Saints Days – why any of them?

by Martin Odoni

It was St. George’s Day this week, and with it came all the usual scenes of the Tommy Robinson crowd starting a pointless running battle with the Metropolitan Police, and smug social media users telling terribly witty and original, really tired, old jokes about how St. George was from Turkey and never set foot in England. I do agree with the underlying point, which is that it is very odd the way English jingoists feel such dewey-eyed pride over a man who never went anywhere near Britain, and died about five centuries before England even existed.

Because nothing shows a love of your country more than rioting and trashing your way through its capital city.

But there is a more fundamental reason why I find it weird that anyone in England bothers with St. George’s Day, which is the nature of canonisation, and indeed of Saints Days; quite simply, Sainthood is a Roman Catholic convention. England, Wales, and Scotland all broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. I am neither endorsing nor condemning the Reformation, but I am bewildered at how the “proud-to-be-English”, “close-the-borders” crowd can get excited about the canonisation of St. George, when it was the decision of a “foreign church”, which “dear olde England” rejected and fought wars to avoid being forced back into its fold.

And look at me; a Jewish-born atheist. I have never been at all excited by St. George’s Day, not because I feel some “shame” at being English, no. It is because I am not only not a Catholic, not even a Christian, nor even someone religious, come to that. Why should I give a hoot about a Saint’s Day – any Saint’s Day?

On top of that, I am no fan of jingoism, or even what is sometimes called “national identity,” which I find a slightly disturbing concept. It demands people behave in certain ways and bars them from behaving in others, just because that is “the way the people in this country are meant to be,” even against an individual’s own personal nature and inclination. It is a damagingly restrictive form of peer pressure applied by the dead on the living, suppressing the individual into a photo-fit of what everyone around them is supposedly like.

And what that “national identity” is really supposed to be will be arbitrary, no one version of it will ever be agreed upon by all, and it will usually be a national exercise in romantic self-flattery anyway. (A remarkably consistent feature of patriotism is how various countries take such pride in themselves by awarding their people flattering descriptions that every other country also awards its people for its own “completely different” identity. While there is a difference in the average behaviour from place to place, and upbringing plays a role in how people develop anyway, there is a danger of assuming that it is decisive in people’s character.) Oh sure, I support England when the World Cup comes around, and I will speak out when someone makes unfair/over-generalised remarks about English people. But that is less a matter of being proud and more just not liking unfairness or stereotype. (I will defend people of any nationality or race from being stereotyped, come to that.) National identity is a menace to individual identity.

Even St. David’s Day in Wales and St. Andrew’s Day in Scotland are pretty minor events, albeit there is more interest in them than there is in St. George’s Day. They just are not Catholic countries, and it is arguable that all three lands in Britain are post-Christian countries entirely.

The party ain’t over! It never began…

I think this Catholic entanglement in Sainthood is the root reason why St. Patrick’s Day is so ridiculously popular both in Ireland and across the Irish diaspora. Although the church’s power in Ireland is, thankfully, ever diminishing, Ireland remains a Catholic country, and so its Patron Saint’s Day has remained central to its way of life for far longer, even if the religious side of it has rather faded into the background in modern times.

But I do find the smug giggles from some quarters of Ireland when seeing the comparative deadness of St. George’s Day a little iffy. The English on the whole just cannot be bothered with St. George’s Day, we are not suffering particularly from the lack of revelries – we just do not see anything in particular to celebrate. And while the point about George being a Turk is all well and good, the Irish should not forget that St. Patrick was no more an Irishman than most of the players in the Republic Of Ireland football team when it was managed by Jack Charlton. Patrick, like George, pre-dated the creation of England, but was a Briton, probably from somewhere between Cumbria and Kilpatrick.

Ah, protest the Irish, but old Pat still spent about half his life in Ireland, and helped establish the Roman Catholic Church as our religion!

Yes, and that is what I find so iffy about the Irish love of St. Patrick’s Day. Think about the dark and terrible history of English/British rule in Ireland. For eight centuries from the landing of Henry II of England on the east coast in the late-twelfth century, the Irish struggled against a high-handed, uninvited, self-appointed authority from Britain occupying their land, imposing institutions on them, and generally bossing them around all the time.

So the Irish hate Henry and all his successors for that? I genuinely do not blame them.

But they love the guy from the fifth century who invented the practice?