Yesterday we celebrated the feast of St Patrick with two Masses in the parish. My sacristan, Hilda, arranged a devotional display of our statue of St Patrick with some shamrock, candles and harps, together with a nice green cloth. After both Masses, we sang the hymn Hail Glorious St Patrick. Fr Guy Selvester posted the Wolfe Tones version which gives one interpretation. Another is that given by Frank Patterson which I have embedded below:Neither version includes all the verses that we sang so here are the words. 43 years ago, Mrs Strawson taught us this hymn in infant school. She said that after each verse you had to reprise the last line, not "On Erin's green valleys" for each verse. So kudos to Frank Patterson for following this tradition.
Hail, glorious Saint Patrick, dear Saint of our isle!
On us thy poor children, bestow a sweet smile;
And now thou art high in the mansions above,
On Erin's green valleys look down in thy love.
Hail, glorious Saint Patrick, thy words were once strong
Against Satan's wiles and an infidel throng;
Not less in thy might now in heaven thou art
Oh, come to our aid, in our battle take part.
In the war against sin, in the fight for the faith,
Dear Saint, may thy children resist unto death;
May their strength be in meekness, in penance, and prayer,
Their banner the Cross, which they glory to bear.
Thy people, now exiles on many a shore,
Shall love and revere thee till time be no more:
And the fire thou hast kindled shall ever burn bright
Its warmth undiminished, undying its light.
Ever bless and defend the sweet land of our birth,
Where the shamrock still blooms as when thou went on earth,
And our hearts shall yet burn, wheresoever we roam,
For God and Saint Patrick and our native home.
12 comments:
Father - I'm so glad you sang this hymn. We've not had it in my parish for years.
Mrs Strawson is absolutely right - and she probably got it from the old 'Crown of Jesus' Hymn book, where each verse is written out in full under the music.
I particularly used to love singing the last line of verse 5: "For God and St Patrick; For God and St Patrick; For God and St Patrick and our native home".
Singing 'Erin's green valleys' after each verse (as it's shown in modern hymn books) makes no sense and shows that the compilers don't know the origin of the words.
Hope you're singing 'Dear St Joseph' tomorrow!
We stuck to the perhaps not very PC "infidel throng" yesterday but omitted the middle verse. Quite an achievement to learn that at school: we stuck to the rather simpler "God is love, His the care".
Andrew J
Just noticed that "infidel" was replaced by "heretic" in the version I pasted. changed it now.
Thank you for this. I was at a recital by Frank Patterson in the National Concert Hall, Dublin, with my late father, maybe in 1986. Some of the audience were on a balcony behind the stage. Frank turned his back on the main audience for one song which he sang especially to those in the balcony, singing 'ad orientem', as it were. The whole audience experienced this not as a gimmick but as the mark of the true gentleman Frank was. May he rest in peace.
'Heretic' was in the original words, but was changed to 'infidel' when the (then-) New Westminster Hymnal was published c. 1940.
Down in Brighton, we had a choir practice on Tuesday evening. We began and ended the choir practice with a hearty rendition of Hail Glorious St Patrick, and then drank some Guinness.
The Pope first gave the Kings of England the Lordship of Ireland. A Papal Blessing was sent to William III when he set out for Ireland. The Lateran Palace was illuminated for a fortnight when news of the Battle of the Boyne reached Rome. During the 1798 Rebellion, the staff and students of Maynooth sent a Declaration of Loyalty to the King. The tiny number of priests who adhered to that Rebellion were excommunicated, the bishops calling them “the very faeces of the Church”.
Into the nineteenth century, Catholic priests participated in the annual prayer service at the Walls of Derry, an ecumenical gesture with few or no parallels at the time. Jacobite and Hanoverian were always united in supporting the closest possible ties among the historic Kingdom of England (including the Principality of Wales), the historic Kingdom of Scotland and the historic Kingdom of Ireland.
Prominent Belfast Catholic laymen chaired rallies against Home Rule, with prominent Catholic priests on the platforms. There were numerous Catholic pulpit denunciations of Fenianism, which is unlike any of the three principal British political traditions in being a product of the French Revolution. Hence its tricolour flag. And hence its very strong anti-clerical streak, always identifying Catholicism as one of Ireland’s two biggest problems.
Jean Bodin’s theory of princely absolutism, held by the Stuarts and their anti-Papal Bourbon cousins, was incompatible with the building up of the Social Reign of Christ, subsequently the inspiration for all three great British political movements. Likewise, ethnically exclusive nation-states deriving uncritically from the Revolution do not provide adequate means to that end.
By contrast, the absence of any significant Marxist influence in this country has been due to the universal and comprehensive Welfare State, and the strong statutory protection of workers and consumers, the former paid for by progressive taxation, and all underwritten by full employment. These are very largely the fruits of Catholic Social Teaching.
Such fruits have been of disproportionate benefit to ethnically Gaelic-Irish Catholics throughout the United Kingdom. Even in the 1940s, Sinn Féin worried that they were eroding its support. She who led the assault on these things remains a Unionist hate figure, since the Anglo-Irish Agreement is an integral part of any Thatcherism honestly defined.
Only an industrial or post-industrial economy, not one built on the sands of EU farm subsidies and film-making, can make provision such as existed before Thatcher. A United Ireland would exclude therefrom people who would otherwise participate in it.
Northern Ireland has both a large bourgeoisie and a large proletariat, like the rest of the United Kingdom, but unlike the Irish Republic. Gaelic-Irish Catholics are to be found in large numbers in Northern Ireland’s middle and working classes alike. Many bourgeois and proletarians in Great Britain are ethnically Gaelic-Irish, devoutly Catholic, or both.
