THE CELTS

A person once sternly reminded online that that the word "Celt" should always be pronounced with a "hard c". I don't know how s/he could tell how I prononced it, considering s/he was reading something I posted. I was certainly thinking "hard c" when I typed it, if that counts! But please rest assured I DO pronounce "Celt" with a hard c, so for those of you who can't wait to write me as a soft c pronouncer, that's one thing you won't have to worry about.

When people think of "Celt" they may think of a Boston basketball team, but that's not what this page is about. The Celts are one of the almost indigenous peoples of Europe (the Basques are apparently the natives). Celt is actually an umbrealla term for several hundred tribes, with multiple languages and different mythologies that varied from one group to another. Historically, Celtic lands ranged from Ireland,Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and other places in Europe.

 Most Neopagans see all ideas about what Celts do and don’t believe as entielry subjective, since they think the Celts have vanished. So if I someone says Wicca has  nil to do with ancient Celtic religions, Wiccans would say you were wrong, because no one knows what the Celts believed,  and therefore they were correct in saying the Celts actually practiced Wicca since there is no proof otherwise.

Depsite what many (not all but many) if not most Neopagans/Wiccans/Neodruids think, there are still Celtic people around, and we do know quite a bit about what the ancient Celtic Pagans believed! Besides, the idea that something is true just because you can’t prove it's not true isn't logical. It's like saying "The ruins of Atlantis lie under the Staute of Liberty", and thinking everyone must accept this idea as true since it can't be proven or disproven.

Many of the largest cities in the U.S. and Canada have huge Celtic communities (particularly Irish, Scotch and Welsh). It's estimated there are 2-3 times more people of "pure Irish decent" in The U.S. than in Ireland itself! The Celts also includes, the Scotch, the Angles, the Saxons, the Welch, and the Cornish, among others.

 Wiccan authors are no doubt the biggest inventors of Psuedo-Celtic history. Gavin and Yvonne Frost for instance claim in their book A Witch’s Guide To Life that the Celts were people who came from the Steppes of China into Northern Europe in 2000 B.C. and supposedly conquered and civilized as they came. They were in turn conquered by other invaders. The Celts fled to Glastonbury, and finally were conquered by the Belgae (ancestors of Belgians) in 52 B.C. Historians are puzzled as to why the Frost’s chose 52 B.C., apparently they drew it out of thin air, since no explanation is given. What the Frosts don’t realize, is that the people who conquered the Celts they describe, were yet just another set of Celts! The Belgae who conquered them too, were Celts.

Perplexed by the Frost's claim, author Peter Bedford Ellis states, “An explanation shows their scholarship deeply rooted in 16th and 17th century balderdash with a mind blowing reinterpretation of history...” {The Druids pg 277. } What he politely calls “a mind blowing reinterpretation of history” I call history revision!

With the invention of Wicca, a mountain of materials arose out of thin air about Celtic culture...much of it not very authentic. One freelance writer wrote a magazine article a few years back about how he attended a seminar on what he thought was going to be about Celtic religion, only to find it was about crop circles (which even then had been debunked as a hoax). There are Celtic dream cards, Celtic Tarot decks, Celtic crystal wands, and other such rubbish...none of which are Celtic. Much of this comes from "filling in the blanks" metality that quickly snowballs out of control. There are also of course, people who simply lie about Celtic history to get money, like the televangelist Rev. Ike selling "miracle good luck coins" to uneducated poor people. Someone greedy for instance, can create a "Celtic healing workshop" and charge $120 a head, teaching an alamagam of occult beliefs that are no more Celtic than the corned beef and cabbage meal of St. Patrick's day in America is.

To add to this problem,  there was a romaticizing of Celtic mythology in the 19th century (and in centuries prior, as well), and many Neopagans are only too hapy to accept fraud as fact, even when Professor Ronald Hutton (among others) has now debunked it. Any fairy tale, odd custom, even if minutes old, or simply an idea that sounds good with no proof to back it up, becomes evidence of "survival of Cletic Pagan culture/religion".

