St. Patrick’s Day is here! And for millions that means green clothing and green beer. For some St. Paddy’s Day is a time to celebrate their Irish heritage. For others perhaps it’s just a great excuse to party! But for many, like the Irish, it’s a time to celebrate the man whom the holiday is named after as well as a time to commemorate the arrival of Christianity in Ireland.
Patrick is credited for converting thousands of Irish to Christianity. But was he a Saint? It may be surprising to learn that St. Patrick was never officially canonized as a Saint by the Catholic Church. It may be even more surprising to learn that he was never a part of the Roman Church to begin with….
Patrick Not Part of the Roman Church
“Two centuries elapsed after Patrick’s death before any writer attempted to connect Patrick’s work with a papal commission. No pope ever mentioned him, neither is there anything in the ecclesiastical records of Rome concerning him. …Patrick preached the Bible. He appealed to it as the sole authority for founding the Irish Church. He gave credit to no other worldly authority; he recited no creed. Several official creeds of the church at Rome had by that time been ratified and commanded, but Patrick mentions none. In his Confession he makes a brief statement of his beliefs, but he does not refer to any church council or creed as authority. The training centers he founded, which later grew into colleges and large universities, were all Bible schools. Famous students of these schools — Columba, who brought Scotland to Christ, Aidan, who won pagan England to the gospel, and Columbanus with his successors, who brought Christianity to Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy — took the Bible as their only authority, and founded renowned Bible training centers for the Christian believers. … Patrick, like his example, Jesus, put the words of Scripture above the teachings of men. He differed from the Papacy, which puts church tradition above the Bible. In his writings he nowhere appeals to the church at Rome for the authorization of his mission. Whenever he speaks in defense of his mission, he refers to God alone, and declares that he received his call direct from heaven.” (Truth Triumphant, pp.82-84)
Another overlooked fact is that the early Celtic Churches kept the Sabbath. Unlike the Roman Church who kept Sunday as their day of worship the Celtic Churches, whom Patrick in part founded, kept the 7th day (Saturday) as required by the 4th commandment.
The Celtic Churches Kept the Sabbath
“The monks sent to England [in 596 A.D.] by Pope Gregory the Great soon came to see that the Celtic Church differed from theirs in many respects…Augustine himself [a Benedictine abbot]…held several conferences with the Christian Celts in order to accomplish the difficult task of their subjugation [submission] to Roman authority…The Celts permitted their priests to marry, the Romans forbade it. The Celts used a different mode of baptism [i.e., true baptism: immersion] from that of the Romans…The Celts held their own councils and enacted their own laws, independent of Rome. The Celts used a Latin Bible [i.e., the Itala] unlike the [Roman Catholic’s Latin] Vulgate, and kept Saturday as a day of rest.” (A.C. Flick, The Rise of Medieval Church, p.236-327)
“It seems to have been customary in the Celtic churches of early times, in Ireland as well as Scotland, to keep Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, as a day of rest from labor. They obeyed the fourth commandment literally upon the seventh day of the week.” (James C. Moffatt, D. D.,The Church in Scotland, Philadelphia: 1882, p.140)
“In this latter instance they seemed to have followed a custom of which we find traces in the early monastic church of Ireland by which they held Saturday to be the Sabbath on which they rested from all their labours.” (W.T. Skene, Adamnan Life of St. Columba, 1874, p.96)
So Patrick was not a Roman Catholic after all and also kept the 7th day Sabbath. The only authority he recognized was the Bible itself and was never in subjection to the pope. For most this information will hardly seem relevant as they clad themselves in green and make a dash for the nearest Irish pub, but for myself, and hopefully many others, today will be a time to honor the real Patrick and his ideal to hold the Bible as the one, true authority and the sole source of spiritual truth.
All of this information and these accounts were taken from the following site. To learn more about the historical truth of Patrick and the early Celtic Churches please visit:
James 