Was St. Patrick a Baptist?

Each year on St. Patrick’s Day, certain Baptists will claim that St. Patrick wasn’t REALLY a Catholic, but was instead a Baptist. But what do we learn from listening to St. Patrick in his own words? And what do we know about the world of St. Patrick from those who lived during his lifetime? As it turns out, Patrick was way more Catholic than you may realize… and he was quite explicit about this fact!

 

Transcript:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner, which means I’m wearing a green shirt, got a new studio redesign, special thanks to Zach Maxwell. It’s got a nice green tint to it, so it seems very timely to launch on the eve, if you will, of St. Patrick’s Day. But also it seems like a good time to address a perennial kind of fringe theory about St. Patrick. And I don’t say fringe to denigrate the theory, I actually say fringe to acknowledge that many Protestants will admit that St. Patrick was exactly what history claims him to be, a Catholic missionary. But there are also Protestants, usually Baptists, who claim that no, this is a Catholic reappropriation of history and that in fact, Patrick was what we would now call a Protestant, and more specifically usually that Patrick was a Baptist.

So I want to give a couple example of people claiming this and then look at the small area in which we agree and then show why these claims are historically completely untrue. So the first of these is from a church called Old Paths Baptist Church in Minneapolis here in the U.S.

In comes a central figure in history, a man that they would call St. Patrick. And this man, the Roman Catholics have stolen the history of this man, they’ve completely changed it, as Rome likes to do. They’ve changed the history around and turned him into a good Catholic, which couldn’t be further from the truth because Patrick didn’t… All the historical accounts that we truly have of him, of any reputable accounts, all of those accounts list his biblical stand on things and what he stood for.

Okay, so you can see the positive from that, which is that there’s this idea, if we could only go to Patrick’s writings, we could find out exactly what it is that he stood for. And you’re going to see a variation of this in another of these claims. This is from a guy named Steve Brady in Fairhaven Baptist Church. So here’s Brady presenting, this is actually part two of a series he did on what he claims is Baptist history, trying to claim St. Patrick is actually a Baptist.

The insurmountable evidence of his position among Baptist belief come from his own writings and he wrote several very important letters that still exist, letters to people that he had led to the Lord. He wrote it actually his own words, his “confession” or a letter to a man named Corotius. And those writings, as I said, still survive and they hold Baptist and New Testament doctrines throughout.

Okay, so let’s start at the point of agreement. It’s important, if you want to know what Patrick believed, to go to his actual writings, and for better or for worse, there’s not many of them. In fact, we know of two writings that are almost universally acknowledged to be actually from St. Patrick. The first is what’s sometimes called the Confessio, which is just Latin for confession. This is like a spiritual autobiography if you’ve read the Confessions of Guston. That’s what we mean by confession here, not like an admission of guilt, but a declaration of his spiritual journey, particularly in his mission to Ireland.

The second is a stranger document, it’s called the Epistola, or the epistle or letter, and this is sometimes called the Letter to the Soldiers of Croticus or the Letter of Excommunication of Croticus. And as you might get from those titles, this is a letter declaring a warlord named Croticus to be excommunicated for having murdered a bunch of newly baptized Christians.

Now, I want to point out two things here. The first, notice that neither of the works we have from Patrick is a detailed theological exposition. This is him writing on two particular topics, which means that there’s going to be a lot of stuff he necessarily isn’t covering because those aren’t the themes of what he’s writing about. It isn’t as if, in the middle of telling Croticus he’s in trouble for murdering Christians that Patrick says, “And let me take a brief digression to explain the Trinity or the seven sacraments or the authority of the Pope.” There’s none of that because that’s not what the letter’s about.

In the same way that if you were to say, “Hey, write an introduction to your life.” So someone has an idea of what it is that you’ve done in the last 20 years for Christ, you probably are not going to take the opportunity to write a systematic theology. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a systematic theology, that just means you’re writing a different document. So that’s one thing to take away from this, but there are going to be plenty of things Patrick doesn’t mention, not because he doesn’t believe them, but because those aren’t the point of what he’s writing.

The second thing is these documents are available online in Latin, in English and Gaelic and probably a bunch of other languages. And so if you want to read them, and I really encourage that, particularly if you want to do this as maybe a spiritual exercise on St. Patrick’s Day, go to Confessio, that’s confession without the N, confessio.ie, ’cause it’s an Irish website, and you can find both documents fully available in a bunch of different languages, and so you can read them for yourself.