It is not, however, impossible to seperate fact from witch-ful thinking. The Celtic people are still around, and they are usually quick to tell people that Wicca (or Wicce, Witta, whatever you want to label it) and its Neopagan clones are NOT an ancient Celtic religion! Neither are the various fanciful Druid groups practicing actual Druidism, etc.

There's a mountain of Balarney out there to back up claims of witch-ful thinkers. In trying to sort out fact from fiction, it can be difficult to refute the claims of Neopagans/Wiccans/Neodruids promoting their non-Celtic faith (oops, forgot, you guys don't promote your faith, because that would be prosteltyzing <snicker>).

 But it's still relativley easy to prove some thinks are nonsense, for example, the claim that there was an ancient "Irish Potato Goddess", as some Neopagans do. The potato comes from South America and wasn't introduced to Europe until the 16th century. Hence, it is easy to refute the potato godess, but the massive bulk of fuax documentation, combined with the automatic distrust by Neopagans of anyone  criticizing the authenciticity of their "ancient" beliefs and "traditions" (and thus branding them "lying xtian" in the process), make it hard to have rational dialouge. Add to this fact that Neopagans and occultists of all varieties enjoy the sport of trying to prove they know more than their fellow travelers, in a kind of esoteric one upmanship (just visit a few Neopagan/occult NG's and BB's to see this). Emotions are the hardest obstacle to overcome. 

Wicca was created by Crowley disciple Gerlad Gardner in 1950, there's actually not much Celtic about it. There are some Celtic words borrowed to describe things like Holidays, but the eight holidays celebrated by Wiccans and Neopagans celebrate called the "wheel of the year", weren't celebrated by the Celts (see the Holidaze webage). Furthermore, names like "Samhain" and "Lughmas" weren't adopted until later. Those two holidays for instance were called  "November Eve" &"August Eve" at first. The 8 holidays are actually lifted in their present form from the O.T.O., the Crowley sex magic cult to which Gardner belonged.

Elements of Psudeo-Celtic relgion are invented by taking things out of European Ceremonial magic, which arose out of the Middle Ages and was derived from many different things such as Gnosticism and the Cabala. The four elements of Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water are said to be Celtic by some writers, but aren't. The idea that the Celts believed in a god and goddess is also erroneous...their primary deities were males in sets of threes. The idea of all gods being one god and all goddesses being one goddess that most Neopagans/occultists subscribe to is an invention of bad scholarsip of the 19th century. The primary Celtic deities were a threesome of male gods, namely, Teutates, Esus, and Taranis, likewise the Germanic tribes  preferred a threesome of Odin, Thor, and Tyr. This is one reason, in fact, that Christianity spread through Celtic lands; The Christian belief of God as a Trinity wasn't an alien concept to them. The British Celts generally thought of things in terms of threes, rather than duos, hence no duothesitic religion. There is also no evidence that the Celtic religions had goddesses as their primary deity, but seem to always prefer gods as their main idols.

The best way to debunk the new Psudeo-Celtic mythology is to point out that the Celts aren't long vanished like the mythical Atlantis. Believeing Celtic civilization has long since vanished leads to things like "We don’t know what the Celts believed, but we can make educated guesses based on archaeology and their legends", being said. This opens a dorrway in which any belief or idea can suddenly have a Celtic label slapped on it. But while many Wiccans/Neopagans/Neodruids think somehow that the Celts are long gone, but in fact, many modern Celtic communities exist. And I'm not saying ALL of them think this, but most of them certainly seem to. 

There are about 16 million Celts alive in the world today, even though only about 2 million speak a Celtic language such as Gaelic. There's frustration and some anger by Celtic people toward Neopagans, because their culture has been eroding for thousands of years - -caused first by Romans then later by English and Germanic people-- and now the Neopagans are further cuasing damage by reinvinting Celtic culture to suit themselves, ironically thinking they are somehow saving it.

