Good Opportunity to Think about Ancestral Roots on St. Patrick’s Day

The Sioux in western South Dakota are militantly attempting to preserve what’s left of their ancestral past.  With only a few of the elders speaking the old language, Lakota is being taught in schools so that young people, adrift in the eternal present of popular culture, won’t forget the foundations of their identity.  The resurgence of interest in family genealogy stems from a similar impetus.

     Like so many holidays in America, Saint Patrick’s Day has been subverted to the demands of commercialism and partying.  All the more reason for schools and churches to offer a counterweight.

     Studying Saint Patrick allows for a history trip back to fifth-century Ireland and Britain to reconstruct the Celtic past and the beginnings of Christianity in that part of the world.  Even more personal, the families of many students today have descended from those same people back then, including grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles.

     Both schools and churches should look at religion before Christianity, especially during those fertile centuries when Patrick and others were able to hold a vision of both worlds simultaneously.  Missionaries today often do the same.  Some old practices are added to the new.

     Protestants and secular historians alike should respectfully take advantage of an opportunity like St. Patrick’s Day to study the culturally monumental achievements of the Catholic Church in the centuries that followed.  Besides the common grounding in Christianity, the history of the church must be studied even in secular schools as the history of the West.