I awoke, joyful.

And on a second occasion I saw Him praying within me, and I was as it were, inside my own body , and I heard Him above me-- that is, above my inner self. He was praying powerfully with sighs. And in the course of this I was astonished and wondering, and I pondered who it could be who was praying within me. But at the end of the prayer it was revealed to me that it was the Spirit. And so I awoke and remembered the Apostle's words: 'Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we know not how to pray as we ought. But the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for utterance.' And again: 'The Lord our advocate intercedes for us.'

And then I was attacked by a goodly number of my elders, who [brought up] my sins against my arduous episcopate. That day in particular I was mightily upset, and might have fallen here and for ever; but the Lord generously spared me, a convert, and an alien, for his name's sake, and he came powerfully to my assistance in that state of being trampled down. I pray God that it shall not be held against them as a sin that I fell truly into disgrace and scandal.

They brought up against me after thirty years an occurrence I had confessed before becoming a deacon. On account of the anxiety in my sorrowful mind, I laid before my close friend what I had perpetrated on a day-- nay, rather in one hour-- in my boyhood because I was not yet proof against sin. God knows-- I do not-- whether I was fifteen years old at the time, and I did not then believe in the living God, nor had I believed, since my infancy; but I remained in death and unbelief until I was severely rebuked, and in truth I was humbled every day by hunger and nakedness.

On the other hand, I did not proceed to Ireland of my own accord until I was almost giving up, but through this I was corrected by the Lord, and he prepared me so that today I should be what was once far from me, in order that I should have the care of-- or rather, I should be concerned for-- the salvation of others, when at that time, still, I was only concerned for myself.

Therefore, on that day when I was rebuked, as I have just mentioned, I saw in a vision of the night a document before my face, without honour, and meanwhile I heard a divine prophecy, saying to me: 'We have seen with displeasure the face of the chosen one divested of [his good] name.' And he did not say 'You have seen with displeasure', but 'We have seen with displeasure' (as if He included Himself) . He said then: 'He who touches you, touches the apple of my eye.'

For that reason, I give thanks to him who strengthened me in all things, so that I should not be hindered in my setting out and also in my work which I was taught by Christ my Lord; but more, from that state of affairs I felt, within me, no little courage, and vindicated my faith before God and man.

Hence, therefore, I say boldly that my conscience is clear now and hereafter. God is my witness that I have not lied in these words to you.

But rather, I am grieved for my very close friend, that because of him we deserved to hear such a prophecy. The one to whom I entrusted my soul! And I found out from a goodly number of brethren, before the case was made in my defence (in which I did not take part, nor was I in Britain, nor was it pleaded by me), that in my absence he would fight in my behalf. Besides, he told me himself: 'See, the rank of bishop goes to you'-- of which I was not worthy. But how did it come to him, shortly afterwards, to disgrace me publicly, in the presence of all, good and bad, because previously, gladly and of his own free will, he pardoned me, as did the Lord, who is greater than all?

I have said enough. But all the same, I ought not to conceal God's gift which he lavished on us in the land of my captivity, for then I sought him resolutely, and I found him there, and he preserved me from all evils (as I believe) through the in-dwelling of his Spirit, which works in me to this day. Again, boldly, but God knows, if this had been made known to me by man, I might, perhaps, have kept silent for the love of Christ.

Thus I give untiring thanks to God who kept me faithful in the day of my temptation, so that today I may confidently over my soul as a living sacrifice for Christ my Lord; who am I, Lord? or, rather, what is my calling? that you appeared to me in so great a divine quality, so that today among the barbarians I might constantly exalt and magnify your name in whatever place I should be, and not only in good fortune, but even in affliction? So that whatever befalls me, be it good or bad, I should accept it equally, and give thanks always to God who revealed to me that I might trust in him, implicitly and forever, and who will encourage me so that, ignorant, and in the last days, I may dare to undertake so devout and so wonderful a work; so that I might imitate one of those whom, once, long ago, the Lord already pre-ordained to be heralds of his Gospel to witness to all peoples to the ends of the earth. So are we seeing, and so it is fulfilled; behold, we are witnesses because the Gospel has been preached as far as the places beyond which no man lives.

