_Up Next For Mel -- The Passion Of St. Patrick_

"DE GUSTIBUS"

"Up Next for Mel
The passion of St. Patrick."

BY MICHAEL JUDGE
Friday, March 12, 2004
The Wall Street Journal

"Next week millions of Americans without the slightest trace of Irish
ancestry will don green get-ups, guzzle green beer and slur "Happy St.
Patrick's Day" without the foggiest notion why they're engaged in such
unusual activity. Just who in heaven's name is this Patrick fellow
anyway?

Sure, most will know that Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland and
that March 17 is set aside to celebrate his consummate achievement:
bringing Christianity to the pagan hordes of Ireland and driving the
snakes into the sea. (The snakes, of course, stand for the paganism.)
But most will have no idea that Patrick, born in Britain in the fourth
century to an aristocratic Roman family, was not Irish at all.

Nor was he raised a devout Christian. In fact, as a young Roman
nobleman, Patricius (meaning of the patrician class) was nominally
Christian but, in his words, "had no real knowledge of God" until he was
torn from his comfortable home by Irish marauders and enslaved on the
Emerald Isle at the age of 15.

But that was just the beginning of young Patricius's adventures.
Indeed, if Mel Gibson is looking for a post-"Passion" project, he
couldn't ask for a better plot line than the arc of Patrick's amazing
life. Think of it as "Gladiator" meets "The Mission": the
spine-tingling story of a young Roman's journey from nobleman to slave
to fearless missionary.

In "St. Patrick: A Biography," just published by Simon & Schuster,
Philip Freeman skillfully weaves together the threads of Patrick's life,
at least those that we have. It's fairly certain that Patrick was born
around 390, in the reign of Emperor Theodosius, and died in the 460s, in
the declining years of the Roman Empire. The details of his life come
mainly from two of his letters written late in life. The first, "Letter
to the Soldiers of Coroticus," chastises the soldiers of a British
tyrant for slaughtering and enslaving Patrick's converts. "Notice I
don't call you my fellow Romans -- no, your crimes have made you
citizens of Hell!"

The second, "Confession," is a long and impassioned plea from Patrick to
his British bishops asking that he be allowed to fulfill his mission in
Ireland despite their accusations of incompetence and pilfering. "So
listen to me well, all of you, great and small, everyone who has any
fear of God -- especially you wealthy landowners so proud of your
education --listen and consider this carefully: God chose foolish little
me from among all of you . . . to serve the Irish faithfully."

Using these documents, and his knowledge of Roman and Celtic culture,
Mr. Freeman fleshes out the life of Patrick and the world he inhabited.
We learn that it was in Ireland, when Patrick was a slave, that "God
first opened [his] heart." We learn that after six years of enslavement
he escaped and found passage back to Britain. We learn that he turned
his back on the aristocratic life of his family, trained as a priest and
returned to Ireland to spread the word of God.

Mr. Freeman's book succeeds where others have failed by giving us a
wholly human portrait of Patrick the boy, the slave and the missionary.
He juxtaposes vivid descriptions of cultured Roman life with the barmy
traditions of Irish kings and Druid priests, thereby revealing all that
Patrick left behind on his mission "to the end of the earth."

One passage describes how Irish kings--really village chieftains--were
crowned. It is, one might say, particularly revealing: "A white female
horse was led into the crowd. . . . The royal candidate then had sexual
intercourse with the horse in full view of the people while proclaiming
that he too was a beast." Unlike Shakespeare's Richard III, an Irish
king had both his kingdom and his horse. ******

<G> ---- DSH

Now that's the stuff of a hit Hollywood production. Of course, any
accurate portrayal of Ireland in Patrick's time would likely offend the
modern-day pagan and Druid communities -- not to mention the Roman
Catholic Church, which probably wouldn't welcome the silver-screen
revelation that the patron saint of Ireland was accused of corruption by
his bishops and ordered to abandon his Irish flock.

But that shouldn't scare off a daring filmmaker like Mel "Braveheart"
Gibson, who clearly doesn't mind controversy. I can see it now: opening
March 17, 2006, "The Passion of Patrick." No one under 17 admitted
without a parent or guardian."

"Mr. Judge is an assistant features editor of The Wall Street Journal's
editorial page."
------------------

Bingo!

Erin Go Bragh!

D. Spencer Hines

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

Vires et Honor