Happy St. Patrick's Day!

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Background on St. Patrick's Day

http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1995/eirv22n23-19950602/eirv22n23-19950602_066-why_did_the_irish_save_civilizat.pdf

The few historical certainties of the life of St. Patrick

are not incidents or miracles, but conceptual signs of the

nature of the Christian concept of man as imago viva Dei,

in the living image of God. His mission to the Irish, around

430,w as the first to barbarians outside Roman law,a s Cahill

observes. It succeeded in a way that no Christian mission

had before, converting an entire national population in less

than a century; but it based itself upon the work of those

beachheads of Augustinian Christianity by which St.P atrick

was trained: the movement of St.A mbrose and St.A ugustine

around Milan in the fourth century, and the networks of St.

Martin of Tours (France ) in the early fifth century.S t.P atrick

and his great successors Columba and Columban were the

leaders of a Christian missionary movement focused on the

Augustinian concept of the Trinity, as expressed by St.

Augustine and by Pope St. Leo the Great ( 441-451). This

moment was unique in a post-Roman world in which "Christian

" leadership otherwise was in heretical denial of the

divinity of Christ-that is, of the Trinity of God. In Christianity,

the divinity of Chris.t and the sacredness of human

life, imago viva Dei, are the same concept, inseparable.

This was the uniqueness of the Irish monastery movement,

which spread so far,s o fast,a nd with such results for human

progress-from St. Patrick's foundations.