But it is tedious to describe in detail all my labours one by one. I will tell briefly how most holy God frequently delivered me, from slavery, and from the twelve trials with which my soul was threatened, from man traps as well, and from things I am not able to put into words. I would not cause offence to readers, but I have God as witness who knew all things even before they happened, that, though I was a poor ignorant waif, still he gave me abundant warnings through divine prophecy.

Whence came to me this wisdom which was not my own, I who neither knew the number of days nor had knowledge of God? Whence came the so great and so healthful gift of knowing or rather loving God, though I should lose homeland and family.

And many gifts were offered to me with weeping and tears, and I offended them [the donors], and also went against the wishes of a good number of my elders; but guided by God, I neither agreed with them nor deferred to them, not by my own grace but by God who is victorious in me and withstands them all, so that I might come to the Irish people to preach the Gospel and endure insults from unbelievers; that I might hear scandal of my travels, and endure man persecutions to the extent of prison; and so that I might give up my free birthright for the advantage of others, and if I should be worthy, I am ready [to give] even m life without. hesitation; and most willingly for His name. And I choose to devote it to him even unto death, if God grant it to me.

I am greatly God's debtor, because he granted me so much grace, that through me many people would be reborn in God, and soon a after confirmed, and that clergy would be ordained everywhere for them, the masses lately come to belief, whom the Lord drew from the ends of the earth, just as he once promised through his prophets: 'To you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Our fathers have inherited naught hut lies, worthless things in which there is no profit.' And again: 'I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles that you may bring salvation to the uttermost ends of' the earth.'

And I wish to wait then for his promise which is never unfulfilled, just as it is promised in the Gospel: 'Many shall come from east and west and shall sit at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.' Just as we believe that believers will come from all the world.

So for that reason one should, in fact, fish well and diligently, just as the Lord foretells and teaches, saying, 'Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,' and again through the prophets: 'Behold, I am sending forth many fishers and hunters, says the Lord,' et cetera. So it behoved us to spread our nets, that a vast multitude and throng might be caught for God, and so there might be clergy everywhere who baptized and exhorted a needy and desirous people. Just as the Lord says in the Gospel, admonishing and instructing: 'Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always to the end of time.' And again he says: 'Go forth into the world and preach the Gospel to all creation. He who believes and is baptized shall be saved; but he who does not believe shall be condemned.' And again: 'This Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached throughout the whole world as a witness to all nations; and then the end of the world shall come.' And likewise the Lord foretells through the prophet: 'And it shall come to pass in the last days (sayeth the Lord) that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams; yea, and on my menservants and my maidservants in those days I will pour out my Spirit and they shall prophesy.' And in Hosea he says: 'Those who are not my people I will call my people, and those not beloved I will call my beloved, and in the very place where it was said to them, You are not my people, they will be called 'Sons of the living God'.

So, how is it that in Ireland, 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 of. the Irish [Scotti] and the daughters of the chieftains are to be seen as monks and virgins of Christ.

And there was, besides, a most beautiful, blessed, native-born noble Irish [Scotta] woman of adult age whom I baptized; and a few days later she had reason to come to us to intimate that she had received a prophecy from a divine messenger [who] advised her that she should become a virgin of Christ and she would draw nearer to God. Thanks be to God, six days from then, opportunely and most eagerly, she took the course that all virgins of God take, not with their fathers' consent but enduring the persecutions and deceitful hindrances of their parents. Notwithstanding that, their number increases, (we do not know the number of them that are so reborn) besides the widows, and those who practise self-denial. Those who are kept in slavery suffer the most. They endure terrors and constant threats, but the Lord has given grace to many of his handmaidens, for even though they are forbidden to do so, still they resolutely follow his example.

So it is that even if I should wish to separate from them in order to go to Britain, and most willingly was I prepared to go to my homeland and kinsfolk-- and not only there, but as far as Gaul to visit the brethren there, so that I might see the faces of the holy ones of my Lord, God knows how strongly I desired this-- I am bound by the Spirit, who witnessed to me that if I did so he would mark me out as guilty, and I fear to waste the labour that I began, and not I, but Christ the Lord, who commanded me to come to be with them for the rest of my life, if the Lord shall will it and shield me from every evil, so that I may not sin before him.

