A Welsh apostle across the sea
by Mike Oettle
SHAMROCKS and
snakes are the emblems associated with Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, whose
day falls on 17 March.
Neither has a definite link to the saint: there never were any snakes in Ireland, naturalists inform us, and there is no proof that Patrick ever explained the Trinity by means of a shamrock plucked from the ground where he stood in order to satisfy the doubts of Laoghaire, High King of Ireland, in the hall of Tara, the High King’s central court in Meath.
Nonetheless, stained glass windows still depict the saintly old man standing on snakes, in memory of the time when he allegedly cast them all out of the Emerald Isle. Perhaps they are a symbol of the evil that his mission removed from the island.
And even if it’s not true, the tale of the shamrock still has something to teach us, for it is indeed a leaf that is both three and one, as is the Lord. But who the king was who heard the explanation, no-one can say for sure. Was Laoghaire High King or even alive in Patrick’s day? Where was his hall?
All that can be said for certain on that subject is that Patrick based himself in Antrim – the part of Ireland nearest to Scotland’s probing finger of the Mull of Kintyre – where the most powerful ruler of the time had his court. And don’t forget the attachment of the Irish to their national floral badge, the shamrock.
Patrick was not the first missionary in Ireland, nor even the first bishop. That honour fell to one Palladius, who was sent by Pope Celestine in AD 431 to be “first bishop to the Irish believers in Christ”. But he was not long in Ireland before Patrick succeeded him.
Patrick[1] was born around 385 or 390 in Bannavem Taberniæ, a Romano-British town perhaps on the Severn. As a Briton he would have been called Welsh[2] by the Anglo-Saxons. His father, Calpurnius, was a local councillor and deacon and his grandfather was a Catholic priest.[3] At the age of 16 he was captured by slave raiders and sold into captivity in Hibernia (as the Romans called Ireland, a land they never conquered)[4] – tradition has it that this was at Slemish in Antrim. There he was sustained
by his faith in Christ: a faith he had not held strongly in Britain, but now
clung to in long hours of prayer.
After six years he escaped and took ship, some say for the Continent, others that he returned home after a further brief captivity. Patrick’s Confessio (an autobiography) tells of a dream in which a man called Victoricus delivers him a letter headed Vox Hiberniæ (Voice of the Irish) in which he is begged to return across the Irish Sea. The uneducated Patrick delayed going for several years while he was trained and became a priest. (The French Catholics claim this was in Gaul, others say it was in Britain.) Shortly after Palladius’s death he was made bishop and set sail, even then doubtful of his fitness for the task.
Strangely, Patrick avoided the south-east of Ireland, where Palladius had worked, but visited almost every other part. He set up his see in Antrim, and later other bishoprics in other regions. “Utterly confident in the Lord, he journeyed far and wide, baptising and confirming with untiring zeal. In diplomatic fashion he brought gifts to a kinglet here and a lawgiver there but accepted none from any. On at least one occasion he was cast into chains. On another, he addressed with lyrical pathos a last farewell to his converts who had been slain or kidnapped by the soldiers of Coroticus.[5] Careful to deal fairly with the heathen, he nevertheless lived in constant danger of martyrdom.”[6] Although he was sometimes accused of having sought office for its own sake, the
one fact about him that stands out above all in his writings (in laboured
Latin) is that he was a man of utterly simple faith.
Patrick did not convert all of Ireland, but on his death in 461 he left it a land where the Christian Faith was firmly established. He had also established a bridgehead for Christianity in the British Isles, for the Anglo-Saxons were about to bring the Church to extinction in their quarter. After Patrick, men would carry the faith first to Caledonia[7] and at last back to northern England.
