When I was a boy going up in Shreveport, Louisiana, I suffered from pretty serious asthma. From time to time I had to miss school. To pass the hours I would listen on my bedside radio to a daily variety show from Chicago called The Breakfast Club with Don McNeill.

Once I was ill for three school days running. The first day Don McNeill launched a contest expected to last for weeks. In it selected people in the studio audience would start with the NEW TESTAMENT and then search back and back and back looking for the first mention of baseball in the BIBLE.

Day ONE: A man found, "And where are THE NINE?" (i.e. lepers).

Day TWO: Another man suggested, "Ruth TOOK THE PITCHER TO THE WELL."

Day THREE: End of Contest. A very pleased with herself young woman quoted, "IN THE BIG INNING"  (="BEGINNING," (GENESIS 1:1).

I am honored to speak at this morning's Communion Breakfast of North Carolina's first Division (= Chapter) of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). AOH is a group of practicing Roman Catholic Men of Irish descent age 16 or over. We welcome those of you who are not our members. Please think about joining us.

I had prepared as serious a talk as it is possible for an Irishman to give, comlete with footnotes and Scriptural citations on the subject, "When Cross and Shamrock first met: The Gospel and the Irish."  You need to know that the name we gave our local AOH group five or six years ago was "The Cross and Shamrock Division."

Not to worry. I tossed out that formal text. It was about how the Gospel of Jesus was meant to change lives, about Peter and Paul and their evangelizing techniques borrowed by St Patrick to use with our Fifth Century ancestors. Then I suddenly remembered that 1940s Breakfast Club contest and I thought you might prefer a similar contest.

Let me cite one NT and one OT passage "clearly" talking about pure Irishmen. At the end I will make a case for the Irishness of Jesus of Nazareth Himself!

What I was looking for in Scripture was guided by my idea about what is special about how Irishmen relate themselves to God.

Irishmen are not insipid whiners. They are stand up guys and gals who are not above arguing their rights with the Lord and holding the Lord to his promises. After a good bout of arm wrestling, the Irish, in the end more or less graciously, submit and do things God's way. Fortunately, God and His Church are especially understanding and forgiving when it comes to what makes the Irish act Irish, as we shall see in the cases of James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 It is, of course, your right as Irishmen to have ideas different from mine!

Let's play: Who Wants to Be An Irishman? Who Wants to Find an Irishman in the BIBLE?

According to Matthew 21 Jesus had been in and out of Jerusalem. Having spent the night outside its precincts, Our Lord entered the temple and began to teach. The chief priests and political leaders joined the listeners and began questioning by what authority He taught.

Jesus caught them in a dilemma, then said (28-32)

Now let me ask you, young Jimmy Joe O'Hare, which son was the Irishman? The one who said, "Right ho, Da, I'm yer man" but did not go or the other son that said, "Wha'? Me? Work? Father, are ye daft? Ferget it!" But later he cooled down, reconsidered his rebellion and obeyed his father. Which son was the Irishman?

I will not claim that the Irishman described in the Book of JOB is the only Irishman in the Old Testament. But I will leave it to you to search for the others.

Take a look at Job both before and after God allowed the Satan to tempt and humiliate Job. Before Temptation Job was a lamb. After being smitten, Job became a tiger. Mad as hell and not about to take any more unfairness. Here are some quotations from Job himself:

Like that feisty Irish lad in Matthew 21, Job had had it with his Divine oppressor.

Well, that couldn't last. An Irishman has to make peace with God. From out of the tempest God lets Job have it. Four Chapters worth! The longest speech God makes anywhere in Scripture! Surely only an Irishman could provoke that much inspired oratory!

As good Irishmen often do, Job then saw the error of his ways, repented and submitted to God. A very gracious winner, God then gave Job 14,000 cattle, 6,000 camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and seven more sons and three more daughters.

And what did the Lord say to his three self-appointed spokesmen who had kept telling Job to shut up and take his lumps with a stiff upper lip? I misdoubt not that the three "friends" of Job were really Englishmen!

