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PATRICK MISSIONARY TO THE IRISH by Thomas O’Loughlin
All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY PUBLISHERS TO THE HOLY SEE
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So it would be neither right nor proper to do anything but to tell you all of the many great blessings and the grace which the Lord choose to give me in this land of my captivity - Patrick (Confessio 3).
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CONTENTS The Myth and the Man ............................................................4 ‘St Patrick’, shamrock, and all that .......................................4 What do we know about the man? ........................................8 Christianity in Ireland .........................................................10 Historical Dates ...................................................................13 A Captive in Ireland ............................................................14 A Roman cleric ...................................................................16 Patrick the Visionary ...........................................................20 Servant of the Gospel .............................................................22 The Convert .........................................................................22 A Punitive God ....................................................................26 The Missionary ....................................................................30 To the ends of the Earth ......................................................33 The Teacher .........................................................................38 Patrick’s Creed ....................................................................39 A member of the Universal Church ....................................42 The Pilgrim ..........................................................................44 Reviewing his Life ..................................................................46 A Stranger ...........................................................................46 An Old Man .........................................................................50 In the Uttermost Parts ..........................................................54 The Edge of Time ................................................................56 The Mighty Saint ....................................................................59 17 March .............................................................................59 Creating ‘the apostle of Ireland’ .........................................60 Tírechán’s creed ..................................................................63 Further reading ....................................................................67
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THE MYTH AND THE MAN ‘St Patrick’, shamrock, and all that On hearing the name ‘St Patrick’ most of us give a little shudder for the name seems to belong more to the realm of legend and Irish mythology rather than refer to someone in the ranks of the saints. When we mention the Venerable Bede we think of a learned and holy man working in his cloister in Jarrow. When we hear the name Columba, we think of a saintly ascetic living on the sea-swept island of Iona. But mention of Patrick brings to mind parades in New York, shamrock, and marketing people cashing-in on ‘Irishness’ as an ethnic brand. His feast day, 17 March, is given in the Roman Calendar as the feast of a bishop with the note that it should be celebrated using the Common of Pastors; but for most people it is simply the Irish equivalent of Bastille Day (14 July) in France or Independence Day (4 July) in the United States. It is a day of shamrock and of being ‘Proud to be Irish’ and sentimental hymns about ‘Erin’s green valleys.’ Indeed, the figure behind all these celebrations seems so shadowy that many people’s first question about Patrick is: ‘Did he really exist?’ Exist he did. He is the only Roman citizen whose name we know who, once captured and sold into slavery beyond the frontiers of the empire, escaped and whose story has
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come down to us. Later, probably much later, he returned to the land of his captivity as a bishop intent on announcing the gospel as a missionary in places where it had not been heard. And, because while there he wrote two short works in Latin which have survived, we know of him and his work. Later, in the seventh century, when his story was told by Irish priests seeking to preach about the origins of Christianity among their people, Patrick was transformed from being one missionary bishop among the many, mostly nameless, Christians who brought Christianity to Ireland into being a great ‘apostle’ who single handedly, in the course of a single Easter Vigil, converted the whole country. This was a brilliant transformation for they saw the conversion of their island in terms of the Paschal Mystery - nowhere more perfectly expressed in the liturgy than at the Vigil - of their people moving from life, through death, into the new risen life of Christ. But in the dazzling theology, the fifth-century bishop had disappeared from view! Later on, in the twelfth century, he was transformed into a wonder-worker and became the man who drove out snakes from Ireland. Then, in the eighteenth century, it was claimed he preached the Christian belief that God is three Persons using a shamrock - and we now have all the elements for a great festival of shamrock and green beer. Let us dismiss that final piece of the legend right at the start as nonsense: we know the creed that Patrick used and preached - you can