While Christians (St. Patrick in particular) get the blame for the end of Druidic Paganism, it was another group of Pagans, the Romans, that actually started the decline of Druidism in the British Isles. When the Romans first reached the shores of the Britain, the Romans recorded that the Druids were there to greet them by throwing curses and spells on them to stop their invasion. The result of all this sorcery by the powerful Druids was...the Romans conquered them anyway. It seems the magic of the Druids was about as successful as occultists nowadays.

The idea of wide scale persecution to convert the people of the British Isles simply is not accurate. When Rome decided to send a missionary expedition to the British Isles in the 8th century, they were surprised to find the Christian Church was already well established there. The Celtic Church had evolved independently of Rome and had a few minor differences, (such as a different holiday calendar for instance), but it was definitely Christian! 

People of the Neopagan mindest seem to think that 2,000 years of Celtic involvement in Christianity are somehow irrelevant. The Bible is the greatest testament to the Celtic Christianity, containing Paul's Epistle to the Gauls of Spain (Galatians).  Mass conversion of Celtic peoples from Pagan religions to Christianity was nearly bloodless, but no one seems to bother to ask why the Celts thought Christianity was a better deal. The transition of Paganism to Christianity is part of the history of the Celtic people. Christianity IS the religion of the Celts, and has been for hundreds of years. To try to make an archaic leap back to the superstitons they abandoned by choice is to basically write off one's ancestors as irrelevant, and trying to find one's roots is supposedly what Neoapaganism is about.

Want to find out about the religions of the Celts? Find an Anglican Church near you (your best bet is a Charismatic Episcopal Church).

WAS ST. PATRICK A BAD GUY???

A popular book titled Witta: An Irish Pagan Tradition purports to be a book about "Irish Wicca" in ancient times. The book is filled with inaccuracies and inventions that are passed off as facts. St. Patrick for instance is painted as a villain who destroys Irish civilization, when exactly the opposite is true. According to Wiccan and feminist Edian McCoy, St. Patrick was apparently some kind of one man dynamo who singlehandedly converted Irealand!

"The arrival in Antrim of a young Caledonian slave named Succat would hardly seem of historical note. But the slave boy became St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland and the person who single-handedly opened the island to mass Christianization."

She doesn’t mention how Patrick was able to accomplish this feat. And it doesn’t seem to occur to her, if the Irish were so all-fired happy being Druids, why did they reject it for Christianity? Obviously, he couldn’t "force" everyone to accept, being one person. Also, if the Druids were so powerful, why did they not simply put a spell on St. Patrick and be done with him? Didn’t their magic work? Weren’t the gods and goddesses of the Druids more powerful than the Christian's "slave god" as occultists seem to think?

Gray also rejects the idea that Celts worshiped trees or stones...a fact that has been documented for years. She doesn’t cite a source for her claim, she is simply revising history to suit herself. Many primitive peoples, both ancient and modern, believed trees and rocks had spirits (animism). The Celts were no different, but still wrong.

Far from being the villans of history, ancient Christian monks of Ireland are credited with actually saving Western Civilization from barbarians (another group of Pagans!). What information remains about Celtic Irish Paganism is due in a large part to the writings of St. Patrick. So if Patrick was so desperate to obliterate Celtic Paganism, why did he do this? The truth is Celtic Paganism was being voluntarily abandoned by most folks for the Christianity, and it didn’t need a lot of help from Patrick. The Romans were a highly literate people who prized books and education, and had public libraries. By the time of Emperor Constantine's reign, there were twenty-eight public libraries in Rome. Where Roman power went, and it spread far indeed, schools and libraries were founded. Neopagans would have you believe Romans simply went from village to village yelling "Accept Christianity or die!", and bringing wholesale ignorance in the process. It simply is not true, and it did not happen this way.