That’s going to be really important because even though these Baptists claim, if you want to understand Patrick, “You need to read Patrick,” their claims aren’t based on anything Patrick actually wrote, but are based on one of two things, either the stuff he didn’t write or false claims other Baptists have made about him. Let me give you an example of what I mean here. So here’s that Old Path Baptist Church again.

We’re going to read about him here from Brother Beller’s Collegiate History Workbook, his section on it, and then we might get into the second one that a Baptist preacher wrote many years ago in New York. He grabbed a good history of St. Patrick or Patrick the Baptist as we call him, and he grabs that history and he pulls down a lot of good facts and everything from that, which really gives us an understanding of this time of year, or I mean, this time of church history.

And so in response to this, I just say at the outset, don’t believe a Baptist third party source just telling you, “Oh yeah, trust me, Patrick was a Baptist.” For that matter, don’t believe me as a Catholic telling you, “Trust me, Patrick was a Catholic.” Read St. Patrick in his own words, and you’ll realize, he’s not a Baptist, he’s very clearly a Catholic. In fact, both those writings that I mentioned before, the Epistola and the Confessio together, they’re about 10,000 words. The average reader can read that in about half an hour. So you can easily, in the time it takes you to watch this video or the Old Path Baptist Church video, you could read the entire document at least once for both of the documents.

In this video, I’m not going to give you so much my view as just quote Patrick to you and highlight some things, if you do go to read them, you can be mindful of and looking out for. So I want to look to six things as we’re reading Patrick in his own words. Number one, what Bible is he using? Number two, what does he think of monks and nuns? Number three, what does he think about church governance, particularly bishops, priests and deacons? Number four, what does he think about works of penance? Number five, what does he think about baptism? That’s going to be a major point in the question of whether he’s a Baptist or not. And then six, and finally, what does he think about the other sacraments?

Now, in the second part of this video, after we run through those things, it won’t take very long, I’m going to then get into a deeper dive as to why Baptists and Catholics tend to view him very differently and how Baptists tend to misunderstand both church history generally, and St. Patrick particularly. But I’m getting ahead of myself. So let’s start with those six questions I posed at the outset.

So first, what Bible does St. Patrick use? Now at the beginning of the Confessio, St. Patrick famously says, “My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers.” I love this introduction. And then he says, “I’m looked down upon by many. My father was Calpurnius, he was a deacon. His father was Potius, a priest.” Now, we’re going to get into that obviously, in a little bit, but Patrick goes on to say that his home was near, and then he mentions a spot. We don’t actually know where it is, so there’s a lot of scholarly debate as to the name of this city that he mentions, whether it’s in England or Wales or maybe even Scotland, but probably this is in Roman Britannia, so south of Hadrian’s wall, meaning modern-day England or Wales.

But in any case, he says that he was taken prisoner at 16 and at the time, he didn’t know the true God. He was taken into captivity in Ireland along with thousands of others. So as we’re going to get into England in this period, like Britannia and more broadly, the Western Roman Empire are kind of falling apart. And so you have these Irish pirates who are raiding and you have all sorts of raids going on in this point, and civilization seems to be just completely collapsing during the life of Patrick. And that’s important for his own story because he grows up in a normal-seeming environment for about 16 years, and then we find him getting kidnapped and taken into slavery and captivity. But he says, “We deserved this because we had gone away from God and did not keep his commandments. We would not listen to our priests who advised us about how we could be saved.”

Now this is going to be a really important point. We’re going to get into this passage later because it’s going to show his understanding of his own relationship to Roman Christianity, Roman Catholicism, and the Roman Empire more broadly. But right now, I want to pause all of that and just point out that this is something you could easily miss just reading the document without knowing that he’s making biblical references all throughout his confessio. It is riddled with these biblical allusions and the way he words things. And this particular one is going to be lost on Protestants because he’s making an allusion to something not in the Protestant Bible. When he says, “We would not listen to our priests who advised us about how we could be saved,” he’s quoting here from the longer form of Daniel. This is Daniel 9 in the way it appears in Catholic, but not Protestant Bibles, in which Daniel says, “We had sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from Thy commandments and ordinances. We have not listened to Thy servants, the prophets, who spoke in the name to our king, our princes, our fathers, and to all the people of the land.”