So I hope that I did as I ought, but I do not trust myself as long as I am in this mortal body, for he is strong who strives daily to turn me away from the faith and true holiness to which I aspire until the end of my life for Christ my Lord, but the hostile flesh is always dragging one down to death, that is, to unlawful attractions. And I know in part why I did not lead a perfect life like other believers, but I confess to my Lord and do not blush in his sight, because I am not lying; from the time when I came to know him in my youth, the love of God and fear of him increased in me, and right up until now, by God's favour, I have kept the faith.

What is more, let anyone laugh and taunt if he so wishes. I am not keeping silent, nor am I hiding the signs and wonders that were shown to me by the Lord many years before they happened, [he] who knew everything, even before the beginning of time.

Thus, I should give thanks unceasingly to God, who frequently forgave my folly and my negligence, in more than one instance so as not to be violently angry with me, who am placed as his helper, and I did not easily assent to what had been revealed to me, as the Spirit was urging; and the Lord took pity on me thousands upon thousands of times, because he saw within me that I was prepared, but that I was ignorant of what to do in view of my situation; because many were trying to prevent this mission. They were talking among themselves behind my back, and saying: 'Why is this fellow throwing himself into danger among enemies who know not God?' Not from malice, but having no liking for it; likewise, as I myself can testify, they perceived my rusticity. And I was not quick to recognize the grace that was then in me; I now know that I should have done so earlier.

Now I have put it frankly to my brethren and co-workers, who have believed me because of what I have foretold and still foretell to strengthen and reinforce your faith. I wish only that you, too, would make greater and better efforts. This will be my pride, for 'a wise son makes a proud father'.

You know, as God does, how I went about among you from my youth in the faith of truth and in sincerity of heart. As well as to the heathen among whom I live, I have shown them trust and always show them trust. God knows I did not cheat any one of them, nor consider it, for the sake of God and his Church, lest I arouse them and [bring about] persecution for them and for all of us, and lest the Lord's name be blasphemed because of me, for it is written: 'Woe to the men through whom the name of the Lord is blasphemed.'

For even though I am ignorant in all things, nevertheless I attempted to safeguard some and myself also. And I gave back again to my Christian brethren and the virgins of Christ and the holy women the small unasked for gifts that they used to give me or some of their ornaments which they used to throw on the altar. And they would be offended with me because I did this. But in the hope of eternity, I safeguarded myself carefully in all things, so that they might not cheat me of my office of service on any pretext of dishonesty, and so that I should not in the smallest way provide any occasion for defamation or disparagement on the part of unbelievers.

What is more, when I baptized so many thousands of people, did I hope for even half a jot from any of them? [If so] Tell me, and I will give it back to you. And when the Lord ordained clergy everywhere by my humble means, and I freely conferred office on them, if I asked any of them anywhere even for the price of one shoe, say so to my face and I will give it back.

More, I spent for you so that they would receive me. And I went about among you, and everywhere for your sake, in danger, and as far as the outermost regions beyond which no one lived, and where no one had ever penetrated before, to baptize or to ordain clergy or to confirm people. Conscientiously and gladly I did all this work by God's gift for your salvation.

From time to time I gave rewards to the kings, as well as making payments to their sons who travel with me; notwithstanding which, they seized me with my companions, and that day most avidly desired to kill me. But my time had not yet come. They plundered everything they found on us anyway, and fettered me in irons; and on the fourteenth day the Lord freed me from their power, and whatever they had of ours was given back to us for the sake of God on account of the indispensable friends whom we had made before.

Also you know from experience how much I was paying to those who were administering justice in all the regions, which I visited often. I estimate truly that I distributed to them not less than the price of fifteen men, in order that you should enjoy my company and I enjoy yours, always, in God. I do not regret this nor do I regard it as enough. I am paying out still and I shall pay out more. The Lord has the power to grant me that I may soon spend my own self, for your souls.