 'WHEN THE LORD HAD FINISHED SPEAKING TO JOB, HE SAID TO ELIPHAZ THE
TEMANITE, 'I AM ANGRY WITH YOU AND YOUR TWO FRIENDS, BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOT SPOKEN AS YOU OUGHT ABOUT ME, AS MY SERVANT JOB HAS DONE."  (42: 7)

A God who can love a sometimes whining Job can't help but admire an eloquent lot of rebellious belly achers like the Irish. He certainly humbled and tested the Irish as much as he ever tested and humbled the great Job. Like Job, the Irish did not roll over and ask for even more beatings. Rather they stood up and demanded justice and fair play. God wants stand-up followers, men and women who demand to know why they have it so rough, men who hold the Lord to His promises and remind him that loyalty is a two-way street.

In Ireland St Patrick made only a bit of a start. There were no martyrdoms. But no sudden nation wide conversions either. It took nearly two centuries before a bare majority were Catholic Christians. Evangelizing is a risky business. Patrick tried to establish in Ireland a strong rule by bishops, as Rome and the Holy Father preferred. But Patrick lost out to that new fangled Eastern invention called monasticism. Monks ruled Irish Christianity for centuries. Seven hundred years after Patrick the Pope called on Normans to lick Irish Christianity into a shape more in Rome's image.

Through one ecclesiastical change and another that Biblical kind of Irishman has always been there. Through thick and thin. The stand-up rebel who submits in the end and becomes all the dearer to God.
 

CHESTERTON called us

In the United States, as Father Andrew Greeley had demonstrated, Irish Catholics have become one of the most affluent, best educated, influential groups in the nation. Their spiritual homeland has shifted from Boston to Greeley's Chicago. But they remain a bunch of pretty impressive lads.

Irish Catholics, both saints and sinners, have made their mark on the entire world.

In 1998 the Board of Random House Publishers listed 100 Best (Most Influential) Novels of the 20th Century.

Number one is ULYSSES by James Joyce.

Number two is THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Number three is A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce.

Number twenty-eight is  TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Number seventy-seven is FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce.

There are other Irish writers on that list of the 100 best.

Let me say a few words about the two giants, Joyce and Fitzgerald.

James Joyce lived an exemplary Catholic life as a young man and university student in Ireland. He was Jesuit educated. Then he fell away from his Faith for reasons not entirely clear. He was once asked, 

Jesuits, it seems to me, are close enough to being acceptably Roman Catholic for Godto retain a soft spot both for our friend Jimmy Joyce, as well as for His loyal Society of Jesus.

And what of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald? He was second cousin, three times removed, of the composer of The Star Spangled Banner. Scott was raised in that most Catholic of American cities, the Saint Paul of Archbishop John Ireland's grand cathedral. His family on both sides was Catholic. In a Catholic boarding school on the east coast, Fitzgerald was deeply influenced for good, both as person and artist, by a young Catholic priest.  Alas, he began drinking too young and too hard. He slowly fell away from the practice of the Faith.

F. Scott Fitzgerald died young of a heart attack in Hollywood on December 21, 1940. A bishop in southern Maryland refused to allow him and later his wife Zelda who died in Asheville to be buried beside his Civil War veteran Catholic father and his mother in St Mary's cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. But like the NT Irish woman who stormed and stormed and chipped away and kept chipping away at the stern judge, the great author's daughter, Scottie, in the 1980s petitioned the Archbishop of Washington, D.C. to bury her parents in St Mary's cemetery. That grave yard had recently been transferred by Rome from one bishop's jurisdiction to another.

It did not take the Archbishop long to make up his mind. He reasoned, 

So Scott and Zelda and their daughter Scottie lie together with Scott's parents in a Roman Catholic cemetery in the suburbs of our nation's Capital.

Looking at faces like those before me today has convinced anthropologists that Jesus himself was also Irish. What Irish traits piqued the scholars?

Whenever He felt like it, Our Lord could spin great yarns, as can Jim Potts.

Jesus also loved to hang around with the lads, like John Fitzgibbon.

Like Mary and me and others who have recreational vehicles, Jesus had no fixed abode, no permanent place to call His own.

There are other proofs. I read new ones on the internet every couple of weeks. But here is the clincher. We believethat Jesus is Irish because His mother knew He was God.

I also suspect that St Ignatius Loyola, founder of those selfsame Jesuits who later educated James Joyce, may have had us Hibernians especially in mind when he told his missionaries, 

IRELAND FREE AND IRELAND FOREVER!

AMEN.

-OOO-