And so, you’ll see there that he’s making a pretty obvious allusion to this longer form of Daniel 9, but that this allusion is going to be lost again on Protestant readers. That’s our first clue that he’s not using a Protestant 66 book Bible, that he has a longer Catholic Bible. There are other clues about this as well. Just to give one other one, in paragraph seven of the epistle, or Epistola, he says, “The most high God does not accept the gifts of evildoers. The one who offers a sacrifice taken from what belongs to the poor is like one who sacrifices a child in the very sight of the child’s father,” and that is almost a verbatim quotation of Sirach 34 verse 20. So it’s not just he has a longer version of Daniel, he also has books that are not in the Protestant Bible. This is our first red flag that he’s not a Baptist.

Second, what does he say about monks and nuns? Now, this one is a lot less subtle because one of the things Irish Catholicism has always been famous for, is a strong emphasis on monasticism, on monks and nuns. And in the Confessio, in paragraph 41, he talks about this. He talks about how the Irish have now become the people of the Lord and are called Children of God. And then he says positively, “The sons and daughters of the leaders of the Irish are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ.” So very clearly, he’s pointing to the surge of monasticism in his own lifetime as proof of the Irish being children of God.

He then says in the next paragraph, he gives a particular example, of a blessed Irish woman of noble birth, most beautiful adult whom I baptized. “She came to us a few days later for this reason. She told us that she had received a word from a messenger of God who advised her that she should become a virgin of Christ.” That is what we now call a nun, so a consecrated virgin and that she should come close to God. Thanks be to God, six days later, enthusiastically and well, she took on the life that all virgins of God do.

So notice that he’s just taking absolutely for granted here that monasticism is part of the God-ordained plan. Now, maybe there’s some monastic independent Baptist community I’ve never heard of, but this is strikingly unlike any Baptist I’ve ever encountered, that there is a place for organized monastic kind of living.

Third, what does he think about bishop’s, priests and deacons? Now here I want to turn to the Fairhaven clip again because there’s this claim that he just believed in elders, but that he just called them bishops, but that this was just one elder per local church.

Church government. Patrick is recorded to have begun, founded 365 churches and ordained exactly the same number of pastors. Now, in that day, they used the term bishop, which is a New Testament term, that term has also been hijacked by other denominations and is used now to say kind of a district head over numerous churches, that’s what that term has come to represent, but the Bible term bishop represents pastor, and Patrick, that’d be a lot of district people over, but it’s very interesting that he started 365 churches and ordained exactly 365 pastors.

Now, none of what you just heard there is true the reference to 365 churches with 365 pastors being ordained in each of the churches, you’re not going to find that in any of Patrick’s authentic writings. And again, this is why, if you want to know who to trust, go read this for yourself and you’re going to see there’s no reference to that at all in any of Patrick’s authentic works. What we do have, is him, as we already saw, declaring that his father was a deacon and his grandfather was a priest. Now, in fairness, the Latin there is presbyter, which is accurately translated as elder. By the time he’s writing, this word is clearly used in Latin to refer to Catholic priests, but you don’t have to take my word for it. We know two other things. First, we know that he also refers to himself as a bishop. So bishop doesn’t mean the same thing as presbyter. He’s clearly got three ranks, Bishop, presbyter or priest and deacon, and then he also is going to have a very different understanding of what the priesthood is all about than Baptists believe about elders.

I’m going to go back to the Fairhaven clip here and then kind of show why that’s not true. So here we go.

Those churches that he started were independent for many creeds, councils, any popes. He never attended one council, he never recognized [inaudible 00:16:01] except the Lord Jesus Christ. There is not any evidence whatsoever that remotely suggests that this famed preacher acknowledged any man to be of superior authority or position than Jesus. He recognized no Pope, he recognized no cardinal. He recognized that he doesn’t even subscribe or mention even in the smallest extent any kind of catechism, creed or dogma of the Roman Catholic system.

Okay, so as I said, none of what you just heard is true, and we know this in a couple ways. First, even though he’s a bishop, he does actually refer to superiors. He says, “One time I was put to the test by some superiors of mine. They came and put my sins against my hard work as a bishop.” Now, this is the underlying issue behind the Confessio. Patrick seems to be writing this largely in his own defense that after having been a successful apostle and missionary to Ireland for decades, an old friend exposed a childhood sin of Patrick’s that was serious enough that it caused serious scandal. We don’t know what the sin is, but he points out this fact, whoever this friend is that he confided in, had reported it to someone above Patrick.

