Each year on St. Patrick’s Day, certain Baptists will claim that St. Patrick wasn’t REALLY a Catholic, but was instead a Baptist. But what do we learn from listening to St. Patrick in his own words? And what do we know about the world of St. Patrick from those who lived during his lifetime? As it turns out, Patrick was way more Catholic than you may realize… and he was quite explicit about this fact!

 

Transcript:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner, which means I’m wearing a green shirt, got a new studio redesign, special thanks to Zach Maxwell. It’s got a nice green tint to it, so it seems very timely to launch on the eve, if you will, of St. Patrick’s Day. But also it seems like a good time to address a perennial kind of fringe theory about St. Patrick. And I don’t say fringe to denigrate the theory, I actually say fringe to acknowledge that many Protestants will admit that St. Patrick was exactly what history claims him to be, a Catholic missionary. But there are also Protestants, usually Baptists, who claim that no, this is a Catholic reappropriation of history and that in fact, Patrick was what we would now call a Protestant, and more specifically usually that Patrick was a Baptist.

So I want to give a couple example of people claiming this and then look at the small area in which we agree and then show why these claims are historically completely untrue. So the first of these is from a church called Old Paths Baptist Church in Minneapolis here in the U.S.

In comes a central figure in history, a man that they would call St. Patrick. And this man, the Roman Catholics have stolen the history of this man, they’ve completely changed it, as Rome likes to do. They’ve changed the history around and turned him into a good Catholic, which couldn’t be further from the truth because Patrick didn’t… All the historical accounts that we truly have of him, of any reputable accounts, all of those accounts list his biblical stand on things and what he stood for.

Okay, so you can see the positive from that, which is that there’s this idea, if we could only go to Patrick’s writings, we could find out exactly what it is that he stood for. And you’re going to see a variation of this in another of these claims. This is from a guy named Steve Brady in Fairhaven Baptist Church. So here’s Brady presenting, this is actually part two of a series he did on what he claims is Baptist history, trying to claim St. Patrick is actually a Baptist.

The insurmountable evidence of his position among Baptist belief come from his own writings and he wrote several very important letters that still exist, letters to people that he had led to the Lord. He wrote it actually his own words, his “confession” or a letter to a man named Corotius. And those writings, as I said, still survive and they hold Baptist and New Testament doctrines throughout.

Okay, so let’s start at the point of agreement. It’s important, if you want to know what Patrick believed, to go to his actual writings, and for better or for worse, there’s not many of them. In fact, we know of two writings that are almost universally acknowledged to be actually from St. Patrick. The first is what’s sometimes called the Confessio, which is just Latin for confession. This is like a spiritual autobiography if you’ve read the Confessions of Guston. That’s what we mean by confession here, not like an admission of guilt, but a declaration of his spiritual journey, particularly in his mission to Ireland.

The second is a stranger document, it’s called the Epistola, or the epistle or letter, and this is sometimes called the Letter to the Soldiers of Croticus or the Letter of Excommunication of Croticus. And as you might get from those titles, this is a letter declaring a warlord named Croticus to be excommunicated for having murdered a bunch of newly baptized Christians.

Now, I want to point out two things here. The first, notice that neither of the works we have from Patrick is a detailed theological exposition. This is him writing on two particular topics, which means that there’s going to be a lot of stuff he necessarily isn’t covering because those aren’t the themes of what he’s writing about. It isn’t as if, in the middle of telling Croticus he’s in trouble for murdering Christians that Patrick says, “And let me take a brief digression to explain the Trinity or the seven sacraments or the authority of the Pope.” There’s none of that because that’s not what the letter’s about.

In the same way that if you were to say, “Hey, write an introduction to your life.” So someone has an idea of what it is that you’ve done in the last 20 years for Christ, you probably are not going to take the opportunity to write a systematic theology. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a systematic theology, that just means you’re writing a different document. So that’s one thing to take away from this, but there are going to be plenty of things Patrick doesn’t mention, not because he doesn’t believe them, but because those aren’t the point of what he’s writing.

The second thing is these documents are available online in Latin, in English and Gaelic and probably a bunch of other languages. And so if you want to read them, and I really encourage that, particularly if you want to do this as maybe a spiritual exercise on St. Patrick’s Day, go to Confessio, that’s confession without the N, confessio.ie, ’cause it’s an Irish website, and you can find both documents fully available in a bunch of different languages, and so you can read them for yourself.

That’s going to be really important because even though these Baptists claim, if you want to understand Patrick, “You need to read Patrick,” their claims aren’t based on anything Patrick actually wrote, but are based on one of two things, either the stuff he didn’t write or false claims other Baptists have made about him. Let me give you an example of what I mean here. So here’s that Old Path Baptist Church again.

