St Patrick's Day: A celebration and a warning

Ireland's lessons for modern America

This weekend’s celebration of St. Patrick’s Day is the granddaddy of all celebrations for people of Irish descent—and those who claim it for the day. But the historical figure behind the holiday has a greater legacy than parades, green beer and leprechauns. The real Patrick shows how one person of conviction can change a nation. It’s a lesson we need to remember in today’s climate of America’s spiritual and moral decline.

No one could have expected Patrick’s life to turn out the way it did. Born in England during the fifth century, he was kidnapped at sixteen by a band of pirates and taken to Ireland where he was sold to a landowner who forced him to work as a shepherd. Patrick was marked for the rest of his life by the experience. He later began his autobiography—it’s called “The Confession of St Patrick”—by describing the spiritual wounds from his early life:

I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many.

He spent the next six years alone in the wild regions of western Ireland, subject to long periods of cold and hunger. But it was during that period that God began to shape his soul for his later calling. The weeks and months of solitude became for him the opportunity for prayer and worship; and like young King David in the Bible, Patrick found that his suffering became the crucible for forming a faith as strong as steel.

At age twenty-two Patrick escaped, making his way back to England where he lived off and on for next eighteen years while preparing for the priesthood. To his heart experience of the wilderness years he added the formal studies necessary for a lasting ministry. Then, during his fortieth year, Patrick had the vision that determined the course of the rest of his life:

I saw a man coming, as it were from Ireland. His name was Victoricus, and he carried many letters, and he gave me one of them. I read the heading: “The Voice of the Irish”. As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood of Foclut, which is beside the western sea—and they cried out, as with one voice: “We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.”

Like the apostle Paul, whose similar vision in Acts 16 summoned him to Europe with the gospel, Patrick obeyed the heavenly voice and left the relative security and comfort of England to return as a missionary bishop to the place of his former slavery.

The popular conceptions of the ministry he established in Ireland have more to do with folk religion than with the gospel. He didn’t use a shamrock to teach the doctrine of the Trinity. He didn’t miraculously chase all the snakes out of Ireland. He never met a leprechaun.

But what Patrick did accomplish was even more amazing. From 431 until his death in 462, he travelled tirelessly throughout the country preaching, ministering, praying, building churches and training ministers. He didn’t play favorites and confronted kings and the poor alike with their need of the gospel. He baptized tens of thousands from every walk of life. He faced down the druids, the priests of the ancient Celtic religions in the region. He built monasteries where men and women not only grew in their faith but also where they studied and preserved the best of classical learning. He showed no fear in the face of opposition, no fatigue in light of his responsibilities and no loss of energy as he grew older. By virtue of his faith in God alone, Patrick changed the character of the nation.

Patrick’s apostolic ministry led Ireland from a being a patchwork pagan land filled with petty kingdoms to becoming the most Christianized nation in Europe. But his ministry didn’t affect just Ireland. In the years and centuries following his death, Irish missionaries travelled throughout Europe evangelizing tribes and nations that had no previous exposure to the Christian gospel. I wrote in a previous post of St. Columba—the best known of the Irish missionaries—who took the gospel from Ireland and into the area we know today as Scotland and northern England:

Thomas Cahill in his book, “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” tells the story of Columcille or, as he’s better known, Columba. Born in 521 into a royal household, he choose a different path than his peers and became a monk. But Columba wasn’t just an ordinary monk. Blessed with a passionate heart, a keen mind, a deep faith and an adventurous spirit, he soon became a missionary bishop charged with taking the gospel across the Irish Sea and into the wild areas of northern Scotland. By age 41 he had founded 41 monasteries, his best known being the abby on the island of Iona that was his base of operations. Today, Columba’s abby is still in operation as a center for Christian pilgrims.