Even though Patrick is a bishop, he doesn’t view himself as the highest authority. He does not view himself as just sent by God and therefore, not needing to report to any earthly institution above the level of bishop. He clearly has superiors, he refers to them. He doesn’t tell us anything about who they are. He’s purposely vague about a lot of this stuff because he’s not wanting to get into the grisly details of whatever this is and not wanting to call anybody out by name, but he clearly does have superiors. He clearly does believe he has superiors because he acknowledges such. In the Confessio as well, a little bit before this, he says when this betrayal from the friend happened, he says, “I was not there at the time, not even in Britain.”

Now that’s going to be important. We don’t know where he is after he… So he grows up in Britain. He then goes to Ireland and then he goes somewhere else, probably France. We don’t know exactly for sure. There’s a long-standing theory that he’s in Tours where he’s formed as a priest and much more could be said. He is vague about this. He just says he’s not in Britain, and he says, “And it was not I who brought up the matter.” You’ll get why I am saying probably Gaul or France in a little bit. And then he says, “In fact it was he himself,” this is the friend who betrayed him, “Who told me from his own mouth, ‘Look, you are being given the rank of Bishop’.” So one thing we know about his view of the whole trifle structure of bishop-priest-deacon, is that a bishop is not just self-appointed. Someone in the church is appointing Patrick as a bishop. He’s been approved to be ordained a bishop by someone.

Second, we know that his view of the priesthood is much richer than just like a Baptist elder or something like this. And we know this from his letter about Croticus where he says that, “Croticus respects neither God nor his priests whom God chose and granted the divine and sublime power that whatever they would bind upon earth would be bound also in the heavens.” So there’s some kind of spiritual authority, again he’s a little bit vague, but there’s clearly some spiritual authority of these priests hold that Croticus is not respecting and so Croticus is viewed as opposing both God and priestly authority.

So although again, all of this is very much just sketched out, Patrick is not giving us a detailed theology or detailed vision of his view of the church, all the indications we have point away from him being a Baptist, towards him being a Catholic.

Let’s go next to works of penance because if there’s another thing Irish Catholicism is pretty famous for, it’s taking penance extremely seriously and Patrick is one of the earliest witnesses to this. In the Epistola, he talks about how these soldiers and Croticus, they need to repent, they need to do hard penance. And so he tells the people not to even share food or drinks with them, not to accept even their alms, “Until such time as they make satisfaction to God in severe penance and shedding of tears.” And then they also have to free the slaves that they’ve taken of Christians.

The point there is that that doesn’t sound like any Baptist that I know of, it sounds very Catholic and the role of forgiveness and penance and the fact that their works are actually important in this whole equation, all of that sounds deeply Catholic. Now let’s turn to maybe the heart of the controversy, which is what did St. Patrick think of baptism? So here again, I want to give a fair hearing to the Fairhaven presentation of this, which again, I’m just using as an example of the kinds of arguments you may hear. I’m not trying to pick on these particular speakers.

And I want to just go through a couple of things. One is, he baptized only professed believers, and that is a Baptist doctrine, contrary to Catholic dogma, which teaches that infants are to be baptized. In all of Patrick’s writings, he does not mention one single incident when he baptized an infant, much less someone who had not been saved. One incident, he records the baptism of one convert named Enda, the night after his infant son was born, and what an ideal opportunity to record the baptism of that infant, and yet Patrick makes no mention of it at all. In one of his writings about the great [inaudible 00:21:44] says, “Go ye, teach. Meet is the order of teaching before baptism. For it cannot be that the body received baptism before the soul receives the verity of faith.” So Patrick never believed in baptizing infants as the Catholics teach. He taught baptism by immersion only, and of course, this has been a leading principle in baptists since the days of the Apostles and in all his writings there’s not one shred of evidence, not one mention of any kind of sprinkling, anything other than immersion.

Okay, so the first thing you should know here is virtually nothing of what you just heard is true, and I can show this in a few ways. First, this story about how he baptized this guy Edna who just had a newborn and doesn’t mention him baptizing the newborn, none of that is coming from Patrick’s own writings. Remember, we have two writings of Patrick. You can read them yourself. I strongly encourage you to do that. This whole story of Edna is from something centuries later called the Tripartite Life of Patrick. This is a monastic, it was called a hagiography, like a life of the saints, and the monks compiling these stories are compiling both good history and just like stories they’ve heard about Patrick. And so we don’t know the historical value of most of what’s in there. A lot of this stuff is probably later legends, because again, there’s centuries. We don’t actually know when the Tripartite Life of Patrick is from, but almost everybody’s going to say it’s several centuries after the life of Patrick.

