Ad Quem Ibimus?

New York seems to be coming up quite a bit on here. Yet it is but one of the five world cities outside London. We hear ominously little in Britain from Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore or Tokyo. We shall hear an awful lot from them before very long at all.

That said, neither side of the controversy around the New York Saint Patrick's Day Parade makes any sense. Why does a homosexual group, simply as such, wish to participate in that? What is the point of connection? And why does the Church, simply as such, think that that Parade has anything to do with Her? Again, what is the point of connection?

As much as anything else, those in the latter camp clearly have not the first idea about Ireland in the present age. They are like either side in Northern Ireland, fondly imagining that somewhere else either is, or at any rate very recently used to be, inhabited and controlled by people like them. When, exactly?

St Patrick's Day events in the United States are also notable for the preponderance of Scottish rather than Irish varieties of bagpipe and of pipers' uniform. I have never understood that.

The marketing of St Patrick's Day as Anglophone Catholicism's big day every year, mostly in the interests of a brewery that refused to employ Catholics in any managerial capacity well into the 1960s while its founding family was providing a dynasty of English Tory parliamentarians and a close personal friend of the Queen Mother, has finally reached the point that lies beyond endurance.

Total abstinence is as much an Irish Catholic tradition as uproarious drunkenness is, just as uproarious drunkenness is as much an Irish Protestant tradition as total abstinence is.

Many countries have both a large and geographically concentrated Catholic population, and a large and geographically concentrated Protestant population, without (beyond certain discrete and now rather small minorities among Protestants) either being known for any especial attitude to alcohol: Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scotland,  England.

The culture of Scandinavia is steeped in Protestantism, and is not noticeably abstemious. Nor is that trait obvious in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, where, apart from a certain number of Catholic glens and isles, the very practice of advanced Calvinism remains more than common, in many places effectively universal.

Correspondingly, the Latin countries take wine with every lunch and dinner while associating drunk and disorderly behaviour with tourists from Europe's Protestantised North.

It would do no harm to the Church in English-speaking countries, with their large populations of Irish descent, to call for 17th March to be set aside as a day of return to the tradition of Fr Matthew and, even if only on that one day of the year, imbibing not a drop. The association of the Church with the industrial consumption of ethanol in the middle of every Lent has long been most unedifying, regardless of who did nor did not march in a parade.