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find its text in chapter 2 - and he would have fully realised that no three-part material object can be used to preach the Christian understanding of God without falling into a basic heresy such as to believe that God whom Christians adore is just three ‘parts’ in a single ‘wrapper’! However, the Preface of the Common of Pastors tells us that when we celebrate saintly bishops that we are thanking God for ‘inspiring us through their holy lives, instructing us by their preaching, and giving us their protection in answer to our prayers’; so can we uncover anything inspiring in Patrick’s life beneath the thick sward of shamrock? Can we find any instruction in his writings which is more than a romantic view of Ireland’s past? That is what I shall attempt here, and it is my hope that this will move you to go on from here to read the man’s own writings and encounter him more directly for yourself. Patrick has been one of the most hijacked bishops in the history of the Church. He was first taken over by Irish clergy in the seventh-century who needed an apostle who could be held responsible for baptising their nation and incorporating it into the world-wide ‘holy nation, God’s own people’ (1 Pet 2:9). Later, he was hijacked for denominational warfare after the Reformation as each side sought to justify its claims as the ‘genuine’ original Christianity of Ireland by claiming that Patrick was one of them. So he was made a Tridentine-looking bishop by Catholics, while Anglicans tried to make him leader of a
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non-Roman church. More recently, he became a talisman in political disputes about who should govern Ireland. For one side he was a rallying point for suggesting an identity independent of Britain - these promoted a very ‘green’ Patrick and used events like St Patrick’s Day parades to promote a muted nationalism. On the other side, Patrick was adopted as representing an island that could be united with Britain. So the Knights of St Patrick (obsolete since 1922) were a British order of chivalry, while in 1801 Patrick was given a ‘cross’ of narrow blue stripes so that Ireland could be represented on the Union Jack - and ‘his’ cross is still there. Most recently Patrick has been adopted by those interested in the intersection between Celtic spirituality, New Age ideas, and/or neo-paganism. In the process he has been transformed into a mix of modern dreams about what a ‘user-friendly’ religion might look like - often the antithesis of the very faith in the God revealed in Jesus Christ which Patrick himself declares that he preached. I am not going to pretend that I can give ‘facts’ without a particular slant - no one can do that with any figure from the past - but I am going to try to stick as closely as I can to his writings, and avoid as far as possible the later stories that have clung to him. I see him as a Christian bishop, from a well-to-do clerical family on the frontier of a crumbling empire, who preached the faith of the Latin wing of the church, and who had an
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intense belief in the special importance of his mission in bringing about the completion of the preaching of Christ. He was announcing Christ’s name in the uttermost parts, so that he could hasten the final ‘coming of the Son of Man’ (Mt 10:23). Throughout this booklet I shall refer to his Confessio (C) - (this should be translated as ‘My Declaration’) and to his Epistola militibus Corotici (E) (‘A Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus’). I hope you then follow up these references for yourself. What do we know about the man? The answer to this question is paradoxical. We know very little about when he lived, where exactly he came from (he tells us that he came from a place in Britain then called ‘Bannavem Taburniae’1, but we do not know where that place was), or where he worked in Ireland. Yet, we know quite an amount about how Patrick viewed his own vocation and mission, how he viewed the gospel’s call to discipleship, and his own relationship with God. So I shall first look at the historical questions in this chapter, and then turn to Patrick’s view of Christianity in chapter 2, and his perception of his life and mission in chapter 3. The traditional picture of Patrick is built up from four sources. The first is just one line. The fifth-century writer, Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 390 - c. 463) compiled a Chronicle which for the period of the second-quarter of