We’re going to read about him here from Brother Beller’s Collegiate History Workbook, his section on it, and then we might get into the second one that a Baptist preacher wrote many years ago in New York. He grabbed a good history of St. Patrick or Patrick the Baptist as we call him, and he grabs that history and he pulls down a lot of good facts and everything from that, which really gives us an understanding of this time of year, or I mean, this time of church history.

And so in response to this, I just say at the outset, don’t believe a Baptist third party source just telling you, “Oh yeah, trust me, Patrick was a Baptist.” For that matter, don’t believe me as a Catholic telling you, “Trust me, Patrick was a Catholic.” Read St. Patrick in his own words, and you’ll realize, he’s not a Baptist, he’s very clearly a Catholic. In fact, both those writings that I mentioned before, the Epistola and the Confessio together, they’re about 10,000 words. The average reader can read that in about half an hour. So you can easily, in the time it takes you to watch this video or the Old Path Baptist Church video, you could read the entire document at least once for both of the documents.

In this video, I’m not going to give you so much my view as just quote Patrick to you and highlight some things, if you do go to read them, you can be mindful of and looking out for. So I want to look to six things as we’re reading Patrick in his own words. Number one, what Bible is he using? Number two, what does he think of monks and nuns? Number three, what does he think about church governance, particularly bishops, priests and deacons? Number four, what does he think about works of penance? Number five, what does he think about baptism? That’s going to be a major point in the question of whether he’s a Baptist or not. And then six, and finally, what does he think about the other sacraments?

Now, in the second part of this video, after we run through those things, it won’t take very long, I’m going to then get into a deeper dive as to why Baptists and Catholics tend to view him very differently and how Baptists tend to misunderstand both church history generally, and St. Patrick particularly. But I’m getting ahead of myself. So let’s start with those six questions I posed at the outset.

So first, what Bible does St. Patrick use? Now at the beginning of the Confessio, St. Patrick famously says, “My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers.” I love this introduction. And then he says, “I’m looked down upon by many. My father was Calpurnius, he was a deacon. His father was Potius, a priest.” Now, we’re going to get into that obviously, in a little bit, but Patrick goes on to say that his home was near, and then he mentions a spot. We don’t actually know where it is, so there’s a lot of scholarly debate as to the name of this city that he mentions, whether it’s in England or Wales or maybe even Scotland, but probably this is in Roman Britannia, so south of Hadrian’s wall, meaning modern-day England or Wales.

But in any case, he says that he was taken prisoner at 16 and at the time, he didn’t know the true God. He was taken into captivity in Ireland along with thousands of others. So as we’re going to get into England in this period, like Britannia and more broadly, the Western Roman Empire are kind of falling apart. And so you have these Irish pirates who are raiding and you have all sorts of raids going on in this point, and civilization seems to be just completely collapsing during the life of Patrick. And that’s important for his own story because he grows up in a normal-seeming environment for about 16 years, and then we find him getting kidnapped and taken into slavery and captivity. But he says, “We deserved this because we had gone away from God and did not keep his commandments. We would not listen to our priests who advised us about how we could be saved.”

Now this is going to be a really important point. We’re going to get into this passage later because it’s going to show his understanding of his own relationship to Roman Christianity, Roman Catholicism, and the Roman Empire more broadly. But right now, I want to pause all of that and just point out that this is something you could easily miss just reading the document without knowing that he’s making biblical references all throughout his confessio. It is riddled with these biblical allusions and the way he words things. And this particular one is going to be lost on Protestants because he’s making an allusion to something not in the Protestant Bible. When he says, “We would not listen to our priests who advised us about how we could be saved,” he’s quoting here from the longer form of Daniel. This is Daniel 9 in the way it appears in Catholic, but not Protestant Bibles, in which Daniel says, “We had sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from Thy commandments and ordinances. We have not listened to Thy servants, the prophets, who spoke in the name to our king, our princes, our fathers, and to all the people of the land.”

And so, you’ll see there that he’s making a pretty obvious allusion to this longer form of Daniel 9, but that this allusion is going to be lost again on Protestant readers. That’s our first clue that he’s not using a Protestant 66 book Bible, that he has a longer Catholic Bible. There are other clues about this as well. Just to give one other one, in paragraph seven of the epistle, or Epistola, he says, “The most high God does not accept the gifts of evildoers. The one who offers a sacrifice taken from what belongs to the poor is like one who sacrifices a child in the very sight of the child’s father,” and that is almost a verbatim quotation of Sirach 34 verse 20. So it’s not just he has a longer version of Daniel, he also has books that are not in the Protestant Bible. This is our first red flag that he’s not a Baptist.

