It is St Patrick’s Day. The patron saint of Ireland was in fact a Brit. Brought up in a Christian family somewhere on the west coast of mainland Britain, he didn’t bother with religion until he was kidnapped to Ireland at the age of 16 to work as a herdsman. Having plenty of time to think about life, he became a great person of prayer. He escaped after six years on a ship full of dogs, but on returning home, God came to him in a dream and told him to go back and preach to the Irish. The early success of Christianity in Ireland is largely down to his work.
‘In a vision of the night, I saw a man whose name was Victoricus coming as if from Ireland with innumerable letters. And as I was reading, I seemed at that moment to hear the voice of those beside the forest which is near the western sea, crying as if with one voice: “We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and walk again among us”.’ St Patrick, The Confession
Today was popularly regarded in the Middle Ages as the day when Noah entered the ark.
Today in 2000, some 530 people belonging to a Ugandan doomsday cult, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, were murdered in an explosion at Kanungu. The cult leaders had been preaching the end of the world on 31 December 1999, and when that failed to happen, they responded to criticism by killing their followers, who thought they were attending a party. The inferno at Kanungu was initially taken to be a group suicide, but when hundreds more bodies, poisoned and stabbed, were discovered at sites belonging to the cult across Uganda, police realised they were part of a mass murder.
The Puritan revolution abolished the English monarchy today in 1649, when parliament passed ‘An Act for the abolishing the Kingly Office in England and Ireland’. The previous ruler of England, Charles I, had only been beheaded six weeks earlier. For the next 11 years, England had no king but God, who ruled through a succession of unstable military dictatorships.
‘It is and hath been found by experience, that the Office of a King in this Nation and Ireland, and to have the power thereof in any single person, is unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, safety and publique interest of the people…’ Act for the abolishing the Kingly Office in England and Ireland
It is the feast of St Joseph of Arimathea, who provided a tomb for the burial of Jesus after the crucifixion.
Image: GoToVan