Looking at Sedevacantism Issues Again What with All Our Troubles Breaking Full Upon Us

A Chairde, Amici,

Opening Note: Regarding Bergoglio's official approval of blessing the carnally deviant, this is, of course a "deal breaker". It cannot stand. Already we're seeing battle lines drawn up across the globe, for and against. We, the laity, must not tolerate it. If you have a local priest or bishop who approves of such an "abomination set up in the House of the Lord", break it off with them. Vote with your feet. They've excommunicated themselves from the Lord Jesus Christ. Full stop. Bergoglio has taught a lot of heresy before (death penalty, reality of Hell, etc.) but this is too much. Of course, "Bergi" is just pushing the envelope, seeing how far he can humiliate God, God's Church, you, and me. That in itself is the story of his war against the TLM. It's all of a piece.

Things are dire. People are on edge. Millions are leaving the Church, "voting with their feet". Things seem to be getting ever worse, more insane, more frightening. Now, as noted, "Pope Francis", aka Bergoglio, via his creepy henchman "Tucho" "Kissy" Fernandez, has allowed same-sex blessings in the Church. Taylor Marshall opines here that this is to destory marriage as a sacrament. And exiled Bishop Strickland calls on "his brother bishops" to unite against this Vatican ruling (fat chance). 

What with all this literal filth – spiritual septic tank filth spewing all over us from Bergoglio's volcano – I have been studying the Sedevacantists again. Personally, I think it quite reasonable to deduce that the papal office stands vacant with the so-called "Pope Francis". As with the reports above, every day his "Magisterium" goes from bad to worse. Reading Liz Yore's recent work at Lifesite News reinforces this deduction. However, going beyond that idea, I was perusing the Novus Ordo Watch site, going through their blog posts and Most Frequently Asked questions. They are considered "hard" Sedevacantists; i.e., that there's been no valid pope since Pius XII's death back in October of 1958. As such, they do not consider the Vatican II Church a Catholic avatar of historical Catholicism at all. That has some far-stretching complications, indeed. It certainly explains a lot of the past 60 years' history, but it is the answer to our problems? I will discuss this below.

Now, in August of this year I had written an article about Sedevacantism. My question then embodied the following, in which I wrote back in August regarding the "hard" Sedevacantist thesis that:

Anyway, were these men NOT actual popes, then we don't have a Catholic Church, because the last priest ordained by the last bishop Pope Pius XII assigned a diocese to has probably passed away by now. Invalid, false popes cannot ordain or assign bishops, and invalid bishops cannot ordain valid priests. Therefore, Catholicism is dead.

Remember the priests exist to validly ordain the Sacraments, especially the Most Holy Eucharist. (It's by Baptism and the Holy Eucharist that we participate in all the ancient Covenants. The Covenant system God set up with the First Covenant, when He blessed Creation and established the seventh day for the remembrance of it. The Holy Eucharist, capstone of the system, is required for salvation, as St. John makes clear in the sixth chapter of his Gospel. So it can't come to an end, until The End.) And the bishops exist to ordain valid priests and keep an eye on them. And in their turn, popes exist either to ordain and assign bishops or approve the election of bishops elevated by local cathedral canons, etc., as it was in the Middle Ages and before....   

So, if valid popes have not existed since Pius died on the 9th of October, 1958, (or I suppose since June 3rd,1963, if one assumes Roncalli was a valid pope), then the Church is an illusion, a "maya" as Buddhists say. That cannot be true, either. Not if God actually exists and if Jesus Christ is indeed God. So, how to square this circle? Maybe it is just me, but I've never seen a sedevacantist explanation of this: a clear one, concise, instantly recognizable to one's reason, as are the First Principles of Logic and the Truths of the Faith.

This was it. I wanted a clear, concise, instantly recognizable explanation to how this could work: how could a Catholic Church still exist assuming the "long-march" 60-plus-year sedevacantism? And how could we know/find it?

Remember: No valid popes for so long means no valid bishops. No valid bishops means no valid priests. No valid priests means invalid sacraments and thus no salvation whatsoever. That is, of course unless we want to go Protestant and ditch God's entire Salvic Plan from the First Covenant (Genesis 2:1-3) down to the Seventh Covenant Our Lord Himself made with His Father two thousand years ago, as told in the New Covenant/Testament. 

But would the Lord God abandon thousands of years of Covenant, since Creation itself, in this way? Would he create a "Hidden Church" of true believers? And is that very idea very Protestant, in itself?

Trying to Understand This Thinking, What I Learned Is...

On their page Now What?, NOW helpfully provide a series of Mass directories where one can search for a Mass not hooked up in any way with the infamous "Vatican II sect", as they call it. I.e.