Now, having said that, if you read the account, you actually see that Edna, yeah, sure, we’re not told explicitly that he has his child baptized. He gives his child to Saint Patrick to have him raised in the monastery. And then it talks about the offerings the son is making on All Saints Day. And so, it’s fine to say, “I don’t believe any of this later account.” This seems like a later legend, but it seems completely unfair to deride all of the later legendary stuff when it supports Catholicism and then to try to appeal to it to prove that he was a Baptist. If these are unreliable documents, which I think both sides would actually agree, they probably are, then you can’t appeal to them to try to prove your side. In Patrick’s own writings, there’s nothing of this story with Edna.

As for that quote where he’s allegedly commenting on Matthew 28, 17, that’s not from St. Patrick at all. That’s from St. Jerome’s commentary on Matthew. So it has nothing to do with St Patrick and it’s being taken out of context. We’re going to leave all that aside and just say, you can read for yourself that neither of these things that he cited comes from Patrick. The Tripartite Life of Patrick is not written by Patrick. Several centuries later, Jerome’s commentary on Matthew was obviously not written by Patrick. Also, this claim that baptism was always by immersion from the time of the apostles forward, is demonstrably untrue. We have a dogma called the Didache. There’s again, a scholarly debate about the dating of this, but a lot of scholars believe that it goes all the way back to the first century, and in it talks about how to baptize.

Now, to be fair to the Baptist side, there’s a clear preference for immersion. If you can baptize in living water, that is like flowing water, like a river, that’s the best. If you don’t have that, still water is the second best. If you have neither of those though, you’re told to pour out water thrice upon the head in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So he’s arguing against baptism by sprinkling. The Catholic church doesn’t do baptism by sprinkling, but we do baptism by immersion or by pouring. And both of those appear to be 2000 year old traditions or very close to it. The early Christians were just not nearly as legalistic about how to do baptism as modern Baptists are. Which is weird because modern Baptists believe baptism is just a symbol that it doesn’t actually do anything, but it also is really important we do this thing that doesn’t do anything, just right.

And so, what about Saint Patrick? Does he believe baptism is just a symbol He does not. In paragraph 17 of his letter about Croticus, he says, “Thanks be to God. You who are baptized believers have moved on from this world to paradise.” So he’s acknowledging that those believers who are baptized have something happen to them or they’re already participating even here on earth in heavenly realities. He clearly has something of a sacramental vision of what baptism does. That’s by the way, well established, widespread throughout the early church. That’s a topic for another day, but you’re not going to find anybody who’s holding to the Baptists like believers baptism, just a symbol, understanding of baptism. And this is why Baptists who hold this view don’t quote the Christians in their own words, they quote their own people telling you stories about those Christians, even though we have the documents in English and can see those stories aren’t true.

So let’s move now from baptism to the other sacraments because one of the claims that they make in the Fairhaven clip is that Patrick only believes in two sacraments or ordinances, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

He did not ever refer to any other of the sacraments of Rome having to do with all the things that Rome teaches. He referred to two ordinances, the Lord’s Supper and baptism, as I’ve mentioned, and we go on and on.

Now, this again, isn’t true and I think we can show it pretty clearly. Paragraph 51, St. Patrick’s Confessio, he talks about how he goes where nobody else has gone, both to baptize and to ordain clerics. Now, Baptists could respond, “Well, we believe in ordination, we just don’t think it’s a sacrament.” Fine. In the Epistle, the letter to Croticus, paragraph three, he talks about the victims of those who’ve been murdered by Croticus and his soldiers, and he says, “The newly baptized and anointed were dressed in white robes. The anointing was still to be seen clearly on their foreheads when they were cruelly, slain and sacrificed by the sword.” Why does that matter? Because anointing or chrismation is another name for the sacrament we also call in the West confirmation. That from the earliest days of the church there are three sacraments of initiation. There’s baptism, anointing, chrismation, confirmation, and the Eucharist. And Patrick is clearly describing these as both baptized and confirmed, newly created Christians.

