Modern Celtic Stuff

From The Ship of Fools:

It’s linked to the long-standing English tendency to use the ‘Celtic fringe’ as sort of foil or mirror for their own society, sentimentalising or demonising it in the process. In the 19th century the supposedly poor, lazy Celts were the antithesis of modern industrial England. Now the supposedly spiritual, nature-loving Celts are the antithesis of modern, industrial England. What’s changed is how the English perceive themselves.

Call me an old cynic if you like, but I suspect that quite a lot of our modern ‘Celtic stuff’ would be dismissed as sentimental rubbish or dangerous syncretism if we were to preach it to a congregation of 5th-century Christians.

The true Celtic Christianity is Irish (and, not least in Scotland, Irish Diaspora) Catholicism and Ulster Evangelicalism, Highland Catholicism and the remarkable strand of Calvinism there with its very high sacramental theology (the cultural sectarianism of the Lowlands does not disfigure the Highlands and Islands), the Welsh chapels and the Catholic sensibility that continued to be expressed in Welsh well into the eighteenth century, the strong Anglo-Catholic presence within the Church in Wales, the mass openness of Cornwall both to the Methodist and to the Anglo-Catholic revivals, and the character of the Episcopal Church in Scotland before it went liberal.

In any case, the figures often, or even usually, cited were Anglo-Saxon, embodying the gloriously explosive union of true Celtic spirituality and the Rule of Saint Benedict by means of the Roman Obedience and the Roman Rite. These islands will be re-evangelised when, again, their two great traditions of Christian witness - Catholic, and classically Protestant - are re-united by those same two means.