From Patricius to St. Patrick: Part 1

March 17 celebrates the birth and life of St. Patrick of Ireland. The blogs this week will focus upon the legacy we have received from St. Patrick and the Celtic stream of Christianity and Spirituality. The Celtic stream has existed alongside the Roman and Greek streams for almost as long as Christianity has been in existence. St. Patrick is a good representative of this stream and its history.


A few things need to be kept in mind when studying St. Patrick. The first is that he was not Irish. He was in fact, British, perhaps even the child of Roman colonists in what is now known as Scotland or in Northumbria. His parents were named Calpurnius and Conchessa, and Patrick's full name was actually Patricius Magonus Sucatus. Most accounts place his birth at Kilpatrick near Dumbarton, Scotland, in the year 387. What a Roman outpost was doing that far north is a curiosity to me, but I am not that fully acquainted with the history of the settling and conquest of the lands we now know as the United Kingdom. As a case in point, the Anglo Saxons had not yet invaded Briton, so it was not even known yet as England (Anglo-land) or Angle Terre, as the French French call it. Most of the peoples were descendants of a vast Celtic migration that centuries earlier had spread across central Europe, through Anatolia (present-day Turkey) and westward to western Europe and on to the British Isles. 


Patrick himself was thus more likely to have been of Roman descent than of celtic origins. There are traditions stemming from one of the few documents authentically attributable to Patrick (St. Patrick's Confession) that he had nearly rejected the Christianity of his parents in a pattern that should be recognizable to anyone who is now going through adolescence or has survived that period in their life. what turned his life around was an experience of being captured and taken into slavery by pirates who sold him to a petty Irish warlord. 


More on this tomorrow...


[Image info: {{Flickr |description={{en|Saint Patrick stained glass window from Cathedral of Christ the Light, Oakland, CA.}} |flickr_url=http://flickr.com/photos/mariya_umama_wethemba_monastery/775890856/ |title=St. Patrick |taken=Taken on February 3, 2009 |photogra)]

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