Middle-class expansion since the Second World War, like the civilised intellectual and cultural life of the pre-Thatcher working class, was in no small measure due to the Catholic schools. The only way to maintain the Catholic school system in Northern Ireland is to keep Northern Ireland within the Union.
For each of this Kingdom’s parts contains a Catholic intelligentsia, whereas the Irish Republic’s is the most tribally anti-Catholic in the world. There are precious few Mass-going, and no ideologically Catholic, politicians, journalists, radio or television producers, or other public intellectuals. Rather, the memories of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce are venerated. Anyone who objects to even the most extreme decadence is accused of wishing to “return” to “the bad, old, repressive Ireland.” The Republic’s Catholic schools, among much else, are doomed.
As would be Northern Ireland’s, if Sinn Féin had its way. Under the pretext that they teach through the medium of Irish, wholly and militantly secular Sinn Féin schools are being set up at public expense, in direct opposition to the Catholic system, by the Sinn Féin Education Minister. Her exclusion of Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist clergy from their historic role in the government of schools is the dry run for her party’s openly desired exclusion of the Catholic Church from schools throughout Ireland.
Furthermore, there is no desire in the Republic, either for the much higher taxes necessary to maintain British levels of public spending in “the Six Counties”, or for the incorporation of a large minority into a country which has developed on the presupposition of a near-monoculture.
The Civil Rights Movement was explicitly for equal British citizenship, not for a United Ireland. Even the old Nationalist Party, never mind Sinn Féin, was permitted no part in its early organisation. And it was classically British Labour in identifying education, health care, decent homes and proper wages as the rights of citizens, who are demeaned precisely as citizens when they are denied those rights. The fruits of Catholic Social Teaching, indeed.
So the Catholic case is for the Union. Look at the Ulster Unionist and Democratic Unionist votes in largely or entirely Catholic wards. Even Ian Paisley’s huge personal vote could not happen without Catholic support. With no corresponding Nationalist vote in Protestant wards, the Union, simply as such, is manifestly the majority will of both communities. As for Paisley’s theological opinions, the definitive Catholic answers to them have been available for centuries.
The left-wing case is also for the Union, which enables more people than would otherwise be able to do so to benefit from the building up of social democracy. The dismantlement of this by an enemy of the Union was mostly opposed by the old High Tory oligarchs of the Ulster Unionist Party, and consistently resisted by the Democratic Unionist Party, with its Old Labour electoral base.
And the all-Ireland case is for the Union. As is appreciated in the Irish Republic, what is now Northern Ireland has been profoundly different from the rest of the island, but very like Great Britain, since long before any prospect of partition. That was precisely what necessitated partition. The Irish Republic does not want, and could not sustain, the incorporation of Northern Ireland.
So Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.
And God Save The Queen.
Thank you for that, David. However, singing "Hail Glorious St Patrick" certainly does not imply support for Sinn Fein.
Exactly my point, Father. The Union is now the last hope of preserving any part of Catholic Ireland, and possibly always was, really.
But then, the United Kingdom has always been significantly more Catholic-friendly than any of the Three Kingdoms that I suppose any serious Jacobite would have to say still existed.
And yes, that certainly does include the Kingdom of Ireland as constituted on the eve of the Union. That was why those running that Kingdom signed up to the Union. Yet within thirty years, a consequence of that signing up had been Catholic Emancipation throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
We have not yet seen it fully in England, although we will soon enough, but it has long, perhaps always, been the case in Scotland and Wales that Catholics are at least as Unionist in relation to their own parts of the Kingdom as Ulster Protestants are in relation to theirs.
And for the same reason: Catholics have no more desire to go down the road of who is or is not "really" English, Scots or Welsh than Ulster Protestants have to go down the road of who is or is not "really" Irish.
Even in Northern Ireland, voting for candidates and parties is one thing, as is voting for something that you know is not going to go through.
But who on the Falls Road is ever really going to risk casting the vote that brings about their own transfer out of the United Kingdom and into a country where you have to pay to visit the doctor? No one.
A (not very likely) independent Scotland would probably become a Jacobin republic pretty quickly, while such an arrangement from the outset is Plaid Cymru's stated policy for a (really most unlikely) independent Wales. The Irish Republic, of course, already is one, even complete with a tricolour.
There is actually quite a high probability that an independent England would follow suit, certainly if the other Commonwealth Realms had done so, as New Zealand very well might, and Canada certainly would, if Scotland did. The only thing that could save the monarchy in an independent Scotland would be its continuation in Canada.
And these would not be, just as the Irish Republic is not, expressions of the pre-Revolutionary Catholic republicanism of, say, Venice, or, insofar as it is still operative anywhere, the Catholic half of Switzerland.
These would not even be republics capable, with a lot of work, of becoming such expressions, as the American Republic is in principle, since 1776 came before 1789.
No, these would be pure products of the Revolution, in all its Terror.
God Save The Queen.
Well thanks be to God we had many ' on Erin's green valleys!' you meanie lot!lol
Why did the Stuart's hold Court in Papal Rome?
Why are the Stuart's buried in a large majestic monument in St. Peter's Basilica itself?
Why was the Stuart Duke of York, Dean of the College of Cardinals?
Mr. Lindsay seems to champion The Act of Settelment and The Succestion.
Would Mr. Lindsay also favor the return of The Test Act?
It is common knowledge that the sons of the land owners went to Maynooth and many of the poor went to the religious orders. That is one reason why many of the Carmelites were always known as great Republican supporters.
It was in the British interest to support Maynooth.`
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