St. Patrick’s Day and Jaffna’s St. Patrick’s - a retrospection

by Anton J Jesuthasan (Sajj)

We have seen St Patrick’s day, the 17th of March, pass just last week, an important day in the calendar of Ireland, of the U.S, and that of many in our very own North, in our city of Jaffna. As a Patrician with fond memories of my old school St Patrick’s College, Jaffna, I feel impelled this year, to put pen to paper, when I see the media all around me reminding me of this memorable day.

St Patrick was a fifth century missionary of Roman-British birth, a bishop of Ireland, who has been revered as a patron saint of Ireland over several centuries. The story goes that when he was 16 years, he was captured by Irish pirates and taken from Britain to Ireland and kept as a slave to look after animals. He escaped six years later.

Cleric

He was a visionary, and according to his own work Confessio, years later, as a cleric in Britain, he ‘heard the voices of those Irish, calling out with a single voice: ”We beg you, holy boy, come here and walk among us”.’ He responded to that call, and as we now know, St Patrick and Ireland are synonymous, became almost one. Where St Patrick has played a paramount part in the lives of many people today is through the many and influential schools that carry his name in many corners of the world, and more particularly for us Sri Lankans, through the school St Patrick’s College, Jaffna, that proudly bears that name.

St Patrick’s College, came into being in the year 1850, 15 years after Colombo’s Royal College in 1835, and 22 years before Kandy’s Trinity College in 1872. These dates may be subject to some questions as to their exactitude, but they well serve to show us the antiquity of these schools and of English education in the country.

Alumni

St Patrick’s has had several distinguished Rectors and Head Masters, and given the country many distinguished alumni to serve society at large. One very outstanding name that shone through the difficult war years of the 1940s was Rev Fr TMF Long, MA (Cantab), Rector 1936-54 , an Irishman and a very stern disciplinarian, whose love for Jaffna made him a virtual Jaffna-man, and who in retirement in Australia, is said to have died of a heart-attack, when informed of the destruction by mindless arsonists in May 1981, of the precious and priceless Jaffna library which he too had been instrumental in getting established.

Speaking of Head Masters, when I first stepped into the College portals many moons ago, I was proud to see in the college quadrangle an artefact commemorating a great-grand-uncle of mine, Santhiapillai Abraham, as one of its esteemed Head-Masters at the turn of the previous century!

Ethos

The College has ‘Fide et Labore’ – faith and labour (hard-work ) as its motto, and true enough it inculcates in its charges that ethos of belief, faith, confidence in one’s ability, and the hard work that one needs to achieve results.

The school attained this objective, without so much as expressing in so many words other than in the atmosphere that it established, that this was what it was seeking to achieve. The motto had perhaps created this indispensable atmosphere.

Educational institutions honouring and carrying the name of St Patrick are dotted all over world, some run by the Congregation of the Brothers of St Patrick or the Patrician Brothers as largely in India, or by Religious Orders working in local dioceses as in Jaffna, producing for humanity an alumni of the kind that serve, than that wait to be served.

I was reading what St Patrick’s College , Wellington, New Zealand, for example, was saying about their college: “The school fosters growth within a nurturing and sustaining environment in six facets: spiritual, academic, cultural, emotional, physical and social”. What more can one wish for in Education than the nurturing and sustaining of these six facets?

St Patrick in his time is said to have fought ‘ignorance, injustice, wickedness and immorality’.

The educationists functioning in this saint’s name ‘consider the formation of character the first essential in any sound education system, and so great stress is laid on the inculcation of high ideals, gentlemanly behaviour and moral rectitude’, to quote from another source - words and thoughts that bear going over and assimilating any number of times.

Success

It will be presumptuous of anyone to claim absolute success in all these goals, but it would be fair to say that St Patrick’s, Jaffna, as many other schools that had set out to achieve goals such as those laid out above, did succeed in attaining much of their goals.

Jaffna’s Patricians constitute people of all faiths: Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians; of all races: Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and Burgher. They are spread all over the world, over all walks of life.

St Patrick’s day brings back to mind, with a tinge of nostalgia, the school that made you who you are, and be where you are.