St. Patrick, a Romano-British Bishop landed in Skerries, Ireland in 432 AD when he returned to bring Christianity to the pagans. I visited the town on Thanksgiving Day 2025. It was green and lush. Its stones were wet from the passing rain, and, to my surprise, there was a segment of a rainbow above St. Patrick Island. I contemplated the consequences and the difference between St. Patrick, a single man, spiritually impregnating the island with Catholicism for centuries to come, and the Puritans without names or faces (as they have been represented to us Americans) spiritually and physically impregnating North America with Protestantism in 1621. On this anniversary of the event, I carried under my arm Paul Blanshard’s book, The Irish and Catholic Power. As Dr. E. Michael Jones has pointed out in many of his articles, Paul Blanshard was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) hell-bent on dealing with the Catholic Question, particularly, as this book reveals, by breaking Catholic Church-State relations.
As the light began to fade, and darkness descended, a gale passed by and almost blew away the few people and dogs enjoying the walk. I took refuge along the rock wall surrounding the sea trying to protect the book, the cellphone in my leather purse with the broken zipper, and whatever warmth I held inside my jacket. When the sharp wind and rain passed, I walked on towards the bus stop near St. Patrick’s church. And on the way I met an old man named Joseph, called Joe, as he sat on the bench looking straight out to St. Patrick’s Island, where the Saint first set foot. There was a glorious white dog that looked like a mixture of a white Labrador with a Golden Retriever’s wavy mane standing on the green, wind-combed hill as if he were the spirit of St. Patrick himself or a dog representing the presence of an angel, like the little dog in the story of Tobit. That’s why I stopped to ask the man if it were his dog. Joseph said no and went on to testify what a horrible thing St. Patrick did to bring Catholicism to the island, ‘It has been catastrophic.’ I was not surprised to hear him speak this way. Not only were the Irish starved during the Potato Famine, their towns were purposely dismantled, and they themselves sent to the United States as cheap labor to advance America’s industrial revolution, but Ireland’s propaganda continues to be anti-Catholic. The Guiness family recently, as an example, allowed the release of a series documenting the homosexual nature of their family history in Netflix’s House of Guinness, which also explains how the family built its empire on the foundation of Irish drinkers. And then there’s the Magdalene Laundries documentaries repeated ad nauseum to the Irish to help them hate Catholic nuns. As a sign that the propaganda works, the most common costume during this year’s Halloween was the horrifying, bloody nun costume. Even the young were wearing it.
I let Joseph talk. When he asked me where I was from, I told him that I was a Mexican, with some Irish roots, born in Florida. I told him my father taught me that the Mexicans would always love the Irish because they switched sides during the Mexican-American War to defend fellow Catholics and the Church from sacrilege (and perhaps to obtain the property the Mexican government offered the soldiers, as well). I told him my great-grandfather was a ginger with pale skin and blue eyes and from my mother’s side, I had uncles with eyes as blue as his because they were from the Gaelic area of Galicia. Joseph looked at me with astonishment and he seemed pleased. I usually add that my paternal family is from the same region as the white-redheaded Mexican boxer Canelo Alvarez, but I didn’t this time. I wanted the story to sink in, and I looked at Joseph: the same person who can curse Catholicism (which I blame on years of heavy social engineering) can still feel pleasure at the idea that Catholics of different races and languages can join to fight against a common enemy. And I watched as the idea dawned on his lovely, weathered face, as he gazed out towards St Patrick’s island, that an act of heroic and sacrificial love can go down in history to his credit as if Joseph himself had been hung for treason on behalf of a Mexican. As I fancied he was thinking. (more...)
Why We Eat Fish on Friday: Ireland’s Divorce of Church & State
