A “saint” who was never made a saint by the church which claims him.

Culturally he was almost certainly a Briton or Welshman.  Or more specifically, he was “Romano-Welsh”, born in about 386 CE to wealthy parents who lived and prospered at the outer British fringe of the Roman Empire.

In 386 CE, Wales encompassed lands now lying in Wales, Cornwall, and southern Scotland.

Many scholars believe he was from a part of ancient Wales now lying in SW Scotland.

His real name will probably never be known for certain – some believe his native Welsh name was “Maewyn Succat“, but it is not impossible that his ethnic roots lay elsewhere within the Roman Empire, and his parents just happened to be living in Wales at the time of his birth.

History has remembered him as “Patrick“, from the Latin name “Patricius” – meaning “noble one”.

“Padraic” or “Padrig” to his Gaelic-speaking contemporaries.

“Paddy” to many of his friends in modern Ireland.

Not “Patty“, as often seen in the USA…

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At the time of Patrick‘s birth in about 386 CE, Roman-ruled sections of Britain had only recently been introduced to Christianity, following upon Roman Emperor Constantine‘s own conversion to that faith a generation or two earlier.

In Roman Britain, Christians were seen as just one religious cult among many.  Patrick‘s parents, and one of his grandfathers, adhered to the new cult of Christianity – but not Patrick.

Patrick also happened to be born about three years after the armies of Rome were withdrawn from Great Britain, following over three and a half centuries of indigenous British-Roman cultural integration.

Do not confuse the ancient Britons or “British” peoples like the Iceni or Trinovantes with later Germanic “proto-English” immigrants such as the Angles, Saxons, or Jutes.

These latter northern European peoples (who had never fallen under complete Roman control) were not slow in spotting the now poorly defended island – raids for booty and land settlement began in earnest.

Germanic peoples from what is now Northern Germany and Denmark arrived in boats from coasts lying to the southeast of Britain.

“Picts” swept down from Caledonia (later Scotland) in the north, and the Irish or Gaels raided from Hibernia, across the Irish Sea to the west.

It was during one such Irish raid on the west coast of Wales that Maewyn Succat was taken prisoner (according to his own account), and sold as a slave to an Irish buyer, who set him to work as a herdsman for many years – most likely somewhere in or around present-day County Antrim in northern Ireland, among the “Scoti” who would go on to colonise parts of Scotland, giving that nation its modern name.

It was only during his six years of slavery that Maewyn began to cling to the faith of his fathers.

Maewyn eventually escaped back home to Wales, spent some time travelling, and acquired an education.

Around the 450s CE, something compelled him to return to Ireland – this time operating out of what is present-day County Mayo.

 

His own account tells of a need to share his growing sense of religious fervour with the pagan Irish.

Patrick was not the first Christian missionary in Ireland.  That distinction belongs to Palladius, who was sent in 431 CE to act as a bishop to the few Irish who had already accepted the Christian message – probably through trade contacts with Christianised Romano-Britons.

The Roman Catholic Church claims that their own Pope Celestine sent Maewyn/Patrick to Ireland as a missionary, but there is simply no documentary evidence for this claim.

In fact, the monastic and apostolic style of Christianity practiced in Ireland during the Early Middle Ages was decidedly non-Roman in many respects.

“Patrick” is the only known Romano-Welsh or Romano-British Christian to have written of his own life and thoughts, and he says nothing of being sent by the Roman Church to Ireland, nor does the contemporary or near-contemporary Roman Catholic Church mention him.

It would seem that Patrick was simply part of a wider Christian grassroots cult which was popular at the time.

British, Welsh, Gaelic, and Gallic Christians might have venerated or respected certain Roman Christians, but they were most certainly not “Roman Catholics” in the modern sense of the term.

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Ireland is the only “pagan” nation believed to have become almost wholly Christianised without widespread bloodshed.

It is worth pondering whether this was due not so much to the power of the Christian message, as to the introduction of LITERACY which arrived with missionaries for the new religion.

During Patrick‘s travels to places like Mayo, Irish chieftains in these remoter parts of the island would have been quick to recognize the potential for taxation management and trade expansion which came with literacy and Roman-style bureaucratic models.

The ability of these Romanised, non-Druid emissaries to store ancestral memory, poetry, legal and religious tracts, and FINANCIAL ACCOUNTS on parchments, rather than within physical human memory, must have been a societal game-changer.

This extra-somatic literacy eliminated much of the raison d’etre for the entire Druidic stratum/class of society – a class which had hitherto been extremely powerful – and replaced that class with literate Christian monks.

Literacy is an awesome power in a pre-literate society…

What is more, Christian missionaries did not bring just literacy and the gospel to Ireland.  They brought a whole new worldview, with their access to a much wider international network.

In short, a chieftain or minor regional king could become much more connected with faraway centres of commerce and power by linking into the only pan-European organisation left standing after the break-up of the Western Roman Empire.

Patrick‘s own “Confessio” hints at these struggles and intrigues – and this history is far more interesting than later folk tales and legends fabricated by the medieval Catholic church concerning snake banishing and numerous other outlandish “miracles”.

It is worth reiterating that the early medieval Christian church and its monasteries in Ireland were patronised and overseen by Irish chieftains – NOT the Catholic church or its pope in Rome.

Only the invasion of Ireland by Anglo-Normans under Henry II of England (in 1169 CE) would force Ireland into the clutches of papal authority.

Thus began the slow decline of high Gaelic culture under the twin colonising forces of England and Rome.

So there you have it – Patrick was not Catholic.

And technically, Patrick isn’t even a saint!

His life and works took place in a time before the Catholic church rules for canonisation had even been devised and laid-down.

Whatever about technicalities, he was being venerated as the patron saint of Ireland within the Irish Christian church by the 7th century, and his day was traditionally marked by sombre reflection and prayer.

Until 19th and 20th century Irish-Americans changed gears…