Look for a Mass location that is close to you, and keep in mind that you may have to go across state or country lines for your nearest Mass. The editors of these directories try hard to ensure that all of the Masses listed are sedevacantist, that is, as far as they know, the clergy who offer them profess the true Catholic Faith, are validly ordained, and do not profess communion with any false papal claimant or the Vatican II Sect.  

Notice they mean, of course, by "true Catholic Faith" the one defined for millennia, not its more recent iterations. And that they thereby totally discount ALL of the Vatican II Church, entirely. One has to find a Mass location (not a parish because those cannot be set up, things being as dire as the are) where the priest was ordained by a bishop who himself was NOT ordained by any Vatican II bishop – but would have been ordained by someone who "passes", someone somehow ordained in a line not connected with Vatican II.

So, that would be either some sort of SSPX bishop or priest who left the SSPX because the SSPX prays for Pope Francis, and the Society has not been cast off by the official Church. (Horrors!) Who fits such a description, though? Aye, there's the rub. Well, there were "The Nine" who left the Society at some point, and some of those (or maybe just one guy?) founded the SSPV, and was consecrated to the episcopacy by Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục (I guess it was) at some point. (Thuc died in 1984.) One of these ordinands just died, a "founder of Congregation of St. Pius V... Sedevacantist Bishop Clarence Kelly (1941-2023)". But then in the Novus Ordo Watch comments on an obituary regarding the late Bishop Kelly, debate arises whether the entire SSPV (not the SSPX, mind you) is Sedevacantist at all. Some say yes, some no, chaos reigns. Fascinating, but a bit like getting into the details of ancient Gnosticism, that or Japanese mythology. Bewildering, in a word.

Another of The Nine, was, I believe, one Father Anthony Cekada. Though dead (in 2020), he has a large Youtube presence. Look him up. You shall thereby find links to articles about some of the issues the guys commenting on Kelly's death brought up.

Another fly in the ointment is that, if nothing else, Pacelli (Pius XII) made it plain that a pope would have to approve new bishop consecrations. Things have changed since then; i.e. the mode and words of bishop consecrations have changed, the words of ordaining priests and deacons have changed, too, for that matter. Changes galore. But not only that. If I recall correctly, from at least Pius' day, the pope has to approve a bishop's consecration, and if there's no pope...er...well, you see the problem. 

Bishops are now not just consecrated as bishop of a certain town, region, or ruin, either; regardless whether they are a titular bishop of an actual place, ancient or modern, or not; they're ascended to a higher rank of clergy and are in direct Apostolic succession of the Apostles! Bishop Strickland is still a bishop fully gunned, victualed and manned, as the old Navy would say. He just doesn't have a ship, a diocese,  not even a titular one, but he still has all the power that being a bishop entails. Therefore, even "dry-docked", he has episcopal power to fire on Bergoglio, as Lifesite reports above. This, thanks to Vatican II. But not in the pre-Vatican II Church. 

Practical Considerations

• As regards changes in the consecration/ordination rites, I personally think that too much scrutiny on that makes it into more magic than grace. A spell won't work unless the words are quite right. Just ask Gandalf.
  
• But in Church sacraments, it is not magic, but grace ("grace" means Divine gift, freely given: i.e. God does this); thus, some verbal variation might be tolerable. It depends on the sacrament, and so on. Catholic Churches of the Eastern Rites, i.e. non "Roman"-Catholic Churches, have different words for ordination and consecration than the Western Church had. They've always been valid. It's the intent that mattered. (I'm just making this notation to save folk from losing their marbles about their local clergy's ability to confect the sacraments.)
  

Bottom Line

Assuming – and I think it is a valid assumption – that Novus Ordo Watch in their research, their articles, their links, are solid for "sedes", that they're well-intentioned but that their zeal puts them on a very tall cliff, basically; i.e. they solve some problems but create new ones. Perhaps even bigger ones. What can we deduce?

I'm Not Joking

That you'd rather be Orthodox. Not a joke. (Well, sarcasm.) And I do mean one of the autocephalous Orthodox Churches, "the 14". Consider, my friends: 

1. These Churches A: have existed for centuries, 
2. B: you know that since they're not "fly-by-night" you don't have to dig around to verify whether they've Apostolic Succession, and...
   
3. C: your problem is how to adapt to a foreign national culture in your religious life: i.e.: We're Western Christians. The Orthos are Russian, Greek, Syrian, whatever. Can you deal with that? Myself, I could not. (But I love icons in general and Russian Church architecture in particular!)
   

As for the search recommendations the Novus Ordo Watch suggests, I've only one word: headache.

