ReadコミュのMar #3 St Patrick might Not Have Been so Lucky in Today's Unforgiving Ireland.

聖パトリックがもし現代に生きていたら。
アイルランドの新聞、アイリッシュ・イグザミナーより。(620words 分野：SS 難易度：中)

1 WE MAY be celebrating him. We may be sending ministers overseas to help other nations celebrate him. But the reality is that today’s Ireland would not tolerate St Patrick.
2 Not for a minute would this nation tolerate him, let alone welcome him. At best we’d ignore him. At worse, we’d hospitalise him or imprison him.
3 We have, for example, a conviction that anyone who went through abusive times as a child is likely, at the drop of a provocation, to turn strange in their adult years. Removing a child from his home and family by force, transporting him across national boundaries and isolating him on the side of a hill herding sheep or pigs, or whatever it was Patrick herded, has to have been gruesome abuse of a child.
4 If it happened in contemporary times, and was followed, long after his escape, by Patrick hearing those voices calling “Come, O Holy Youth and walk once more amongst us,” nobody would nod in admiration of the lad’s sense of mission.
5 Much more logical would be for the rest of us to assume that Patrick from Wales was suffering from an advanced case of Stockholm Syndrome.
6 That’s the pattern of behaviour first noted in 1973 when a bank robbery happened in that city, involving hostages and a six-day standoff between robbers and police, at the end of which the hostages demonstrated unexpected affection for and protection of the people who had threatened and imprisoned them. (One of the hostages even claimed to be engaged to one of the criminals.)
7 Stockholm Syndrome, widely studied since that bank robbery, seems to happen in response to a sequence of happenings. The first is that someone threatens your life and clearly has the capacity to take it, but doesn’t.
8 The second is that, while they’re deliberating, or apparently deliberating about the possibility or desirability of doing you in, they isolate you from friends, colleagues and family, so that you are dependent on them, not just for food, shelter and water, but for communication. This skews your emotions and your perception of the world. It is torture.
9 Unless the hostage is of outstanding mental robustness, it’s a matter of time before they find themselves beginning to share the perspective of their captor, to such an extent that the prisoner may eventually oppose those seeking to free him or her. That’s especially the case if the captor shows any kindness — even small kindness — to the prisoner. It’s not much of a stretch to figure that the boy Patrick, dragged away from his home town by pirates who demonstrably had the weapons with which to take his life, abandoned on the side of a hill in a strange country hundreds of miles from friends or family, might become dependent upon the man who held him hostage, especially if the man occasionally showed him a little kindness.
10 Stockholm Syndrome, were Patrick to be a present-day missionary, would be dealt with by psychotherapy. The voices calling him back to Ireland would be removed by medication.
11 In modern times, Patrick would be an abuse survivor, maintained just below the level of florid acting out, or acute personal misery by being regularly talked to and dosed. He was extremely lucky to have lived at a time when hearing voices was a symptom of an advanced relationship with the deity, and when it was accepted that God spoke directly to favoured individuals, giving them inescapable commands.
12 Were he to return to unforgiving modern Ireland, where clerics are mistrusted and where one wrongdoing — even if unintended — is taken as the definition of the entire individual, Patrick would never get over spearing that new convert. (前半)
(Terry Prone. Irish Examiner, March 16, 2008)
http://www.irishexaminer.com/irishexaminer/pages/story.aspx-qqqg=opinion-qqqm=opinion-qqqa=general-qqqid=57917-qqqx=1.asp