Pagan Rome never conquered Ireland and as a result the Celtic Irish were illiterate without cities or the things of civilization. This is a far cry from the image of the godlike "wise ones" Wiccans would have us think populated ancient Ireland. About forty years before the final fall of Rome to the barbarian Odoacer, St. Patrick took Christianity to Ireland, and with it, literacy and a love of reading and writing. Patrick succeeded in doing what Pagan Rome had failed, namely, bringing a love of reading and writing to the Irish people,. Monasteries were founded which became repositories of learning, and without the Christianity Neopagans so despise, it would have never happened.. In about thirty years, Patrick converted Ireland to Christianity, bringing literacy and learning, and he did so without killing anyone. Sorry Wiccans, but it's true! Refer to How The Irish Saved Civilization for more information of how Christianity help enrich the lives of the Irish.

Once again Christians suffered persecution of Pagans in a new form. It was not in a coliseum facing death by lions while Pagan crowds cheered. Barbaric hordes of Pagan Vandals, Goths, Saxons, Huns and others burned, looted and murdered across Europe during the 6th and 7th centuries. The Irish monks kept on building abbeys. They went in search to find more and more books. They found books in Coptic, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, of which they made numerous copies. Since the Pagan barbarians eliminated all the libraries on the European Continent the abbeys of Ireland became only libraries. Yes, if it hadn't been for Christians (those mean old "xtians" Wiccans hate so much), there would have been no libraries. Because of Pagans, libraries were destroyed Neopagans and Wiccans, with their voluminous libraries would probably faint at the idea!

During the Middle Ages, the illiterate kings and rulers of the Franks, Angles, Saxons, and Burundians asked the Irish Christian monks to come and educate their sons. Irish Christian clerics were invited to build monasteries , libraries and schools in towns across Europe, and cities such as Paris, Ghent, Glastonbury, Rome, Verona, Salzburg, and Mainz. You read that right, they were invited. Even when they went somewhere they were not invited to at first, they came with their faith and their books, which quickly made them welcome guests. People wanted to learn to read and write then, just as people do now, and Christians knew how. Christians were the "wise ones", NOT Pagans or witches!

As a result of the rise of the Western Pagan barbarian tribes and fall of Rome, all the countries of the Western Roman Empire fell into ignorance. It was really PAGANS who brought on these Dark Ages. It was by saving the books that the Irish Christians saved civilization. Despite what Neopagans think, these Pagans were not wise teachers and bearers of light, but were murdering marauders!

Had it not been for the Christian monks of Ireland, civilization would probably not be where it is today. We would probably just be at the renaissance level by now, if even that. It is a travesty to the memory of those brave Christian monks who saved Western civilization to paint them as some kind of murdering villains! Christianity brought literacy and ended ignorance and superstition. This is a fact that Christians must begin reinforcing, and Neopagans must learn to accept! The idea that Christianity brought ignorance to the ancient Celts is just one example of how Wiccans and Neopagans distort history.

The St. Patrick You Never Knew           

He didn't chase the snakes out of Ireland
and he may never have plucked a shamrock to teach the mystery of the Trinity. Yet St. Patrick well deserves to be honored by the people of Ireland—and by downtrodden and excluded people everywhere.

By Anita McSorley

Some 1,500 years ago a teenage boy from what is now Great Britain was kidnapped and enslaved by marauders from a neighboring country. Not since Paris absconded with Helen of Troy has a kidnapping so changed the course of history.The invading marauders came from fifth-century Ireland. The teenager they captured eventually escaped, but returned voluntarily some years later. In the meantime, he had become convinced that he was handpicked by God to convert the entire country to Christianity.

Apparently, he was right. In the process of converting the primitive people of Ireland, however, the former slave experienced a conversion, too. In the years that followed, he not only shared God with the people of Ireland, but also grew in his understanding of God through them.And so it was that a young Briton named Patricius died an Irishman named Patrick. And neither Ireland nor Christianity was ever quite the same. This conviction of Thomas Cahill, Catholic author of the best-selling book How the Irish Saved Civilization, was made clear in an exclusive interview for St. Anthony Messenger last August.