1. A; whatever Sede "Mass community" or "church" you found would NOT have existed for very long, and thus been proven by that cruel, exacting "Test of Time"; 
2. B: therefore you would have to spend a lot of time, energy and patience trying to ferret out whether they have Apostolic Succession.
3. And C: With the Orthodox, of course, they're national Churches. So, if you are not Russian, or Serbian, or Romanian, or Greek, or Bulgarian, or Syrian, or...well, you really think some generic Orthodox Western Church is a real thing? But with these tiny Sede break-aways that are insisting they're really Roman Catholic, does that sit well with you in your craw? Maybe your gut says yes. Maybe not. And we have to live with our gut.
   

To Finish Up

The Hard Sedevacantist situation, my friends, is nearly impossible. Honestly. On the one hand, sure, they describe well and thoroughly the very falleness of the mainstream Church. (NO doubt as to the N.O. Church.) And Bergoglio is so obviously a wild boar of an enemy of Christ that he has usurped the throne (a lot like Biden and his swamping the USA with military-aged men from China, etc.). But on the other hand, their long march attempt at a solution just doesn't work for long. 

• Spiritually, who are we to ascertain that Bishop Strickland – to take an example – is not only not a bishop, but not even a priest? That he, and Bishop Schneider and so many others are what we used to say of Anglican/Episcopalian clergy: just laymen in fancy dress.
• Morally and legally, oddly but truly, we have no right to judge these others in that way. We can judge moral action, definitely; for example, Bergoglio's sell-out of the Chinese Catholics and other Christians is a horrific evil no pope could allow. Yes. See Liz Yore here. So also his "Kissy" up to the Gays.
  
• But regarding your local bishop or priest? Unless they excommunicate themselves, as in the Opening Note, can we excommunicate them?
• And what do demons judge? They are THE hyper-legalists of all hyber-legalists. If a local bishop isn't valid, he cant appoint a valid exorcist. However, I believe Fr. Ripperger has said he can cause a demon great pain by just showing him the photograph of a local bishop. And for that matter, Fr Ripperger himself, how's he casting out demons if he's just a confused layman in fancy dress?
• And finally: Practicality. Practicality hangs over Hard Sedevacantism like Damocles' Sword. What in Heaven's name is the practicality of a layman having to do tons of research, not to mention serious travel, prayer, and simple reflecting, on whether some local off-shoot outfit is really Catholic at all? Does that sound like something we can practically engage in, time and again? 
• Yes, sometimes "the less must lead" as with confronting Bergoglio, who affects us all. We can all see his immorality and judge that. We can judge those who openly embrace his apostasy. But locally, in judging whether Fr. So-and-So is a Catholic in the first place? God set up the spiritual hierarchy of human beings for a reason, and we all agree Luther went too far with his priesthood of all believers (he himself clearly thought so after seeing its consequences). 
  

Summation

Who among the laity – except for the "hard core", whoever they might be – could stand the trouble? All this searching NOW recommends, and for what? So much would depend on our money and time as well as our will, and then our mental state rather than our rational state, and wouldn't so much depend on the charisma – or lack thereof – of the priests involved? Father Anthony Cekada exhibited a great and winning personality. It is said Father Leonard Feeney (died 1978) could be mesmerizing, too. Doesn't make them wrong – or right.

1. It's obvious the Vatican II Church has troubles, and that it has been moving further and further away from the Deposit of Faith. 
2. But that's been a process, my friends. A PROCESS. It is an arc. 
3. This latest fiasco about blessing homosexuals shows it is reaching its apogee, its culmination, its denouement. Maybe the majority of bishops in the world will submit to Bergoglo and "Kissy", thus separating themselves from the Lord Jesus. We'll all be scrambling, then. But there will remain 7,000 who have not bent the knee to Ba'al. (First Kings 19:18)
   
4. I recently watched that enemy of Tradition (and hence the Deposit of Faith and hence a Ba'al knee-bender) Cardinal Wilton Gregory, say his piece about Tradition dying a bloody death. It's stomach-churning to watch. The man parodied an actor back in a '60s "Rat-Pack" movie playing a homosexual man. Gregory is very "faggoty". He's just a parody entirely. So many of Bernadine and McCarrick's highly placed "sons" are. 
5. And besides that, it's equally obvious to EVER more people that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not a valid pope. Whether invalidly elected or fraudulently elected (or post a valid election he abandoned his post argument) we can set aside for this discussion we're on. 

My argument is long-march Sedevacantism like this – that the entire Catholic Church except for a few eccentrics (apologies to everyone at N.O. Watch), is very valuable in a great many ways, but ultimately, I'm sorry: arguing over whether the SSPV is really and truly a Sedevacantist or just a seemingly merely Sedevacatist church, is nuts. I can't reduce Catholicism to that. I really don't think they want to, either.