Second, what does he say about monks and nuns? Now, this one is a lot less subtle because one of the things Irish Catholicism has always been famous for, is a strong emphasis on monasticism, on monks and nuns. And in the Confessio, in paragraph 41, he talks about this. He talks about how the Irish have now become the people of the Lord and are called Children of God. And then he says positively, “The sons and daughters of the leaders of the Irish are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ.” So very clearly, he’s pointing to the surge of monasticism in his own lifetime as proof of the Irish being children of God.

He then says in the next paragraph, he gives a particular example, of a blessed Irish woman of noble birth, most beautiful adult whom I baptized. “She came to us a few days later for this reason. She told us that she had received a word from a messenger of God who advised her that she should become a virgin of Christ.” That is what we now call a nun, so a consecrated virgin and that she should come close to God. Thanks be to God, six days later, enthusiastically and well, she took on the life that all virgins of God do.

So notice that he’s just taking absolutely for granted here that monasticism is part of the God-ordained plan. Now, maybe there’s some monastic independent Baptist community I’ve never heard of, but this is strikingly unlike any Baptist I’ve ever encountered, that there is a place for organized monastic kind of living.

Third, what does he think about bishop’s, priests and deacons? Now here I want to turn to the Fairhaven clip again because there’s this claim that he just believed in elders, but that he just called them bishops, but that this was just one elder per local church.

Church government. Patrick is recorded to have begun, founded 365 churches and ordained exactly the same number of pastors. Now, in that day, they used the term bishop, which is a New Testament term, that term has also been hijacked by other denominations and is used now to say kind of a district head over numerous churches, that’s what that term has come to represent, but the Bible term bishop represents pastor, and Patrick, that’d be a lot of district people over, but it’s very interesting that he started 365 churches and ordained exactly 365 pastors.

Now, none of what you just heard there is true the reference to 365 churches with 365 pastors being ordained in each of the churches, you’re not going to find that in any of Patrick’s authentic writings. And again, this is why, if you want to know who to trust, go read this for yourself and you’re going to see there’s no reference to that at all in any of Patrick’s authentic works. What we do have, is him, as we already saw, declaring that his father was a deacon and his grandfather was a priest. Now, in fairness, the Latin there is presbyter, which is accurately translated as elder. By the time he’s writing, this word is clearly used in Latin to refer to Catholic priests, but you don’t have to take my word for it. We know two other things. First, we know that he also refers to himself as a bishop. So bishop doesn’t mean the same thing as presbyter. He’s clearly got three ranks, Bishop, presbyter or priest and deacon, and then he also is going to have a very different understanding of what the priesthood is all about than Baptists believe about elders.

I’m going to go back to the Fairhaven clip here and then kind of show why that’s not true. So here we go.

Those churches that he started were independent for many creeds, councils, any popes. He never attended one council, he never recognized [inaudible 00:16:01] except the Lord Jesus Christ. There is not any evidence whatsoever that remotely suggests that this famed preacher acknowledged any man to be of superior authority or position than Jesus. He recognized no Pope, he recognized no cardinal. He recognized that he doesn’t even subscribe or mention even in the smallest extent any kind of catechism, creed or dogma of the Roman Catholic system.

Okay, so as I said, none of what you just heard is true, and we know this in a couple ways. First, even though he’s a bishop, he does actually refer to superiors. He says, “One time I was put to the test by some superiors of mine. They came and put my sins against my hard work as a bishop.” Now, this is the underlying issue behind the Confessio. Patrick seems to be writing this largely in his own defense that after having been a successful apostle and missionary to Ireland for decades, an old friend exposed a childhood sin of Patrick’s that was serious enough that it caused serious scandal. We don’t know what the sin is, but he points out this fact, whoever this friend is that he confided in, had reported it to someone above Patrick.

Even though Patrick is a bishop, he doesn’t view himself as the highest authority. He does not view himself as just sent by God and therefore, not needing to report to any earthly institution above the level of bishop. He clearly has superiors, he refers to them. He doesn’t tell us anything about who they are. He’s purposely vague about a lot of this stuff because he’s not wanting to get into the grisly details of whatever this is and not wanting to call anybody out by name, but he clearly does have superiors. He clearly does believe he has superiors because he acknowledges such. In the Confessio as well, a little bit before this, he says when this betrayal from the friend happened, he says, “I was not there at the time, not even in Britain.”

