Cornwall Cogitation #7 addendum, Friday 27 March–I’m correcting information in last Sunday’s post, related to St Patrick’s Day.

There are 33.3 million people living in the US who claim Irish ancestry.

The book by Thomas Cahill is How the Irish Saved Civilization. The Irish during the dark ages held onto literacy, cared for books and education, as part of the Christian witness. Cahill wrote, “If there are no books. There is no civilization.”

A longer quote from the above book: “What will be lost, and what save, of our civilization, probably lies beyond our powers to decide. No human group has every figured out how to design its future. That future may be germinating toady not in a boardroom in London or an office in Washington or a bank in Tokyo, but in some antic outpost or other–a kindly British orphanage in the grim foothills of Peru, a house for the saying in a back street of Calcutta run by a fiercely single-mined Albanian nun, an easy-going French medical team at the starving edge of the Sahel, a mission to Somol8ia by Irish social workers who remember their own Great Hunger, a nursing program to assist convict mothers at a New York Prison–in some unheralded corner where a great-hearted human being is committed to loving outcasts in an extraordinary way.” (Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization)

One more tidbit about Patrick: The original colour of St Patrick’s vestments was blue. Patrick’s story is an amazing one. Google it.

See you Sunday. -John