Behold, I call on God as my witness upon my soul that I am not lying; nor would I write to you for it to be an occasion for flattery or selfishness, nor hoping for honour from any one of you. Sufficient is the honour which is not yet seen, but in which the heart has confidence. He who made the promise is faithful; he never lies.

But I see that even here and now, I have been exalted beyond measure by the Lord, and I was not worthy that he should grant me this, while I know most certainly that poverty and failure suit me better than wealth and delight (but Christ the Lord was poor for our sakes; I certainly am wretched and unfortunate; even if I wanted wealth I have no resources, nor is it my own estimation of myself, for daily I expect to be murdered or betrayed or reduced to slavery if the occasion arises. But I fear nothing, because of the promises of Heaven; for I have cast myself into the hands of Almighty God, who reigns everywhere. As the prophet says: 'Cast your burden on the Lord and he will sustain you.'

Behold now I commend my soul to God who is most faithful and for whom I perform my mission in obscurity, but he is no respecter of persons and he chose me for this service that I might be one of the least of his ministers.

For which reason I should make return for all that he returns me. But what should I say, or what should I promise to my Lord, for I, alone, can do nothing unless he himself vouchsafe it to me. But let him search my heart and [my] nature, for I crave enough for it, even too much, and I am ready for him to grant me that I drink of his chalice, as he has granted to others who love him.

Therefore may it never befall me to be separated by my God from his people whom he has won in this most remote land. I pray God that he gives me perseverance, and that he will deign that I should be a faithful witness for his sake right up to the time of my passing.

And if at any time I managed anything of good for the sake of my God whom I love, I beg of him that he grant it to me to shed my blood for his name with proselytes and captives, even should I be left unburied, or even were my wretched body to be torn limb from limb by dogs or savage beasts, or were it to be devoured by the birds of the air, I think, most surely, were this to have happened to me, I had saved both my soul and my body. For beyond any doubt on that day we 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.

For the sun we see rises each day for us at [his] command, but it will never reign, neither will its splendour last, but all who worship it will come wretchedly to punishment. We, on the other hand, shall not die, who believe in and worship the true sun, Christ, who will never die, no more shall he die who has done Christ's will, but will abide for ever just as Christ abides for ever, who reigns with God the Father Almighty and with the Holy Spirit before the beginning of time and now and for ever and ever. Amen.

Behold over and over again I would briefly set out the words of my confession. I testify in truthfulness and gladness of heart before God and his holy angels that I never had any reason, except the Gospel and his promises, ever to have returned to that nation from which I had previously escaped with difficulty.

But I entreat those who believe in and fear God, whoever deigns to examine or receive this document composed by the obviously unlearned sinner Patrick in Ireland, that nobody shall ever ascribe to my ignorance any trivial thing that I achieved or may have expounded that was pleasing to God, but accept and truly believe that it would have been the gift of God. And this is my confession before I die.

This isn't Patrick's only surviving writing, amazingly enough.  Some people have claimed that the Confessio is short, but given the nature of writing at the time, it's actually amazingly long, given the ordeal that writing such a long letter entails.  Patrick himself notes that he was rustic in nature, which downplays his patrician origin, but if we consider that he had been kidnapped when only sixteen years old, there was no doubt truth to his claim.

He left a very long letter in addition to the Soldiers of Coroticus complaining about the violent treatment given to some recently baptized converts and instructed that it be openly announced.  A prayer, the Lorica of St. Patrick, also survived and is believed to have been authored by him.

One of my favorite saints, for a variety of reasons, and one whose is more contemporary in terms of our present needs than we sadly realize.

A Blog Mirror Rerun: Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: The Irish in Wyoming

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: The Irish in Wyoming:

I'm pretty sure I've posted this here before, probably when I wrote it in 2013.  So there's no real reason for me to do it again.  But then this is St. Patrick's Day, or more properly the Feast of St. Patrick, the Patron Saint of Ireland, which this year is falling on a Sunday and therefore there's some hope that ti come with a bit more gravitas than it often receives.