Right now, we have to weather the storm that's on us as best we can. Pray. As I wrote above, the battle lines are being drawn. Fundamentally: Schism, True Schism, is now upon us all.

• Pray to St. Patrick. He went to Ireland without the approval of his bishops back in Britannia. They didn't consecrate him a bishop. They might not even have ordained him a priest. But he went regardless, and the Lord God rewarded his sacrifice pretty handsomely in the test of time. 
• There's a delightful Russian story about three monks on an island in a lake who spent their days and nights chanting, "We three below adore You Three above." So the local bishop got a boat and went out to enlighten them about the Faith. As he was boating homeward, he saw one of the monks running across the water. He ran to the boat and stood on the lake to ask the bishop a child-like question. I'd rather be one of those monks than the bishop, wouldn't you?
  

   An Préachán

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Further reflections on St. Patrick, the real Sanctus Patricius

Amici, a Chairde,

A friend has been doing some research on the century Sanctus Patricius lived in, the 380s to 480s. An amazing century, altogether. A sort of highly significant nexus point in the history of the Church.

Just some "Patrician" thoughts:

Were Patricius born about 385, as some think and as was traditionally believed, that major player in the Western Church, St. Augustine, was in his 30s and St. Ambrose, who would be St. Augustine's spiritual master, served as bishop of Milan, and so forth and so on. For instance, had Patricius been born about 385, Saint John Chrysostom would have died when the future saint Patricius was in his early 20s, i.e., languishing in slavery in Ireland.

• The only certain things we know about Patricius is from what he, himself, wrote.

But speculation on his story has been vexed by a certain Palladius, a Roman who served as a bishop (apparently) sent by the pope of that day (Celestine, pope from 422 to 432 and concurrent to the General Council of Ephesus, held 431) to "go to the believers in Christ in Ireland." These would have been slaves and a few converts the slaves or free traders had made.

• This mysterious Palladius arrived in 431 A.D. Apparently. And what did he achieve?
  
• We're not certain. Modern scholars generally seem to think he predated Patricius.
• And a good few of them vexedly insist that Patricius' story was crossed with, or even woven out of entirely, the Palladius story. 
• Vague memories and a few churches in southeastern Ireland founded by Palladius, in other words, were mixed up by propagandists for Armagh (in the north) to embellish the Patricius legend.
• Because why? Because we have an actual historical document referencing (kinda, sorta) Palladius and his mission.
  

I do not hesitate to write that this is pure surmise. We've no clue whether this mixing occurred. Palladius, remember, was active in southeastern Ireland. Patricius has always been associated – since the beginning of the legend-making about him – with northeastern Ireland, the ancient areas associated with Ulster, famous for Conchobar mac Nessa (his mother was Nessa, married to Ulster's king, Fergus MacRoigh), who lived in the days of and the fantastic Queen Mebd (Maeve) and Cú Chulainn himself, of the immortal Red Branch Knights of Ireland's immortal national Iliad, the Táin Bó Cuailnge. All these heroes probably flourished from just before Our Lord's time to the second century A.D., but we really don't know; archaeology strongly indicates Armagh itself and nearby Emain Macha were ancient Iron Age ceremonial sites of great import, as was Tara of the Kings, down in east-central Ireland.

• In my youth, I wandered around and over Emain Macha, having walked out to the cattle pastures from Armagh town: it was impressive then, impossibly romantic, quietly dreaming under the grazing bovines, a sort of Irish Troy or Mycenae. One's imagination could run as wild as the wind. From its summit, you could see grass-covered mounds suggesting vast defensive rings and ditches, and you could easily imagine Cú Chulainn playing hurling outside the battlements. Alas, the last time I went, it was a quasi-Disneyland like fiasco. A "heritage center". Ugh!
  
• So it is no wonder the legends associate Patricius with these places, but nowhere much further south or west.

A bit of historical reflection

• Now, clearly, had Patricius indeed been born about 385ish, his traditional date of birth, that was 43 years before Palladius showed up. (Palladius's dates are more or less certain.)
  
• Palladius apparently had some role (maybe, possibly) in urging Germanus of Auxerre to go to Britain to combat Pelagianism about 429. 
• (The Celtic Briton Pelagius, who was certainly from cloudy Britannia, endured ceaseless use and abuse by the African sun-baked passionate Berber urbanite St. Augustine; you see, Pelagius had taught a self-help Christian grace because obviously, the times were desperate in his home island and people had to physically defend their hearths and homes from diabolical Barbarians; they needed a theology to match!)
  
