Fake Patricks
The fake Patricks at the head of countless Saint Patrick’s Day parades today are no more a parody of the man than the church has cultivated over the centuries. The church has not been averse to ascribing supernatural powers to saints, to the extent that people still offer prayers to them. The doggerel crediting Patrick with the absence of snakes and toads from Ireland is no more incredible than much that the church has regarded as authentic:
So success attend Saint Patrick’s fist,
for he’s a saint so clever,
he gave the snakes and toads a twist,
and bothered them for ever.”
Read accounts of the supposed feats of Irish saints in early times and the claims do not bear scrutiny, but nor, then, do the miraculous claims of the church in modern times. Read stories of “healings” attributed to visits to shrines visited by countless pilgrims and search for independently verified empirical evidence, and it is entirely absent.
A casual attitude toward the truth surrounding saints has been accompanied by a casual attitude toward church history. Another rhyme,
Saint Patrick was a gentleman,
he came of decent people,
he built a church in Dublin town
and on it built a steeple.
is as lacking in historical foundation as claims concerning Patrick and reptiles, but its historicity is probably not much less than that of the numerous traditions that developed regarding Patrick’s presence: Armagh’s claim to be the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland arose from rhe financial and political interests of the monks centuries after the death of Patrick.
Fake news tends to be regarded by most people as a phenomenon that has only emerged in contemporary politics, but a brief perusal of church history would reveal that bishops and clergy have engaged in fake news for generations. Stories have been shaped to facilitate the power and influence of the church, so Patrick was presented as being subject to Rome; the early Irish chuch was presented as being subject to the Pope; being truly Irish was presented as being Roman Catholic. The authenticity of clerical claims could not be questioned.
To read Patrick’s writings is to recoil from ecclesiastical history, it is to wonder how a man of humility and peace became the reference figure for an oppressive hierarchy. Were Patrick alive he might have laughed aloud at the depictions of him, it would be no more incongruous than the way he was depicted for centuries.
It is always taken that ‘saints’ arrived and suddenly the whole place fell about themselves to convert. And you also see the same thing in Scotland.
Loosely, I suspect the connections in the south was with Wales, and that Pembrokeshire and the southeast of Ireland was seamless, in the early period. Earlier than the fall of Rome in Britian. And it was from there that the early Christians Celestine refers when he sends Paladius as bishop.
But again, I think that early church was setup with a quasi military and a democratic/republican structure. Where the Abbots were the heads of forts and the bishops admin in the towns.
Here’s something you may not have known. In Ireland, all of it. The total mark in the archaeological of the presence of the biggest and most powerful polity the world had seen to then. There, 40 miles over the water for the better part of 500 years is about a car boot full of artefacts. Where you are in the southwest sticking a shovel in the ground you have a good chance of hitting something Roman. Here nothing.
I think my complaint at the “fake news” told by the church was, in part, a reaction to reading the opening pages of John Boyne’s latest novel in which the theocracy that emerged from the fake history is completely dominant.
It is odd that Roman artefacts are so scarce in these parts when they are so plentiful in these parts, almost as though the Romans had a fear of Ireland
It’s only recently that the idea that to be Irish one had to be Roman Catholic; it’s still believed by many so-called “Irish Americans”. Official Ireland ignores the reality that most people of Irish descent in the USA came from northern protestant backgrounds.
I think it was deeply rooted in the 1937 Constitution, McQuaid wanting something much more thorough-going than the “special place,” and was obviously accentuated by the Troubles, where ethnicity and religious identity came to be seen as almost coterminous in the minds of some people.