Now that’s going to be important. We don’t know where he is after he… So he grows up in Britain. He then goes to Ireland and then he goes somewhere else, probably France. We don’t know exactly for sure. There’s a long-standing theory that he’s in Tours where he’s formed as a priest and much more could be said. He is vague about this. He just says he’s not in Britain, and he says, “And it was not I who brought up the matter.” You’ll get why I am saying probably Gaul or France in a little bit. And then he says, “In fact it was he himself,” this is the friend who betrayed him, “Who told me from his own mouth, ‘Look, you are being given the rank of Bishop’.” So one thing we know about his view of the whole trifle structure of bishop-priest-deacon, is that a bishop is not just self-appointed. Someone in the church is appointing Patrick as a bishop. He’s been approved to be ordained a bishop by someone.

Second, we know that his view of the priesthood is much richer than just like a Baptist elder or something like this. And we know this from his letter about Croticus where he says that, “Croticus respects neither God nor his priests whom God chose and granted the divine and sublime power that whatever they would bind upon earth would be bound also in the heavens.” So there’s some kind of spiritual authority, again he’s a little bit vague, but there’s clearly some spiritual authority of these priests hold that Croticus is not respecting and so Croticus is viewed as opposing both God and priestly authority.

So although again, all of this is very much just sketched out, Patrick is not giving us a detailed theology or detailed vision of his view of the church, all the indications we have point away from him being a Baptist, towards him being a Catholic.

Let’s go next to works of penance because if there’s another thing Irish Catholicism is pretty famous for, it’s taking penance extremely seriously and Patrick is one of the earliest witnesses to this. In the Epistola, he talks about how these soldiers and Croticus, they need to repent, they need to do hard penance. And so he tells the people not to even share food or drinks with them, not to accept even their alms, “Until such time as they make satisfaction to God in severe penance and shedding of tears.” And then they also have to free the slaves that they’ve taken of Christians.

The point there is that that doesn’t sound like any Baptist that I know of, it sounds very Catholic and the role of forgiveness and penance and the fact that their works are actually important in this whole equation, all of that sounds deeply Catholic. Now let’s turn to maybe the heart of the controversy, which is what did St. Patrick think of baptism? So here again, I want to give a fair hearing to the Fairhaven presentation of this, which again, I’m just using as an example of the kinds of arguments you may hear. I’m not trying to pick on these particular speakers.

And I want to just go through a couple of things. One is, he baptized only professed believers, and that is a Baptist doctrine, contrary to Catholic dogma, which teaches that infants are to be baptized. In all of Patrick’s writings, he does not mention one single incident when he baptized an infant, much less someone who had not been saved. One incident, he records the baptism of one convert named Enda, the night after his infant son was born, and what an ideal opportunity to record the baptism of that infant, and yet Patrick makes no mention of it at all. In one of his writings about the great [inaudible 00:21:44] says, “Go ye, teach. Meet is the order of teaching before baptism. For it cannot be that the body received baptism before the soul receives the verity of faith.” So Patrick never believed in baptizing infants as the Catholics teach. He taught baptism by immersion only, and of course, this has been a leading principle in baptists since the days of the Apostles and in all his writings there’s not one shred of evidence, not one mention of any kind of sprinkling, anything other than immersion.

Okay, so the first thing you should know here is virtually nothing of what you just heard is true, and I can show this in a few ways. First, this story about how he baptized this guy Edna who just had a newborn and doesn’t mention him baptizing the newborn, none of that is coming from Patrick’s own writings. Remember, we have two writings of Patrick. You can read them yourself. I strongly encourage you to do that. This whole story of Edna is from something centuries later called the Tripartite Life of Patrick. This is a monastic, it was called a hagiography, like a life of the saints, and the monks compiling these stories are compiling both good history and just like stories they’ve heard about Patrick. And so we don’t know the historical value of most of what’s in there. A lot of this stuff is probably later legends, because again, there’s centuries. We don’t actually know when the Tripartite Life of Patrick is from, but almost everybody’s going to say it’s several centuries after the life of Patrick.

Now, having said that, if you read the account, you actually see that Edna, yeah, sure, we’re not told explicitly that he has his child baptized. He gives his child to Saint Patrick to have him raised in the monastery. And then it talks about the offerings the son is making on All Saints Day. And so, it’s fine to say, “I don’t believe any of this later account.” This seems like a later legend, but it seems completely unfair to deride all of the later legendary stuff when it supports Catholicism and then to try to appeal to it to prove that he was a Baptist. If these are unreliable documents, which I think both sides would actually agree, they probably are, then you can’t appeal to them to try to prove your side. In Patrick’s own writings, there’s nothing of this story with Edna.

As for that quote where he’s allegedly commenting on Matthew 28, 17, that’s not from St. Patrick at all. Th... Read more on Catholic.com