• St. Germanus, who is perhaps a little bit associated with Palladius, visited Britain post the provinces final exist from Roman in order to fight against Pelagianism. St. G was born about 378. So he would have been an exact contemporary of the traditional Patricius. In his tour of post-Roman Britain, he composed a travelogue, and his description of ruined Britannia is haunting. (And sort of like descriptions of current-day Chicago or Seattle.)

But apparently most modern scholars, despite the traditional birth date for Patricius, insist Patricius came to Ireland AFTER Palladius. The idea is that Palladius set the stage, starting churches in southeast Ireland (Leinster, Cúige Laighin) before returning to the empire. For example, this author is discussing minutiae arguments by famous scholars arguing Patrician issues. He writes, as a given fact:

The central episode in Patrician legend is his confrontation with king Loegaire and his wizards at Tara, where, while Loegaire was celebrating a great pagan festival, Patrick lit Ireland's first Easter-fire in defiance of the king's sacred fire, from which all the hearths in the island were supposed to be re-lit.  Loegaire, High King of Tara, son and successor of the great Niall, belongs to the four-fifties and four-sixties; and everyone accepts that the "great festival" challenged by Patrick's Paschal fire was in fact the Feis Temro - that is, not, as Muirchu says, an annual spring festival, but a once-in-a-lifetime ritual of royal consecration.

Wait a minute. This is absurd. The famous meeting of Patricius and the Ard-Rí Loegaire at Tara of the Kings is indeed legend, precisely so, meaning it was created (perhaps from some truth, but how can we possibly know?) later in the 5th or 6th centuries. I repeat what I think responsible scholars assert, that the ONLY sure and certain Patrician material we have remains purely what the saint himself wrote. Everything else is suspect. He himself writes nothing of this confrontation stuff. He had a rough time, he wrote, and was re-enslaved, but nothing like the legends.

• Significantly, Patricius claims NO MIRACLES of any sort. Remember that. And his description of things happening in Ireland stands far, far too vague for any inner-Hibernian dating at all, and only his mention of his father and grandfather's political-ecclesiastical standing in Britain (or Gaul?) indicates that Britannia's imperial diocesan (political, not ecclesiastical) organization stood still intact, as clearly did the villa culture of late Roman Britain that Patricius had been raised in.
  
• Remember, his family had a "small villa" nearby the vicius (smallish town) his father was associated with, but did that mean that they only had this one small villa, or was it a small villa belonging to a larger group?
  
• (BTW, the fact his grandfather was a Christian priest might suggest something significant: it might hint that the grandfather had been something of a grandee, at least a decurion (senator class of Roman town senates: ordo), so perhaps Grandpa was a true "man of status and position". But these grandees, you see, in order to escape their onerous public responsibilities (and financial fees), often took holy orders as a way to "retire" from public duties!)

All these sorts of things we can (kinda-sorta) infer directly from what he wrote. But otherwise, we don't know that any of the legendary material has any truth at all. Probably some of it does, but how can we know now?

Other than that, I can only point out that in the year 367 A.D., the British Romano-Celts saw an overwhelming – and coordinated – assault by assorted Barbarians: Saxons on the east coast, and remember the Germanic mercenaries in the Roman Army, Picts from the north, Scoti (Irish) from the west, and Attacotti (no one knows who these guys were). Roman Britain never really recovered. But archaeological evidence of Mediterranean trade in Cornwall indicates trade routes remained functioning for another century or so, into King Arthur's era. (470ish; see this article for more on Arthur.)

Where and When?

Patricius would have been born – probably most likely – in coastal areas of Britain south of what is now Scotland; i.e. Cumberland on the west coast or inland, or maybe on southward around what is now Wales, to Cornwall. We're that uncertain. But when, exactly? Late 300s? Early 400s? If he was born in 385, that lay just 18 years after the Great Assault on Prydain of 367. Let me present a shocking thought. He may have been born earlier, too, just as well, earlier enough to have been carried off in the Great Assault. We can't be certain of much regarding Patricius, as I keep saying, yet from what he does write, he seems to say he personally saw thousands of captives awaiting transportation to Ireland and slavery. That would match the Great Assault, An tIonsaí Mór of 367. Perhaps it matched a later raid, as well, or perhaps the stricken, horrified youth counted too many fellow victims of the raid. But it certainly does seem to describe what one would have seen as the Great Assault developed.

General timeline of late Roman Britain:

305 The Picts and 'Scots' (i.e. the Irish) begin attacks Roman Britannia on the northern border and along the western coasts.

306 The legions of Constantine the Great, an officer who came to Britannia to defeat the Barbarians (think of the initial battle scene in the movie Gladiator) declared their general Emperor at York; Constantine goes on to win entire empire, East as well as West; issues the Edict of Milan in 313, which gives legal recognition to Christians (something we Christians need more and more today!)