Which means that whether you think he views ordination as a sacrament or not, he clearly is referring to anointing or chrismation as a sacrament beyond baptism, which is what Baptists are denying. Patrick, in his own words, refutes the Baptist case. Now, having said all of this, I want to acknowledge the limitations of the evidence. There are plenty of things that Patrick doesn’t speak about. As I said, you can read everything he wrote in about half an hour, which means there’s a lot of stuff that he surely believes that he just doesn’t answer for us. He doesn’t tell us how many sacraments he thinks there are. He doesn’t tell us the exact nature of who ordained him, for instance. We have some theories about that, but not coming from Patrick himself. We’re looking at other historical evidence.

So there’s all this important stuff that we don’t have from him, and Baptists will seize on this and make an argument from silence that because he doesn’t explicitly say he believes an ex doctrine, therefore he must deny ex doctrine. This is a bad argument. This is always a bad argument, unless there’s a really good reason to believe that he would be expected to make X doctrinal claim. And if you’re explaining the missionary efforts you’ve had in a certain land and telling people not to murder Christians, you’re probably not going to also say, “Here’s exactly how the Trinity works.” That just is not going to be the way you approach these things. It was like a systematic theology.

And so I think we can show this with a really clear case, which we’ll just call St. Patrick, St. Palladius and Pelagius, three Ps all from the same region, all at the same rough time period. Now here we have to acknowledge another limitation of the historical evidence. We don’t know exactly when St. Patrick lived. We know he lived sometime in the 400s. He may have been born sometime in the 300s, he may have been born in the very early 400s. There’s going to be some scholarly debate about when in the 400s he’s active in Ireland. Sometime in the fifth century, is basically what we know. This matters because he’s alive at the time the Roman Empire is falling apart, and we don’t know how much it was together at the time that he was growing up.

We do know this, in the early days, so go back all the way to the late 200, you’ve got this massive stretch of the Roman Empire including what’s now England and Wales, up to Hadrian’s Wall, which is where Scotland is now. And this is in pretty important Roman history for no other reason than that Constantine, the Emperor Constantine, and his father were active in Britain and then Constantine moves east and conquers the entire empire and becomes sole Roman Emperor. I’m simplifying a lot of Roman history there, but all that’s to say is, that the empire, including Britannia, is all one empire. There’s one place, it’s one interconnected sort of reality that starts to fall apart during the 300s and the 400s.

And so around 410, the Romans pull out of Britannia, and I believe it’s 445, you have documents where they’re actually appealing to the Roman Empire to come and favor them from the barbarians. So you have the barbarians sweeping in in the late 300s and throughout the 400s with the Huns, with the Vandals, with the Visigoths, and they’re destroying the Western Roman Empire as all of the imperial attention focuses on preserving the eastern part of the empire, what later, we start to call the Byzantine Empire. The Western, the actual Roman part of the Roman Empire sort of falls apart. And this is again, an important part of even the life of Patrick. We see allusions to this in the fact that things are clearly falling apart in his own life. He’s kidnapped at 16 and he talks about how they collectively deserve this for their lack of fidelity.

Well, there’s another thing that’s happening at this same time, and that’s a rise of the heresy of Pelagianism. And this points to a couple really important things. First, it points to the continued interconnectedness of the Roman Empire, even if things are falling apart, because Pelagius is from Britain. But then he goes down to Rome and to Carthage, North Africa where Saint Augustine is, in what’s now Tunisia, and then he’s over in Jerusalem and he encounters Jerome, and then he dies, maybe in Syria, maybe in Egypt.

And so it’s a massively interconnected world. And we know this from the ancient history. I’ll get to why Pelagius matters here in a second. But B.R. Rees, the Welsh historian in his Pelagius Life and Letters says, “We know neither the date and place of either Pelagius’ birth or death, but it’s reasonably certain that he was born not long after 350 in Britain and died not long after 418, somewhere in the countries adjoining the Eastern Mediterranean, possibly in Egypt. Okay. And then Heron and Brown, in Christ and Celtic Christianity, talk about how this is actually really important for the evangelization efforts in Ireland, that the first Christians in Ireland may have actually been heretics, probably like Arian heretics, who didn’t have a full understanding of the Trinity. And then you probably have the introduction of Pelagians because Pelagius has come from Britain. And so you’ve got this influential set of Pelagian devotees, disciples.