Later on, Irish scholars made a name for themselves on the European continent as men of spiritual devotion and intellectual ability. Known as “peregrini” (wanderers), these itinerate intellectuals became leaders in universities and monasteries all over Europe. John Duns Scotus was the most famous and made a lasting contribution to Christian theology. His argument for the existence of God from natural theology is still in use today. While Patrick wasn’t directly responsible for the many missionaries and scholars that followed him, it was his leadership that created the environment that produced them. You can read more about the remarkable Irish missionaries and scholars in this study published by the CS Lewis College.

Toward the end of his life, Patrick described his ministry in terms that capture its true spiritual impact:

Never before did they know of God except to serve idols and unclean things. But now, they have become the people of the Lord, and are called children of God. The sons and daughters of the leaders of the Irish are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ!

Before Patrick, Ireland was filled with warring kings, suffering people and paganism. By the time of his death (he died on March 17, the day we celebrate),  the nation was so thoroughly evangelized that it was known as the most Christian place in Europe.

The most famous work Patrick left behind is called “The Breastplate of St Patrick.” Its lyrics capture the nature of his personality as well as the grounds for his ministry:

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ at my right, Christ at my left,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me,
Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.

Patrick’s legacy is how one person gripped by the God’s presence and power can change a nation.

But St Patrick’s day is not only a celebration, it’s also a warning. The Ireland of today bears little resemblance to the vibrant, missionary country of Patrick’s time. If anything, the modern Irish people seem determined to dismantle not just Patrick’s example and teaching but every reminder of the Catholic faith that once was their nation’s greatest achievement.

Once the center of Catholic doctrine learning, training and leadership, Ireland in the last few decades has changed its constitution to a secular document, legalized abortion, promoted homosexuality and become a leader in the transgender movement. Recent surveys point to church membership and participation plunging to levels never before seen, with the “nones”—those people who claim no religious affiliation—the fastest growing religious demographic. To make matters even more troubling, church leaders who uphold biblical standards of morality are publically shamed and, in some cases, legally threatened. It’s as though the Irish people have traded their birthright for a bowl of stew.

There are many reasons for Ireland’s spiritual decline—it was hit particularly hard by the sex abuse scandals of the last few years—but the bottom line for what’s happening in Ireland is that every nation is only one generation from losing its faith. That’s a lesson that many of us wrestle with today as we watch America moving in a direction not unlike that of Ireland. It’s not out of the question that one day, perhaps soon, we’ll end up in a similar place: a nation with a great spiritual lineage that no longer matters.

And here, I think, is where Patrick’s example comes back into the picture. While there’s no shortage of Christian initiatives, programs, denominations and organizations today calling America back to its spiritual heritage, what we seem to be lacking is the sense of individual vision and passion that drove Patrick. At the end of the day, programs or politics won’t change America. It will take men and women, young and old, who’ve been so gripped by God that they’re willing to go anywhere, undertake any hardship and take on any challenge for the sake of his Kingdom.

Another figure in Christian history—a contemporary of Patrick—was a young Italian nobleman named Benedict. As the Roman Empire declined in the 5th century, Benedict fled the city for the wilderness in order to be alone with God. Like Patrick, Benedict’s solitude led him to a vision for ministry that changed the course not only of his nation but also that of the Church as a whole. When he emerged from his mountain retreat he began the monastic movement that still bears his name today, a movement that in almost every way that matters preserved western civilization through the dark ages that followed Rome’s collapse.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s classic book, “After Virtue” takes Benedict as the model of Christian leadership that we need today:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

We are waiting, MacIntyre says, for a new Benedict, someone with the calling, vision and gifts to lead us through the appoaching darkness. The same could be said of Patrick.

My wife and I observe St Patrick’s Day the same way almost every year. We’ll go to a local Irish restaurant and have corned beef and cabbage. Unlike most of the other partiers there, we’ll only drink water. Then, we’ll return home to watch our favorite movie of all time, “The Quiet Man,” with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. It will be a nice evening. But beneath the familiar and comfortable celebrations that mark the day, I’ll remember the real man behind the holiday and maybe even envision what it must have been like for him to win a nation with no resource other than God and no weapon other than faith. And I’ll think—not for the first time—that what America needs in our time of national decline is someone like him.