The Influence of St Patrick
Five things to ponder.
Patrick was born in Britain, CE 389. He is one of the three patron saints of Ireland, alongside, Brigid (born CE 451) and Columba (born CE 521).
Patrick was abducted as a young boy by Irish raiders, sold as a slave, and spent his teenage years alone tending sheep in the cold and windswept landscape of an Irish hill. One day he made a dash to freedom and boarded a merchant ship back to his family.
Later in his life, he had a vision one night from God telling him to go back to Ireland. This vision had a profound effect on Patrick, and he immediately made plans to return to Ireland, the land of his previous captivity.
Tradition has it that Patrick was appointed bishop and apostle to the Irish in 432. Patrick travelled the Irish country preaching the gospel. Paganism was the dominant religion when Patrick arrived.
It is thought Patrick was personally responsible for baptizing over 100,000 people, ordaining hundreds of priests, planting hundreds of churches and monasteries, driving paganism from the shores of Ireland, and starting a movement in Ireland that helped preserve Christianity during the Middle Ages.
Irish Christianity spread more after the death of St Patrick than it had in his lifetime. There aren’t many written records from the time, so little is known about these Irish communities of mission that would later grow to influence Celtic Christianity in Britain and beyond. Yet, we do have many useful facts to ponder about the influence of St Patrick.
Here are five:
1. In Ireland, more than six thousand Irish place-names contain the word Cill ( the old Gaelic name for Church- anglicised form kil ), which originally meant ‘cell church’ (ultimately from Latin cella). It is frequently used in combination with the name of the saint to whom the church is dedicated. To this day, the influence of cill names’ is worldwide, and many towns and cities feature Kil in their name.
2. As Ireland was beyond Rome’s influence, a distinctly Celtic approach to communities of mission emerged. Whereas monasteries within the Roman world organised themselves to protest and escape Rome’s materialism and the Church’s corruption, the Celtic monasteries organised to penetrate the pagan world and extend the Church.
3. A visitor from Rome would have noticed that Celtic Christianity was more of a movement than an institution, with temporary buildings of wood and mud, and featured laity in ministry more than clergy.
The Celtic communities of mission were more imaginative, less cerebral, closer to nature, and more diverse than their Roman counterparts.
4. Though the Celtic communities did include nuns and monks, they also were populated by scholars, craftspeople, farmers, artists, families, and children — all under the leadership of a lay abbess or a lay abbot.
5. The reality of the Roman Church not colonizing Ireland in the same manner as it had across most of the known world at the time enabled a new form of (Irish) Christianity to emerge over the next few hundred years from St Patrick — to St Columba — to St Aidan and St Hilda, that would eventually influence the history of the world and mission strategies for evangelism up to our current times.
As we see, the life and ministry of Saint Patrick reveal the significant influence that he made upon Christianity and our world of today.
Happy St. Patricks Day!