Patrick in Myth and History

No, Patrick never chased the snakes out of Ireland. Nor do we really know whether he used the shamrock to teach converts about the Trinity. But what we do know about St. Patrick is far more interesting than many of the legends that grew up around him.And the fact that we know anything about him at all is as great a miracle as any that later traditions ascribe to him. For Patrick is literally the only individual we know from fifth-century Ireland or England. Not only do no other written records from Britain or Ireland exist from that century, but there are simply no written records at all from Ireland prior to Patrick's.

Surprisingly enough, however, scholarly debate about the authenticity of what Patrick left us is almost nonexistent. The chronology of his life is very confused. Indeed, we can't even identify for sure when he was born, ordained a bishop or died! Experts agree, however, that the two examples of his writing that we have are clearly written by the same man, the man we know as Patrick.These two brief documents, Patrick's Confession and his "Letter to Coroticus," are the basis for all we know of the historical Patrick. The Confession, because its purpose was to recount his own call to convert the Irish and to justify his mission to an apparently unsympathetic audience in Britain, is not a traditional biography.

And the "Letter to Coroticus," apparently an Irish warlord whom Patrick was forced to excommunicate, is a wonderful illustration of Patrick's prowess as a preacher but doesn't tell us much by way of traditional biography either.The uncontested, if somewhat unspecific, biographical facts about Patrick are as follows:Patrick was born Patricius somewhere in Roman Britain to a relatively wealthy family. He was not religious as a youth and, in fact, claims to have practically renounced the faith of his family.

While in his teens, Patrick was kidnapped in a raid and transported to Ireland, where he was enslaved to a local warlord and worked as a shepherd until he escaped six years later.He returned home and eventually undertook studies for the priesthood with the intention of returning to Ireland as a missionary to his former captors. It is not clear when he actually made it back to Ireland, or for how long he ministered there, but it was definitely for a number of years.

By the time he wrote the Confession and the "Letter to Coroticus," Patrick was recognized by both Irish natives and the Church hierarchy as the bishop of Ireland. By this time, also, he had clearly made a permanent commitment to Ireland and intended to die there. Scholars have no reason to doubt that he did.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Though Patrick's writings tell us little in terms of names and dates, they do reveal much about Patrick the man. But traditional biographies of Patrick, suggests Thomas Cahill, author and former religion editor for Doubleday, don't really do him justice."I think they missed a lot of what Patrick was about because they approached him as a kind of plaster-of-paris saint. Two things," he says, "really shine through his Confession: his humility and his strength. That strength is what has been missing in the earlier biographies and portraits of Patrick."

In fact, Cahill says, "The Patrick who came back to Ireland with the gospel was a real tough guy. He couldn't have been anything else—only a very tough man could have hoped to survive those people. I don't mean to say he wasn't a saint—he was a great saint—but he was a very rough, vigorous man."And he was his own man, writes Noel Dermot O'Donoughue, O.D.C., in his 1987 biography Aristocracy of Soul: Patrick of Ireland. When Patrick receives the vision that he believes calls him to evangelize the Irish, he doesn't hesitate, despite the fact that in 400 years no one had taken the gospel beyond the boundaries of Roman civilization. "He goes his own way following his own dreams and divine 'responses,'" says O'Donoughue, even though by doing so he is challenging the structure and ordinances of the Church he serves.

It doesn't take a scholar to recognize how he was able to do this. Patrick was so certain that he had been specifically called by God to do exactly what he did—return to the land of his captivity and convert the barbarians to Christianity—that his Confession leaves even the modern reader little room for doubt. In this certainty, Patrick finds his strength—strength sufficient, in fact, to overcome every obstacle he will encounter in the remaining years of his life.The first obstacle was his education. The six years Patrick was enslaved in Ireland put him permanently behind his peers in terms of his classical education. His Latin would always be poor. Later in life when he used Latin less frequently, it was practically unintelligible at times.