314 British Catholic bishops from London and York attend the Council of Arles.

359 Several British Catholic bishops attend the Council of Rimini.

367 The Picts and 'Scots' raids culminate in the 367 Great Assault catastrophe.

401-410 The Romans "withdraw" from Britain. This is complicated, actually: Roman armies kept leaving Britain throughout the 300s to support one or another contestant for Western Emperor auditions). By 410, few remained, except Germanic mercenaries in military forts in east Britain. After that first decade of the Fifth Century, Anglo-Saxons, Jutes, possibly Swedes and certainly Germans of every description unload their Mark III Tigers onto the beaches and roll over the Celtic Britons to begin extensive settlement and repopulation (sort of like the U.S. border with Mexico, come to think of it!). Believe me, if they weren't shouting "Seig Heil!" as they conquered, they were thinking it.)

500s-600s Any self-respecting Welsh historian can name the years when the Barbarians took famous cities, for example, Aquae Sulis (Bath) fell to the West Saxons in 577. Eventually, advance Panzer units reached the Severn Estuary, cutting what remained of Roman Britain in half. (Cumbria, to the north of Wales, and one of the perhaps more likely candidates for Patricius' birth, remained an independent Celtic kingdom Cumbria (or Rheged) until the 620s, when the Northumbrian English king Edwin took the Isle of Man, and by the later 600s, all of Cumbria was gone. How long the Welsh language survived there is anyone's guess.  

Population replacement is population extinction. Something we need to relearn today.

Bottom line, St. Patrick, the Historical Patricius, remains ever elusive. In his two quasi-autobiographical documents, he actually, truly, speaks for himself. He mirrors St. Augustine in that, except that Patricius wrote little (that has survived) and Augustine wrote enough to fill an entire Alexandrian Library annex! Also, of course, St. Augustine was probably the finest prose stylist who ever wrote in Latin, whereas Patricius struggled to express himself even halfway clearly.

In any event, no one else can speak for him. Isn't that intriguing? And significant. Astounding, actually? It is fitting, too, I think. So unlike the schmaltzy later legends, utterly unlike the modern-day "St. Patrick's Day" drunk fest. Reaching out from the darkest century of the Dark Ages, Sanctus Patricius is a lone voice, and a vibrant, intense voice, for the Christian Faith. "A beacon all alone in the dark" as was said of Babylon 5. That is his significance. Certainly, trying to "date" anything about him from the hagiographies and "histories" of the later 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries is an exercise for an academic crowd adrift on a slow-running tide with far too much time on their hands.

An Préachán

St. Patick, a brief bio of info you probably didn't know

Amici, or, as one would write in Irish, A Chairde,

A few thoughts on St. Patrick's biography that you might not have known.

In these grim times, when world war, even nuclear war, threaten, it is good to remember that Patrick grew up in what today we would call a post-holocaust world.

Post-holocaust?

The secure, settled Roman imperial rule of Patrick's grandfathers' days was gone by the time he came along; gone, or going rapidly. Confusion reigned, barbarians advanced pillaging and burning and the last of the Roman armies were retreating or collapsing. Sometime around lifetime of Patrick's, the German mercenaries who served as Roman soldiers in the huge legionary fortress at York (Eboracum or Eburacum) in north-eastern Britain "turned native" and seized the place for themselves, and began seizing property from the British Celtic Roman citizens, enslaving them or chasing them westward. It would be like Meso-American "refugees" and "migrants" today seizing large portions of the U.S. And the same thing essentially happened when "the Muslims" seized the Iranian capital and Byzantine Syria, etc., from the Byzantine Eastern Romans. (These were Arab-speaking settlers who began to immigrate into the Persian and Roman empires after the 300s. By the early 600s they were numerous enough to be a force, indeed. The moniker "Muslim" and the religion "Islam" didn't appear until a century after the conquest!) Meanwhile, Irish raiders crashed upon the western coasts of Britannia, and some of them made settlements, one of which eventually grew into what we now know as Scotland.

This is a pattern modern government types are ignorant of, obviously.

Also, in relating his escape from Ireland, via a band of Irish pirates (just couldn't escape those guys!), Patrick tells how he and the pirates wandered through a desert for days and days and nearly starved to death. Nowhere in Western Europe at that time possessed such a territory. And this is the ONE occasion in his writing that scholars doubt him. Yet at least it strongly suggests how banged up and "burnt over" the British-Roman world was in the last days of Roman rule.

Birth

We don't know when Patrick was born.

Most historians, as far as I know, think he was born in the fifth century (400s), the single most obscure (and therefore fascinating) century in British history since the Romans landed (and began 'history', the written record). But early on? Mid-century? Late? We don't know.

