What the Saints Have to Teach Us

Lessons for even modern sensibilities:

Most of what takes place on St. Patrick’s Day would be considered frivolous by St. Patrick himself and he would breathe thunderous condemnations of much of the booze-fuelled debauchery. The Americanized St. Patrick’s Day serving of corned beef may appeal to the saint’s penitential side; it is a penance to eat it.

(Sidebar: I'll say.)

This St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, the actual life of St. Patrick will give rise to a sober ceremony at which a noted Canadian sculptor’s work will be featured.

Patrick was not Irish, but a missionary to Ireland. His evangelization was so fruitful that he and the gospel he preached became inseparable from Irish identity. Yet he did not arrive in Ireland — at first — as a missionary. He came not by choice, but as a slave. At 16 he was seized in the now-British part of the Roman empire and was taken across the Irish Sea, where he was sold to a local warlord who kept him as a slave labourer for six years.

Patrick escaped both slavery and Ireland, but his conversion to Christianity lit a burning fire within him to share his faith with those who had enslaved him; slaves need liberation from slavery, their owners need liberation from the sin of slaveholding.

Patrick thus returned to preach salvation in Jesus Christ to Ireland, and his adopted homeland became one of the most Christian countries in history over the centuries. It was Patrick and the Irish, after all, who saved civilization.

Patrick was what we now call a victim of human trafficking; today’s form of slavery. Often traffickers sell their victims for forced labour; more shamefully, the trafficking is also for purposes of pornography and prostitution.

Pornographers and pimps are the plantation owners of our time. There have been reports that the vultures of the “sex trade” have been circling Ukraine’s borders, seeking to exploit fleeing women and children.

This St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin a special ceremony will bring the scourge of human trafficking to the fore, a stark contrast to the usual St. Paddy’s Day silliness. A Canadian work, “Let the Oppressed Go Free” (cf. Isaiah 58), will be blessed at Dublin Cathedral by the archbishop of Dublin in the presence of the president of Ireland.

Timothy Schmalz is the leading Christian sculptor in the world, and one of the most impressive monumental sculptors anywhere. He did the Canadian Veterans Memorial and the Fallen Firefighters Memorial Monument in Kitchener, Ont., as well as the National Mining Monument in Sudbury, Ont. His massive “Angels Unawares” statue about refugees throughout history was the first new sculpture installed in St. Peter’s Square in centuries. Schmalz’s distinctive style includes dozens of exquisitely carved figures approximating life size.

He is most famous for his “Homeless Jesus” sculpture, portraying an anonymous homeless person, wrapped in a blanket on a park bench. Anonymous, that is, until, upon closer examination, the nail marks in the hands and the feet can be seen. It is Jesus in, as Mother Teresa often said, “the distressing disguise of the poor.” Public sculpture rarely becomes a sensation, but the “Homeless Jesus” has become just that, having been installed in dozens of prominent civic and religious spaces in major cities the world over.

“Let the Oppressed Go Free” is Schmalz’s prayer in bronze for those subjected to human trafficking today, as Patrick was in his time. A model was blessed by Pope Francis last month in Rome.

The sculpture shows victims of human trafficking emerging from the dark underground of their confinement into the light, standing upright again in a sign of their dignity.

The principal figure is another enslaved saint, Josephine Bakhita, a Black Sudanese girl who was mercilessly beaten and scarred by Arab slaveholders in the late 19th century. Bakhita — a word meaning “fortunate” given to her by the slaveholders in cruel mockery — eventually came into the service of an Italian diplomatic family. When they returned to Italy they took her with them but, as Italian law did not permit slavery, Bakhita was freed. She became a religious sister and was enormously beloved and remarkably well known in Italy. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II as part of the Jubilee Year 2000.

Her canonization brought her story to much wider notice, and she is now frequently invoked as an intercessor for those entrapped in modern slavery. Indeed, her feast day, Feb. 8, has become an international day to combat human trafficking.

Schmalz’s imaginative and impressive sculpture of a Sudanese slave, installed in Dublin on the feast of Ireland’s most famous personage, demonstrates something of how entrenched in human history slavery is — from ancient Ireland to 19th-century Sudan to 21st-century porn studios. Schmalz’s various figures express that the stain of slavery touches peoples from every time and place.