Despite the fact that Patrick would be self-conscious about his literary limitations to the end of his days, he was not uneducated. One suspects, however, that he was primarily self-educated. His use of biblical quotations, Cahill says, "is far more accurate and appropriate than many of the Fathers of the Church."And although almost any other qualification pales by comparison to Patrick's zeal for his mission, he must have set off equipped with an intellect both subtle and supple. For he not only decided, unilaterally, to do what no man in 400 years of Christian history had done before him—to carry the gospel message to the ends of the earth—but he also found a way to do it.

It's hard to grasp just what an accomplishment that was, says Cahill. When Patrick decided to "willingly go back to the barbarians with the gospel," Cahill explains, "he had to figure out how to bring the values of the gospel he loved to such people. These were people who still practiced human sacrifice, who warred with each other constantly and who were renowned as the great slave traders of the day."That was not a simple thing. This was before courses were given to missionaries in what is now called inculturation—how to plant the gospel in such a culture," Cahill says. "No one had ever even thought about how to do it; Patrick had to work his way through it himself.

"I know that Paul is referred to as the first missionary," Cahill says, "but Paul never got out of the Greco-Roman world, nor did any of the apostles. And here we are, five centuries after Jesus, who had urged his disciples to preach to all nations. They just didn't do that. And the reason they didn't is because they did not consider the barbarians to be human."

Patron Saint of the Excluded

Patrick's enslavement as an adolescent had to have been a critical factor in the development of his unique attitude toward the Irish. Even in captivity, he must have come to know them as human, hence, deserving of the gospel. This set the stage for his call to convert them.

As a result of his enslavement, Cahill, whose particular interest is the "hinges of history," says, "Patrick grew into a man that he truly would not otherwise have become. So you would have to say that Patrick's kidnapping was a great grace, not just for the people of Ireland, but for all of Western history."Had he never been kidnapped, it seems quite likely that it would have been decades, probably centuries, before Ireland was converted. It certainly would not have been in a position to "save civilization," as Cahill so dramatically puts it in his book, when the Roman Empire crumbled and literacy was lost—lost, that is, by all but the Irish monasteries planted by Patrick and his successors.

Not surprisingly, his own experience in captivity left Patrick with a virulent hatred of the institution of slavery, and he would later become the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against it."The papacy did not condemn slavery as immoral until the end of the 19th century," Cahill says, "but here is Patrick in the fifth century seeing it for what it is. I think that shows enormous insight and courage and a tremendous 'fellow feeling'—the ability to suffer with other people, and to understand what other people's suffering is like."

In fact, although he is renowned as the patron saint of the country and the people he evangelized, a better advocate than Patrick cannot be found for anyone disadvantaged or living on the fringes of society."He really is one of the great saints of the downtrodden and excluded—people that no one else wants anything to do with," Cahill says.

Women find a great advocate in Patrick. Unlike his contemporary, St. Augustine, to whom actual women seemed more like personifications of the temptations of the flesh than persons, Patrick's Confession speaks of women as individuals. Cahill points out, for example, Patrick's account of "a blessed woman, Irish by birth, noble, extraordinarily beautiful—a true adult—whom I baptized."Elsewhere, he lauds the strength and courage of Irish women: "But it is the women kept in slavery who suffer the most—and who keep their spirits up despite the menacing and terrorizing they must endure. The Lord gives grace to his many handmaids; and though they are forbidden to do so, they follow him with backbone." He is actually the first male Christian since Jesus, Cahill says, to speak well of women.

"The Fathers of the Church had the most horrible things to say—it's frightening to read what people like Augustine or John Chrysostom had to say about women. As remarkable as anything about Patrick is that in his writings there is never anything remotely like that."In fact, there are clear instances of him saying warm and appreciative things about women. O'Donoughue adds, "It is clear that the man who wrote the Confession and "Coroticus" is deeply and sensitively open to women and womanhood....But he does not take refuge in either 'the pretentious asceticism, nor yet in that neurotic fear of and contempt for the feminine' that has entered so deeply into the attitudes and structures of the Christian Church....In this respect he is a complete man."