His testaments

These are two documents we are very blessed and very lucky to have: The Confessio and The Letter to Coroticus. These documents ALL scholars believe Patrick himself wrote, AND in a form of Latin that he had spoken since childhood; i.e. he did not have very much formal schooling from Latin rhetors, so his Latin is "rustic" and obscure (in places, VERY obscure!) We have NO Latin like this in the entire corpus of Latin literature. So, Patrick is unique and outstanding on many levels!

His name

Yes, indeed. It said now that his original name was Maewyn (pronounced my-win) Succat. However, as the researcher of this piece goes to the trouble to explain, this is not true. We have NO primary sources – we have NO primary sources on Patrick at all except his own words – that indicate the saint's name was anything other than "Patrick". Later Irish commentators suggested other names he had, or that were applied to him by others. But with Saint Patrick, only his own words have any weight. He never claimed to out-magic the Druids, or fight with them. He never claimed any miracles of any sort, except that he had had a significant dream to return to Ireland, once he had escaped the place. That's it. His writing is full of praise of God and God's great deeds and graces He gave Patrick, as one would expect a saint to write. But he mentions no miracles.

Place of birth

We have no clue. The big island of Prydain (called 'Britannia" by the Romans), most probably. A much smaller possibility is Gaul. He almost certainly wasn't born in what is now Scotland, which once was a popularly held idea. But where, exactly? "Hundreds of thousands of words have been expended in in defence of one theory or another.... The question remains unsolved, and various theories still have their faithful supporters," wrote Brian de Breffny in my "In the Steps of St Patrick," (Thames and Hudson, 1982). St. Patrick himself wrote that he: "...Had for a father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a priest, of the settlement ('vicus') Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small villa ('villuva') nearby where I was taken captive." This is from The Confessio. In the Letter to Coroticus, he writes that his father held the administrative post of decurion, a member of the local senate, called an "ordo".

By the probable time Patrick was born, the decurion position had become hereditary. But just where was the villa? Patrick also indicates that the small villa had male and female slaves. So, how small was the villa, then, really? And how noble, or at least well-off and influential, stood his family? Was Patrick being modest? Truly humble? He's always truly humble. He never lies. No serious scholar thinks he lies or even embellishes. But maybe this small villa was just one of a number his father and grandfather had. One could read what the saint wrote that way. And note, as well, Patrick doesn't say he was born at Bannavem Taburniae, only that his grandfather had a small villa near to it that Patrick had the bad luck to be near when Irish pirates showed up. Was he managing this villa for his decurion father? Or just "hanging out"?

Trustworthy

One thing Patrician scholars insist on is that while we often can't really gather what Patrick is trying to say, we can trust what he says (except for the wandering for days through a desert with pirates after he escaped from slavery in Ireland, which remains an absolute mystery).

And that's it. Between what he wrote about specifically, what he chose to mention and to leave out, PLUS his obscure Latin, we are often clueless what he meant or where he was. One wit said that Patrick could hardly have told us less if he had not written at all! For example, look at his descriptions of where he came from. And read the Irish section of The Confessio. He describes no kingdoms, names no kings, and only mentions geography to say he was a slave herding pigs near "the western sea". But did he mean 'the western sea" from the perspective of a Briton, and thus meant the Irish Sea, or did he mean "the western sea" from an Irish perspective, and thus the mighty Atlantic? We've no clue.

Religious Life

I could write for hours about his description of the troubles he had with the Church hierarchy back in Britain, and the exceedingly sad troubles he had with Coroticus, a fellow Briton and "Roman". This raider, also "Caratauc", a Welsh form of the older Coroticus or Caratācos, which gave rise to the names Carys, Cerys, and the English Cedric, raided a baptismal celebration of Patrick's and killed some of the newly baptized, and enslaved (and raped) the others. Patrick was incensed and wrote the Letter to excoriate and damn Coroticus. 

One important aspect of this extraordinary man's religious mission abides in the fact that he is not only the first to write Latin as he spoke it in childhood, but he was also the first to take the Catholic faith outside the bounds of the Roman Empire at all! There was Wulfias, a Gothic Arian Christian who evangelized his fellow Goths outside of the empire, and a pope sent one Palladius to Ireland to tend to the already Catholic. But NO ONE thought of going outside the empire to a completely barbarian place and pagan people to evangelize them. The Faith spread among pagans osmosis-like, person to person. If I might coin a phrase, Patrick's innovation was truly "beyond the Pale"!

One final truth about his mission: Patrick left Britain as an adult to bring Christ through preaching and baptism to the Irish, yet he had endless abuse and hassle from the British bishops. So why all the mess? (Haha, what, was he using the Traditional Latin Mass!) Perhaps Patrick embarked on his mission without their permission. It was, after all, a true innovation. He might also have done so without even being ordained! If the latter is true, that would explain a great deal of his passionate defense in The Confessio.

