Like all Americans of Irish descent (Fitzgerald), I look forward to celebrating St. Patrick’s Day each year. Hoisting a dark stout (or two, or three) over good food and socializing with agreeable company is something to enjoy.
There are the more ridiculous traditions, however, like pinching people who don’t wear green, or the overconsumption of beer by zombie-like hordes of plastic paddys who swarm any pub that seems remotely Irish every March 17 to celebrate their questionable Gaelic heritage.
Sadly, these “traditions,” like those in most modern holidays we celebrate, have nothing to do with the actual person or why he is remembered.
What makes St. Patrick so fascinating as the patron saint of Ireland is the sheer irony.
The most obvious irony is that first “Paddy” was not Irish, but a Briton (of all people). Living during the Roman rule over Britain, he was kidnapped by Irish pirates and sold as a slave in Ireland, where he lived for six years as a shepherd. He later escaped and returned to Britain.
The experience would have easily justified a life-time of hatred toward the Irish, but instead he went back after being ordained as a bishop to convert them to Christianity.
To get an idea of how daunting a task this was, Thomas Cahill in his tongue-in-cheek-titled book “How the Irish Saved Civilization” recounts Ireland’s carnal pagan culture during the period, as well as the influential druids and deeply entrenched traditions St. Patrick had to confront.
Yet he somehow managed to pull it off. In “St. Patrick: The Real History of His Life, From Tragedy to Triumph,” historian William Federer writes that he converted around 120,000 druids from paganism to Christianity in his lifetime, despite the attempts by other druids to kill him.
St. Patrick also openly attacked the institution of slavery, not just certain aspects of it, making him perhaps the first abolitionist in human history. For Americans, the word “slavery” typically conjures up the Transatlantic Slave Trade that brought enslaved Africans to the Americas, but in St. Patrick’s time, the practice of kidnapping people and selling or keeping them as slaves was ubiquitous to almost all cultures and nations, and the Irish and Britons were no different.
On one occasion, a Briton king raided an Irish clan that St. Patrick had recently baptized and brought them back to Britain as slaves. In response, St. Patrick penned a scathing letter to the king and his soldiers and had them excommunicated from the Church.
What makes St. Patrick an ironic figure is that he represents the opposite of what was later to befall the isle, particularly following the English Reformation. From there on out it is more or less a history replete with invasions by the English, repeated failed rebellions by the Irish against foreign rule, and then famine. Even after the southern part of the island obtained its independence in 1921 after a final war with England, it underwent an even more violent civil war, while the north was sentenced to decades of sectarian violence between republicans and loyalists during “The Troubles” (why the Irish are thought to be “lucky” is simply bewildering).
Preceding all of this was a Briton who, despite being ill-treated by the Irish, came to the island not to oppress but to preach against human oppression. Perhaps the greatest irony is that he succeeded in accomplishing what he set out to do strictly through peaceful means, as Ireland is unique in the history of Christianity for being the only place where it was introduced without a single martyr.
His decision to go back also ultimately saved much of our western literary heritage, as Cahill describes in his book. The conversion of Ireland to Christianity led to the creation of monasteries, where monks preserved classical literary works when all other known copies while destroyed during the barbarian invasions of the former Roman Empire. Those works were later reintroduced to Europe, but had the Irish monks not saved them they would have been lost forever.
TJ Martinell is a reporter for the Kirkland Reporter.