Patrick the Mystic

Modern Catholics might have a hard time reconciling the portrait of the rugged individualist that Cahill describes with the current notion of a mystic. Yet O'Donoughue says that in the Confession, "the main lines of Patrick's spiritual development show through, and they are unmistakably the lines of a mystical journey." In fact, his biography of Patrick is the first in a series of works edited by Michael Glazier called "The Way of the Christian Mystics."

So what makes Patrick a mystic?

First, as recounted in the Confession, most of the major events in Patrick's life are preceded by a dream or vision. The visions were usually simple—almost self-explanatory—but they were also very vivid and carried enormous emotional impact with Patrick.The first vision, which he received after six years of servitude in Ireland, came by way of a mysterious voice, heard in his sleep. "Your hungers are rewarded: You are going home," the voice said. "Look, your ship is ready." Indeed, some 200 miles away, there it was. (Patrick was nothing if not tenacious.)

The second vision—the one that came to him after he'd returned home and that called him back to Ireland—was equally straightforward. Victoricus, a man Patrick knew in Ireland, appeared to him in this dream, holding countless letters, one of which he handed to Patrick. The letter was entitled "The Voice of the Irish." Upon reading just the title, he heard a multitude of voices crying out to him: "Holy boy, we beg you to come and walk among us once more." He was so moved by this that he was unable to read further and woke up.But the dream recurred again and again. Eventually Patrick tells his dismayed family of his plans to return to evangelize Ireland and soon begins his preparations for the priesthood. What is interesting about this dream calling Patrick to his lifelong mission to the Irish is that it comes not as a directive from God, but as a plea from the Irish.

It is also significant, O'Donoughue says, that "the voices in the dream do not ask for preaching or baptism but only that Patrick as one specially endowed should come back and share their lives, come and walk once more with them." In other words, at least according to his recollections decades later, Patrick wasn't commanded to bring civilization or salvation to the heathens. He was invited to live among them as Christ's witness.When he finally returns to Ireland, he proceeds to treat the barbarians with the respect implicit in his dream. From the outset, Patrick feels humbled and honored that God has selected him to convert the Irish. Apparently he never doubted that he would be able to do so.

Patrick even came to see his own kidnapping as a grace, Cahill says. From the time Patrick sets off on his 200-mile journey to his "waiting ship," he is convinced "once and for all that he is surrounded by Providence and that he is really in the hands of God. And that is what gets him through the rest of his life. That is what enables him to do the incredible thing that he does by returning to the barbarians." And that closeness to God in no way diminishes as the years progress.

"Patrick was a mystic who felt the presence of God in every turn of the road," Cahill says. "God was palpable to him, and his relationship to him was very, very close." In fact, he says, it was very much like the relationship in the Bible that Jesus has with God the Father. "It is very familiar and comfortable, and that is how Patrick saw God at work in the world."

Patrick's Lasting Legacy

When Patrick looked back at the end of his life on his service to Ireland, Cahill says, he must have been pleased with his accomplishments.By the time of his death, or shortly thereafter, "the Irish stopped slave trading and they never took it up again." Human sacrifice had become unthinkable. And although the Irish never stopped warring on one another, "war became much more confined and limited by what we might call the 'rules of warfare.'

"I think that though he probably died knowing that he had succeeded [in his mission]," Cahill adds, "he also died hoping that success would be permanent and not temporary."In fact, Patrick's success couldn't have been more permanent. Not only had he accomplished what he'd set out to do—convert the nation to Christ—but in the process he'd retrieved from obscurity the primary objective set by Christ for his apostles: the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth.