And so Heron and Brown point out that two years after Germanus’s first visit to Britain in 429, which is again, to combat Pelagianism, Pope Celestine decides to send Palladius’ Bishop to the Irish believers in Christ. So even though a lot of people think St. Patrick is the first bishop in Ireland, he’s not, and we know this from even Prosper of Aquitaine, who’s alive during this time, that Palladius is actually, in 431, the first bishop. We’ll get into why we don’t hear much about Palladius, basically, he didn’t succeed, but we find that he’s sent there by the Pope and in response to the heresy of Pelagianism. And so, Prosper of Aquitaine, who I just mentioned, who is a contemporary, he’s 390 to 455, so lifetime, St. Patrick. In his work, Contra Collatorium or Against Cassium, records that Pope Celestine who’d successfully repressed Pelagium in Britain while thus endeavoring to keep that island in the Catholic faith, ordained Palladius to be bishop of the Irish and so, “Draw this pagan nation to the Christian fold.”

In other words, Germanius’s mission is, keep Britain Catholic, don’t let it go Pelagian, and Palladius’ mission is, convert the Irish pagans and don’t let them be first converted by a bunch of Heretics. Heron and Brown go on to say, “It should be noted that Palladius, the bishop sent to the Irish, was almost certainly the same Palladius who had actually convinced the Pope to send Germanus to Britain two years earlier. So he was a devoted opponent of Pelagianism, which is probably why he was sent.

Now, I alluded to the fact that chances are you’ve never heard of him. Why is that? Well, as the Book of Armagh will later note, he was ordained and sent to convert this land, lying under wintry cold, but God hindered him, for no man can receive anything from Earth unless it be given to him from heaven. And neither did those fierce and cruel men receive his doctrine readily, nor did he himself wish to spend time in a strange land, but return to him who sent him.

This is just part of the mystery of God that in the span of probably not many years, Palladius and then Patrick go to try to evangelize the Irish. And Palladius spectacularly fails and Patrick spectacularly succeeds and the book of Armagh continues. On his return hence however, having crossed the first sea and commenced his land journey, he died in the territory of the Britons. So even when he is leaving Ireland to give up, he makes it as far as Britannia and then dies.

That’s the story. This is a later account, but it’s probably accurate. We know from Prosper that the 431 arrival, that the Pope sends Palladius in 431. We also know he doesn’t have massive success. And so if the life of St. Patrick is correct on the details here, the death of Palladius in Britain is influential in probably getting Patrick to be ordained a bishop because it becomes more important to have an actual bishop there because the bishop who had been there has died.

So it ends up being really important for Patrick’s own life. Now, why do I mention all of this? Because Patrick mentions none of this. This is massively important to the thing he’s writing about, to his own life, to his missionary efforts in Ireland. We have other sources, even from his lifetime with St. Prosper of Aquitaine, talking about Palladius, and he doesn’t get mentioned. Now, it’s possible that Patrick was just maybe working on a different part of the island, and so never really had anything to do with him. And maybe the life of St. Patrick is wrong about the importance of him becoming ordained because Palladius had died. Or it’s possible that arguments from silence are just really bad arguments.

That’s the first reason I mentioned it. But the second reason is because I think it’s important to note Elva Johnston in the Journal of American Society of Irish Medieval Studies, Eolas, points out that Ireland should not be imagined as an offshore island lying off another offshore isle, meaning Britain, hidden from the wider world. After things fall apart with the Roman Empire, after the barbarians succeed in destroying the Western Roman Empire, it’s true that Ireland does have kind of an isolated quality, sort of.

We find the Irish monks go and evangelize Western Europe after Western Europe’s kind of fallen into pagan hands, and they have this massively important impact. But you can have an argument later on, well after Patrick’s life, of this thing called Celtic Christianity that’s sort of detached from what everybody else is doing. But during the lifetime of St. Patrick, that just isn’t true. We see this again in the life of Palladius. He’s from Britain, just as Patrick is from Britain and then, in the case of Patrick, he goes from Britain probably to Ireland, France back to Ireland. We’ll get into again why I’m making that argument in just a moment here. And then Pelagius goes from Britain to Rome to Tunisia to Israel, to maybe Syria, maybe Egypt. And it shows a much more interconnected world than the kind of Celtic Christianity theory would lead you to believe.