But we'll never know. He describes an obscure snafu with a fellow cleric to whom he confessed, and who declared Patrick unfit to be ordained. But the details of that Patrick did not go into.

Death and Resurrection

From what we can tell today, when Patrick died, he was utterly forgotten for about a hundred years or so. Maybe a Biblical lifetime of 70s years. But then someone in Armagh in Ulster discovered his two testaments in an attic or a trunk somewhere. The Armagh clergy (Ireland was Christian by then, or about as Christian as it ever got) used Patrick's writings as a propaganda tool to insist they, the Armagh clergy, were the chief clerics in all Ireland, as their church was founded by this heroic saint, and their bishop (attached to the Armagh monastery complex) was the Primate of ALL IRELAND. 

It was from that point that Patrician histories and hagiographies proliferated, and the Patrick we all know, fighting the Druids and chasing the snakes out of Ireland, came to be. But none of that material – even were some of it to have a basis in truth – compares to Patrick's own incredible story. What a lonely life he led, lonely except for God's presence! What a cross he bore in trying to write, and elderly man remembering the Latin of his childhood as best he could and writing about his life and tragedies. And what a mission! He wrote that after his return to Ireland, he had been robbed, beaten, even enslaved again. But he kept on. And unique of all saints' writings that I've ever heard of, Patrick at one point mentioned the faith – and the great beauty! – of Irish women!

As the Englishman Thomas Hardy would one day (early 20th century) write, "Many things are too strange to believe; nothing is too strange to have happened."

That uniquely applies to St. Patrick, the Briton-Roman wayward aristocrat exile for Christ.

An Préachán

St. Patrick, intercede for us!

 Amici,

Take a moment to view this great painting by Jim Fitzpatrick of St. Patrick. THAT's a saint to drive out the snakes in the Church today.

Fitzpatrick writes:

Originally commissioned by a US company and never used; they considered it a little too wild but I enjoyed creating this different and more imaginative portrait of our national saint. Patrick was no slouch and rebelled against the rigid authority of Rome and allowed the Irish to keep their religious beliefs while incorporating Christianity into their ancient belief system. From then onwards Irish missionaries carried the gospels to Europe and converted many of the most barbarous and powerful tribes to Christianity.

This is basically true but not quite, as so much of what is Irish. St. Patrick went to Ireland without the approval of the British bishops, and he may have not even be ordained a priest, let alone a bishop. He had no authority or power except what God gave him; from his own writings (i.e. two documents, his Confession and his Letter to Coroticus, which contain the only certain information we have for the saint) he mentions no troubles with the druids, although he does write that he was enslaved a few more times. In fact, he was sort of forgotten in the century after his death, being rediscovered and rehabilitated by the Armagh clergy when they found his two surviving writings in an attic or somewhere, which they broadcast to assert Armagh's claim to be the Primatial See of all Ireland.

St. Patrick must have managed his mission quite well because pagan Ireland produced no martyrs. In fact, in the next generation, there's the great tale of St. Brigid herself, who had a "Life" like few saints can be said to have had. Bríd was the daughter of a king, and was fostered by a druid! She never had troubles with him or any druid (the draoí saved her from her father, by the way, when the latter was going to kill her). In some manner we won't know in this mortal life, she became (apparently) head of a major pagan shrine to the great Celtic goddess Brigit that she turned into a Christian shrine: Killdare. (A dual monastery run by the Abbess and the site of a sacred flame from pagan times that the English extinguished.) 

Then in the next generation after Naomh Bríd, St. Colm Cille (521-597), THE major Irish saint of those centuries, actually saved the druids from extinction, arguing for their preservation at the Convention of Druim Ceat around 573 or so, A.D. The result was what author John Minahane calls "Christian Druids" in his important 2006 book: The Christian Druids: On the Filid or Philosopher-poets of Ireland.

In short, St. Patrick and St. Brigid and St. Colm Cille were powerful, God-filled saints who lived truly heroic lives, and certainly stood up to the Church bureaucracy of their times. They'd certainly be kicking Bergoglio to the curb. They have thrown the current Irish Church into the sea. (Another meaning to this great painting!) And if you know anything about the incredible St. Columbanus (540-615), a younger contemporary of St. Colm Cille, you'd be praying to him to rid us of our troubles in Rome. (He had stood up to a pope in his day; but whole tale is a long story, indeed. He didn't condemn that pope, but certainly stood his ground; we need even one Columbanus today, alas. Would that we had one!)

Anyway, St. Patrick, oh so heroic a saint, intercede for us.

An Préachán