Additionally we recently did that 23 and Me thing.  In my case, not surprisingly, I'm over 88% "British and Irish" and when you look at the map, I not only had ancestors that stemmed from the places in Ireland I was aware of, Cork and Wexford, but from all over Ireland.  The British parts shows up but not much, with some relative from the Glascow region of Scotland (which I was aware of) and of course the expected German but in a much lower percentage than I would have anticipated.  Genetics works strangely, as I know that my paternal grandfather was completely descended from Germans   I know a lot of their family names and it's like the Paderborn phone book.

Genetics and culture are not quite the same, as we well know, but like to forget.  You do carry the culture of those before you quite often, to at least some extent, as well as the culture of where you are from.  An Irish American several generations removed from Ireland isn't the same thing as an Irishman from Ireland.  But Irishness is persistent.

So on this day which is the Feast of the Patron Saint of Ireland, we'll re run this item.

Sidebar: The Irish in Wyoming

Just recently we posted our "green" edition of this blog with our St. Patrick's Day entry.  Given that, this is a good time to look at the Irish in Wyoming.

The Irish are a significant demographic, in terms of ancestry, in the United States in general, so a reader might be justifiably forgiven for thinking that the story of the Irish in Wyoming wouldn't be particularly unique, or perhaps even that such an entry must be contrived.  This would be far from the case, however, as the Irish were not only an identifiable element in European American settlement of the state, but a distinct one with a unique history.

 Bantry Bay, Ireland; where many of Wyoming's Irish came from.  This photo was taken between 1890 and 1900.

It may not be definitely possible to tell when the first Irishman or Irish American entered the state, but a pretty good guess would be that the very first son of Erin entered what would become the state in the service of the U.S. Army.  More particularly, it seems like that this would have been with the Corps of Discovery, that body of men commissioned by the Army to cross the continent from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean.  Sgt. Patrick Gass was definitely of Irish descent, although he himself came from Pennsylvania.  He's unique as he left the first literary work on the expedition.  George Shannon was of Irish Protestant descent and therefore, perhaps, arguably "Scots Irish," although his name would suggest otherwise.   The Corps, however, crossed the continent prior to the great migration caused by the Famine, and therefore its almost surprising that these men of Irish descent were on the expedition, as the Irish were a small demographic at the time.  Also revealing, at this time many, probably most, whose ancestors had come over from Ireland were of "Scots Irish" descent, those being descendant from the Scots population that the English had settled in Ireland to form a religious and ethnic barrier between themselves and the native inhabitants of the conquered country.

The fact that the first Irish Americans to enter the region, however, came in the form of soldiers was telling, as by the 1840s this was becoming coming common.  Up until that time the U. S. Army had been tiny and had very little presence on the Frontier at all.  The Mexican War, however, changed all of that and, at the same time, brought a flood of Irishmen into the enlisted ranks.  This was caused by the contemporaneous jump in immigration from Ireland at the time, which was coincident with a huge spike in German immigration as well.  There was a political element to both immigration waves, with the Irish being discontent with the United Kingdom, which disadvantaged them at law with statutes aimed against Catholics and with some German immigrants coming during the troubled times on the continent that would lead to European wide revolutions in the 1840s.  The Irish in particular, however, were also driven by extreme poverty and hunger as their disadvantaged state was further compounded by extreme crop failures in this period.  Taking leave to the United States or British Canada, many simply chose to get out of Ireland.  Upon arriving in the United States, still oppressed with poverty, and often just downright oppressed, many took a traditional employment route which was to enlist in military service.  Like their ethnic cousins the Scots, the Irish were not in actuality a particularly martial people, but standing armies provided an economic refuge for them.  In the United Kingdom this resulted in Irish and Scots regiments of the British Army.  In the United States, starting during the Mexican War, it resulted in a huge percentage of the enlisted ranks being made up of Irish volunteers.

 World War One vintage recruiting poster for "The Fighting 69th", a New York National Guard regiment legendary for being recruited, even as late as World War One, principally from Irish immigrants and and Irish Americans. At least one Canadian unit of the same period, the Irish Canadian Rangers, was specifically aimed at Montreal Irish.