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the fifth century (425-455) used contemporary sources. For the year 431 he recorded that: ‘Palladius, ordained by Pope Celestine, was sent to the Irish who are believers in Christ as their first bishop.’ This Palladius is an obscure figure. He is not mentioned in any source from the British Isles until the late-seventh century when Muirchú (who wrote the most influential Life of Patrick and who explained the whole process theologically as a Paschal event) found it necessary to ‘write him out’ of the history of the conversion of Ireland in order for Patrick to become the sole patron and evangelist. We have only one other piece of information about Palladius, and again Prosper is the source. In a book written in 434 he says that Celestine had sent a bishop to Britain to free the church there from ‘Pelagianism’ - Prosper’s pet-hate and that he ordained a bishop for the Irish so that ‘the barbarian island might be made Christian.’ These passages, along with evidence of concern by Pope St Leo the Great about the pastoral care of Christians in Ireland from the 450s, point to a Roman mission to Ireland which was still working there twenty years after Palladius was sent from Rome. There are no contemporary references to Patrick’s mission, Prosper does not mention Patrick, and Patrick does not mention Palladius: we must therefore assume that both, alongside many others, were working as missionaries among the Irish in the fifth century, and consequently it was a group of workers (without any
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known connection between them), rather than a single individual, who should be seen as the ‘founders’ of Christianity in Ireland. Christianity in Ireland Christianity probably first arrived with traders and slaves Patrick’s own captivity is our evidence - and it was to these Christians that clergy may have first been sent to provide pastoral care - we know of similar cases elsewhere on the Roman frontiers - and gradually the faith spread outwards. Indeed, Patrick says he preached where no one else had gone, a statement which assumes others were involved in the missionary process. Alas, poor Palladius disappeared from history without any credit from later Irish Christians for his work in being one of their fathers in faith - in all probability he spent a long and onerous episcopate far from home looking after a community suffering the horrors of slavery. Even Palladius’s reputation was not safe. His memory smeared by Muirchú who removed him from the scene by claiming that he was a coward who turned back from the plough (see Lk 9:62) rather than face preaching to the Irish, thus leaving the field completely open for his hero Patrick! So the central point is this: we must locate Patrick as just the most famous - we do not know if he was the most important - of a brave band of missionary pastors who chose to work in an alien environment looking after slaves while seeking to communicate their religion to their captors.
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Our second source is the two works written by Patrick himself. The longer work is his Confessio in which he explains before God and his fellow Christians the integrity of his work as a missionary. The second is A Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus delivering a formal sentence of excommunication on Coroticus and his soldiers on enslaving newly baptised Christians. Both are complex documents as they are directed to several perceived audiences. At some points they are addressed to God and the reader is allowed to overhear Patrick’s words; at other points he directly addresses the reader; while on occasion he wants his reader to take his words to some others whom he wishes to address. In the Confessio his goal appears to have been a narration of the great works that God has wrought through him, and so is a declaration of praise; while his purpose in the Letter is to state publicly what he has bound on earth (Mt 16:19 and 18:18) as Christ’s ambassador (Eph 6:20). At the same time, there are parts of the Confessio that directly answer clerical critics (probably in Britain), while parts of the Letter assume that the slavers working with Coroticus will actually hear or read his words! Neither document is much use to us for the historical details of early Irish society or its christianisation in the sense of giving dates, places, or the names of rulers, but together they do provide us with insights into Patrick the man. There are, of course, references to places by Patrick,
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the most famous being to Bannavem Taburniae near his family’s home, the other is the ‘wood of Foclut, near the western sea’2. However, we have no idea where these places were, and their location was already a puzzle for people only a couple of centuries after him. Two other questions usually occur to readers at this point: what language did he speak as his native language, and which ‘country’ did he come from? Both questions are difficult to answer as they are based on modern assumptions about nationality and language. Patrick came from the most north-western province of the Roman empire, ‘Britannia’, and so he perceived himself as a Roman first and foremost. He probably spoke in common conversation at home a language which is an earlier form of Welsh, but for significant business and anything that needed to be put in writing he used Latin and would have considered this his ‘native’ language for these purposes. He would have learned Irish while a captive - while both Irish and Welsh are related Celtic languages, they were already mutually non-intelligible - and he considered this a ‘foreign tongue’3. He says he came from Britain, but it is often said that he was ‘Welsh’. This is fine provided that we remember to treat that designation as the name for a people rather than the inhabitants of a region. Historically, ‘Welsh’ refers to the inhabitants of the island of Britain who were displaced by the Angles and Saxons - so Patrick can be said to be ‘Welsh’ in the sense that his family would eventually become part of the people later called by that name.