The inadvertent results of his conversion of Ireland, however, were equally astonishing and long-lasting.First, as Cahill makes the strong case in How the Irish Saved Civilization, it is Patrick's conversion of Ireland that makes possible the preservation of Western thought through the early Dark Ages by the Irish monasteries founded by Patrick's successors. When the lights went out all over Europe, a candle still burned in Ireland. That candle was lit by Patrick. Second, by converting the Irish pagans to Christianity without making any attempt to romanize them as well, he founded a new kind of Church, one that was both Catholic and primitive.

Third, with Patrick's introduction of Christianity to Ireland, Cahill says, the faith was introduced for the first time into a culture free of the sociopolitical baggage of Greco-Roman civilization. Prior to Patrick's gift of the faith to Ireland, to be Christian was to be Roman, or at least to be a product of Roman civilization. The conversion of Ireland, however, sees the faith thrive in an entirely different environment—in a culture that celebrates rather than abnegates the natural, a culture in which, according to Cahill, there is a "sense of the world as holy, as the Book of God—as a healing mystery, fraught with divine messages."

In this tradition, Cahill explains, "there is a trust in the objects of sensory perception, which are seen as signposts from God. But there is also a sensuous reveling in the splendors of the created world, which would have made Roman Christians exceedingly uncomfortable."

As a result, Cahill says, "The early Irish Christianity planted in Ireland by Patrick is much more joyful and celebratory [than its Roman predecessor] in the way it approaches the natural world. It is really not a theology of sin but of the goodness of creation, and it really is intensely incarnational."And since it was the Irish monks who served as the bridge between classical Christianity and the Middle Ages, medieval Christianity tends to reflect the celebratory nature of Irish spirituality rather than the gloom and sin-centeredness of its classical predecessor.

Finally, Patrick gave the Irish himself—knowingly, willingly, joyfully, proudly. He did this despite the fact that, even at the end of his life, "after 30 years of missionary activity," Cahill says, "he knows he's still living in a very scary place. You don't change people—people who offer human sacrifice and who war on one another constantly—you don't change them overnight."

But change them he eventually did. And the example of his life—his courage, his intelligence, his compassion and his incredible, indomitable faith—made the lives of all Catholics, even those living 1,500 years later, just a little easier.To millions of modern-day Catholics, an Ireland without Patrick is unthinkable. But so, too, Cahill says, is the prospect of modern life without saints like him. The saints are for the ages, and ours no less than any other.

"Life would be almost unbearable without such people," he says. "I think it would be unbearable. The saints are for everyone—believer, unbeliever, Christian, non-Christian—it doesn't really matter. They are the people who say by their lives that human life is valuable—that my life is valuable—and that there is a reason for living. Without them, history would just be one horror after another."

Patrick at the Judgment

There is no question that Patrick taught us by his example that all life is, indeed, precious. Yet it's hard to imagine that there isn't a soft spot in his heart reserved just for the Irish.In fact, there is an old legend that promises that on the last day, though Christ will judge all the other nations, it will be St. Patrick sitting in judgment on the Irish.

When asked whether that spelled good news or bad news for the Irish, Cahill doesn't hesitate.

"That's great news for the Irish," he says with a laugh.

Anita McGurn McSorley is associate editor of The Leaven, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Kansas City, Kansas. She has also written for Columbia. Last year, she interviewed Father Edward Hays, founder of Shantivanam House of Prayer, for St. Anthony Messenger. She is a member of St. Patrick Parish in Kansas City.

Why not discover the REAL religion of the Celts? The Celts have had a deep love for the Christian religon for centuries. The Celts threw off the superstition  and ignorance of the Druids for a religion that taught hope and love. If Druids really had all these magical powers as some people think Christianity would have never spread.

There are many Celtic Christian Churches all over the world. There also many independent Anglican churches out there. Why not visit one? There's bound to be one you will feel at home with. Here are just a few listed.

ARE THE CELTS SOME OF THE 10 LOST TRIBES OF ISRAEL?