Sodom & Begorra.

The Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) protesters, more than 200 of them, were arrested about an hour before the Saint Patrick's Day Parade began. The demonstrators marched north on Fifth Avenue in the rain only to be stopped by a line of police at 44th Street. I didn't see any of that. By the time I got to 50th and Fifth, just outside Saint Patrick's Cathedral, the demonstration was over.

It was a wet, cold day, gray and uncomfortable, somewhat in keeping with the dreary controversy about explicit homosexual participation in the parade. Initially the city awarded the parade permit to an "inclusive" group that would have permitted ILGO to march with its own banner. But that decision was voided, and the parade's traditional sponsors, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, were not compelled to include the ILGO contingent.

On this narrow legal point even the ACLU and the New York Times editorial page grudgingly agreed with the Hibernians and New York's Cardinal John O'Connor: the parade, held in honor if not in imitation of a Catholic saint, was largely a religious celebration. The state--in this case New York City and its mayor--had no right dictating who should or should not be included. For government to intrude upon such private decisions would restrict "free expression" and freedom of association, said the Times, and "play havoc with the Constitution."

So, not to put too fine a point on it, the Times, along with nearly every liberal columnist and politician in the city, smugly concluded that if the Hibernians, Cardinal O'Connor, and the Catholic community wanted to be troglodytes and bigots, no one could stop them. It just didn't seem very Christian, remarked the more supercilious.

Such lofty sentiments, soaked in arsenic, rarely persuade. Reasonable and well-meaning people can disagree, I think, about the public status of homosexuality. But the effort to turn the Saint Patrick's Day parade into a celebration of "inclusion" is, I am sure, more a symptom of liberal individualism's misplaced ambition than its rightful regard for equality before the law.

So, it goes without saying, I did not find the parade a moral affront. Indeed, in principle I am a big fan of public rituals of almost any kind. Truth be told, however, this was my first Saint Patrick's Day parade. My initiation began when two smartly dressed policemen got on the subway at 66th Street. I admired the shine on their buttons and badges, the silk stripe running down their trousers. "O'Malley" and "Donovan" were the names on the brass nametags. I'm not kidding. Perhaps those are the names of every cop in New York, or at least I suspected as much by the end of the day.

In the parade itself, which got under way promptly at 11, the Police Department's Holy Name and Emerald societies took the lead. Cardinal O'Connor greeted the marchers from under a plastic tent on the steps of the cathedral. O'Connor was widely quoted the next day for a remark he made in his Saint Patrick's Day sermon. "Neither respectability nor political correctness is worth one comma in the Apostles' Creed," he said. I tend to agree with this, although I'm not sure exactly how counter-cultural a Saint Patrick's Day parade can be. If the parade wasn't respectable or politically correct, it nevertheless moved with the lethargy we associate with both. I must have watched for fifty minutes, but doubt if the marchers advanced more than ten blocks. The bagpipes of the Emerald Society, and the woeful countenances of two stately, but rain-bedraggled Irish Wolfhounds were the highlights. As for the music, there seemed to be an inordinate amount of the Marine Corps Hymn.

Among the spectators, green plastic leprechaun hats and small shamrock face-stickers were popular. If there was rowdiness I didn't see it, although various small groups of pasty-faced young men sauntered up and down the sidewalk eyeing equally pallid platoons of giggling young women. One tall, boorish fellow shouted, "Yeah, no fags," but this barbaric yelp elicited no response from the crowd. A somewhat more fearsome and boisterous band of young men included one skinhead in T-shirt and bermuda shorts who had a large green shamrock painted on the back of his frightfully simian skull. Must have been an impostor.

As time passed, and the parade stood still, the intensity of the rain increased. Shortly before noon I slipped into the cathedral to get dry. It was crowded, with a steady stream of people circumambulating past the devotional altars surrounding the nave. Business, for lack of a better word, was booming, with pockets of the prayerful dropping coins into the tin boxes conspicuously displayed at each altar. For inexplicable reasons, there was a particular logjam at the Altar of the Holy Face, better known as Saint Veronica's Veil.

Much to my surprise, the noon Mass proceeded as scheduled, despite the cacophony of band music wafting through the open transept doors. I was seated behind a broad-shouldered Haitian, who recited his responses in beautifully accented English. Behind me was a woman in a mink coat, a rosary held lightly in her hands. We--this most unremarked upon of democracies--recited the Gloria."For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ," hundreds mumbled.

This, when you think about, is a most peculiar petition--so monarchical and abject in tone. It can't be all that different from what the Egyptian faithful chanted in the temple of the Sun God 3,000 years ago. Yet here we were, modern New Yorkers all, praising in the most clamorous of settings the unfathomable justice of an omnipotent yet invisible God. Is there anything stranger than the tenacity of such aspirations in a culture so dedicated to the disenchantment of the world and the exaltation of the self? Who could not be struck by the baldly anachronistic nature of this gathering, by the preposterous claims of the Mass, by the statues and candles, the cavernous space reaching far above our heads, the priests scuttling down the aisles in their theatrical capes, or (most amusing of all) the meek attendants hurrying by with refreshment for the dignitaries, quartered off behind velvet ropes, reviewing the parade.

Need anyone feel excluded from all this? You can be excluded from the Century Club, from Wall Street, from Park Avenue, from Yale and Harvard and Greenwich, Connecticut. But from the one "Lord Most High"? From the Altar of the Holy Face! You might as well feel ignored by the sun or the stars--or on this day, by the rain. Though the democracy of the church demands something different from each of us, I suspect there is shelter here for all.