Ireland’s literary patron saint
In the May issue of America Magazine, Irish Jesuit Tom Casey writes an incisive article on what we have to learn from Ireland’s unofficial, or literary, ‘patron saint’ – Leopold Bloom, protagonist of James Joyce’s Ullyses, who is commemorated annually on Bloomsday, 16 June. Fr Casey, who is Professor of Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, sees both Bloom and St Patrick as outsiders. Patrick was Roman British and Bloom was the son of a Hungarian Jewish immigrant. In Leopold Bloom, according to Fr Casey, Joyce has created a generous imaginative space that present-day Ireland, a land of migration and alienation, could profitably enter. Read the full article here.