The Irish, and the Germans, were at first resented in the service, even if their enlistments were accepted, and they were very much looked down upon by Southern born officers, who made up a disproportionate percentage of the Army's office class.  This had, in part, sparked a high desertion rate during the Mexican War and had even contributed to the formation of a unit in the Mexican Army made up of Irish and German desertions, the San Patricio's.  The Army, however, in what may be the first instance of a long U. S. Army tradition of adapting to social change ahead of the general population, made peace with the Irish enlisted men by war's end and they soon became an enduring feature of the Army.  By the time of the Civil War things had changed so much that there were now Irish American and Irish born officers in the Regular Army, such as Irish American Philip Sheridan, after whom Sheridan Wyoming and Sheridan County Wyoming are named. 

 "Little Phil" Sheridan, far left.  Sheridan was born to Irish immigrant parents, but his ties with Ireland were so strong that it is sometimes erroneously claimed he was born in Ireland.  The Irish American Cavalryman was honored in Wyoming with a town and county being named after him.  Oddly enough, in later years a 20th Century Catholic priest who was a relative of his would also serve in Wyoming.

This change started to take place almost as soon as the Mexican War was over, and was well established by the time the Civil War broke out.  Already by that time many rank and file members of the Army were Irish born and there were Irish American officers of note.  The controversial Patrick Connor provides one such example, with Connor having a major campaigning role in Wyoming during the Civil War period.  After the war ended, the post Civil War U. S. Army was full of Irish and German volunteers.  The list of the dead, for example, at Little Big Horn reads like an Irish town roster, so heavy was the concentration of the Irish born in its ranks.  Indeed, the Irish in the 7th Cavalry, and other U.S. Army units, had a permanent impact on American military music during the period, contributing such martial tunes as Garryowen and The Girl I Left Behind Me to the American military music book.

The controversial Patrick E. Connor, who campaigned in Wyoming, not always widely, but very aggressively, during the Civil War.

Irish born and raised 7th Cavalry officer, and former Swiss Guard, Myles Keogh.

After Irish soldiers came the Irish railroad workers, who arrived with the construction crews of the Union Pacific.  The role of Irishmen in the construction of the railway is well known. Along with other ethnic minorities, the Irish were strongly represented in the crews that made their way through the state in the late 1860s.  As towns came up along the rail line, some of these men would inevitably leave the employment of the railroad and take up residence in other occupations.  Cheyenne, Laramie, Medicine Bow, Rawlins, Green River, Rock Springs, and Evanston all share this Union Pacific source of origin.

Former railroad station in Medicine Bow, with the Virginian Hotel to the far left.

After the railways started to come in, cattle did as well. Rail lines were, in fact, a critical element of the conversion of the United States from a pork consuming to a beef consuming country, as rail was needed in order to ship cattle to packing houses in the Mid West.  Rail expanded into Wyoming at exactly that point in time at which the greatly expanded herds in Texas started to be driving out of that state.  Prior to that time, while beef was certainly consumed, it tended to be a local product and pig production provided the primary meat source in the United States, along with poultry, foul and wild game.  Texas' cattle had been raised primarily for their hides not their beef.  The Civil War, however, had seen an uncontrolled herd expansion which, with the war's end, became a nearly free resource, if a way of sending the cattle to central markets could be found.  The expansion of the rail lines soon provided that, and the long trail drive era was born..  And with the cattle, came some Irish cowhands, and ultimately Irish ranchers.

Ireland itself was nearly completely dominated by agriculture in the 19th Century, and indeed it was for most of the 20th Century.  Agriculture was the largest sector of the Irish economy as late as the 1990s.  In the 19th Century, as with every century before that, most Irish were rural and agricultural.  Looked at that way, employment in non agricultural activities really meant that most of the Irishmen taking them up were leaving their natural born employments for something else.