This is not just some out of the way island, off of another island that’s kind of forgotten by Europe. This is very much part of the Roman Empire very much part of the Roman world. And so all of that is to say positively that St. Patrick was, by his own account, thoroughly Latin and thoroughly Roman. And I say this to say that if you’re imagining Patrick as somebody out there in the wild yonder who has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic Church, that’s not true. In one sense, it’s certainly true that he’s on the cutting edge, the periphery of Christendom. He acknowledges this outright, but he’s also deeply enmeshed in the religion of his father and his grandfather, this Christian religion that he was brought up with in Roman Britannia, which is Roman Catholicism. And so he says, I already quoted from paragraph one of his epistle, “That he lives as an alien among non-Roman peoples in exile on account of the love of God.”

So by his own account, he’s a Roman living outside of the Roman world, but he keeps that Roman kind of identity. And then in the next paragraph, the epistle, he’s talking about the soldiers of Croticus here, he says, “I cannot say that they’re my fellow citizens, nor fellow citizens of the saints of Rome, but fellow citizens of demons because of their evil works. By their hostile ways, they live in death, allies of the apostate Scots, and Picts,” meaning that they’re behaving more like the pagan tribes beyond the Roman world than they are the saints of Rome. Does that sound like the kind of appeal a Baptist who wants nothing to do with the Roman Catholic Church is going to make? No, of course it doesn’t. So he’s appealing to Roman Christianity, which at this point is undeniably, thoroughly Catholic in his own kind of presentation of himself compared to those that he’s excommunicating.

Paragraph 20 is the same document. He mentions the fact that he’s written in bad Latin. He says, “These are not my own words which I have put before you in Latin, they are the words of God.” And so I mentioned the Latin thing just because we can overlook this really obvious fact. One of the things that united the Empire is that the Western half is all speaking and writing in Latin. The Eastern Party is speaking and writing in Greek, and this contributes to what will eventually be the split between the Eastern Orthodox and the Catholic Church, but you still have this very much a Latin world that Patrick is part of. Now, Patrick writes in what some scholars have called a rustic Latin. I saw one scholar who said his Latin is deplorable, but nevertheless, he’s still part of this world and he’s been trained somewhere in how to speak and write in Latin, and he’s been thoroughly versed in the Bible in Latin.

So Epistle, paragraph 20 still, he says, “The Christians of Roman Gaul,” that’s modern day France, “Have the custom of sending holy and chosen men to the Franks.” The Franks were at the time, were in northern France. This actually gives us some indication that he’s writing before the conversion of the Franks at the very end of the 400s with Clovis. That’s much more Roman history than we need, but this is seemingly mid-400s that he’s writing here. And so the Roman province is sending holy and chosen men north to the pagan area with the Franks and to other pagan peoples to buy back the baptized who’d been taken prisoner. And he contrasts this with these Christians who’ve murdered a bunch of other newly baptized Christians. And look at how the French behave compared to how you behave, basically.

Now, I’m going to turn now from the Epistle to the Confessio. In paragraph 43, he said, “I could wish to leave them to go to Britain.” Why would he go to Britain? ‘Cause he grew up there, right? He says, “I would willingly do this and am prepared for this, as if to visit my home country and my parents. Not only that, but I would like to go to Gaul to visit the brothers and to see the faces of the saints of my Lord.” So why does he mention Gaul here? Well, he mentioned Britain because he grew up there. He mentions Gaul seemingly, because that’s where he was formed and trained to be a priest. He doesn’t say that, but the allusion there doesn’t make much sense otherwise. He’s not just talking about vacation plans because he actually goes on to say that he’d be sinning if he did so. That obviously, he’s got some home sickness for Britain and for France, but he belongs here in Ireland. That’s the point he’s making in paragraph 43, which tells us again, that not only does he believe Catholic things in those six doctrines, but he’s very much part of this Catholic world and is in this Catholic world that he was formed and sent out as a missionary to go convert the people that the Pope had earlier sent Palladius to convert, and Palladius had failed to convert.

Thanks be to God, St. Patrick succeeds where Palladius had failed. And thanks be to God, Ireland becomes this incredible Catholic nation. That’s not some Catholic re-appropriation of history, that’s not some medieval legend. That’s what we get from Patrick in his own words and in the historical evidence we get from his contemporaries. And that’s something we should be very grateful to God about today. No, St. Patrick was not a Baptist. He was a Catholic saint and a Catholic saint who brought innumerable souls to Christ and who saved the Irish people. Thanks be to God for that. And happy St. Patrick’s Day.

For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.