Moreover, while we today tend to think of Ireland exclusively in terms of potatoes, due to the horror of the famine, in reality the Irish have a very long association with horses and cattle.  In pre Christian Ireland, stealing cattle was virtually a national sport, and the great Irish epic work, the Cattle Raid of Cooley (Táin Bó Cúailnge)  concerns that activity.  In later years, during English occupation, potatoes became an Irish staple because Irish farmers tended to grow them for themselves, by necessity, while still often working production crops on English owned lands.  Even as late as the famine Ireland exported wheat to the United Kingdom.  Cattle raising never stopped, and indeed by World War One Ireland was a significant beef exporter to the Great Britain.  The same is also true of sheep, which were raised all over Ireland for their wool and meat, and giving rise to the idea that all Irish are clad in tweed at all time, a concept that also applies to the sheep raising Scots.

 The dramatic protagonist of the Cattle Raid of Cooley.

Horses, for their part, were and remain an Irish national obsession.  Unlike the English and Scots, whose routine farmers had little interest in riding stock, the Irish developed an early love of horse riding and everything associated with it. The Steeple Chase was and is an Irish national sport, followed intensively even now, and in earlier eras widely engaged in.  A person has to wonder, therefore, if the heavy Irish representation in cavalry formations in the U.S. Army of the 19th Century reflected that fact.  It certainly did in the English Army, which had at least one Irish cavalry regiment up until Irish independence.

All of this made the Irish a people that was particularly inclined to go into animal husbandry.  Other agricultural Europeans, except perhaps the Scots, had less exposure to this sort of agriculture than the Irish did.  It's no wonder therefore, that the Irish were well represented amongst 19th Century cowboys and, ultimately, amongst small scale 19th Century and 20th Century ranchers.  Indeed, in more than one occasion, Irish immigrant ranchers were able to convert humble beginnings into enormous agricultural enterprises.  One such example was that of Patrick J. Sullivan, an Irish immigrant who started ranching sheep near Rawlins. As his ranch grew, he moved to Casper and became a wealthy man from sheep ranching, which then translated into politics as he became Mayor of Casper, and ultimately a U.S. Senator upon the death of Francis Warren.  Sullivan had come a long way from his humble beginnings in Bantry Bay.  His Irish roots were reflected in the balcony of the large house he built in Casper, which featured a shamrock on the banister of the widow's walk, although that feature is now gone.

No story about the Irish in the United States would be complete without noting the role that Irish born clerics played, as the Irish were always closely identified with the Catholic Church, a fact which ultimately was pivitol in Ireland's independence following World War One.  In Wyoming, the presence of the Irish guaranteed the presence of the Catholic Church, and in many areas, but not all, Irish born parishioners and Irish American parishioners were the largest segment of any one congregation (although, again, this is not true everywhere in Wyoming).  Because the church was essentially a missionary church in Wyoming, the Church relied for decades on Irish priests.  The first Bishop of the Diocese of Cheyenne was the Irish born Maurice Burke, who served from 1887 until 1893, and who had to defend his Diocese from hostility from nativist elements, which were strong at the time.  He was succeeded by Thomas Lenihan, who was also Irish born.  Irish born priests continued to be very common well into the 20th Century and it only came to a slow close after World War Two, although at least one Irish born retired priest in residence remains at St. Patrick's in Casper.

In a state where they were fairly strongly represented, it's perhaps not surprising that the Irish were able to have some success in politics in the state even though there remained a strong anti Catholic prejudice in much of the United States prior to World War One.  Indeed, at least according to one source, some early Irish businessmen and politicians in the State made efforts not to make their Catholicism generally well known and were muted about their faith, being aware of the prejudice that existed against ti.  None the less, as the example of Patrick Sullivan provides, there were successful Irish born and Irish American politicians in the state fairly early.  Sullivan may provide the best early example, but others are provided by mid 20th Century politicians Joseph O'Mahoney and Frank Barrett.

An identifiable Irish presence in the state remained through most of the 20th Century, but by the last decade of the 20th Century it began to fade, as Irish immigrants aged and began to pass on.  Some still remain, but the era of Irish immigration to Wyoming is over.  Like most of the United States, a residual Irish influence lingers on in subtle ways, and in the memories of Irish descendants, many of whom, perhaps most of whom, can also claim ancestry from other lands by now.  But the impact of the Irish on the state, while not as open and apparent as it once was, continues on, and always will, given their significant role in the the 19th and 20th Century history of the state.