Today is “green” day – a green that has nothing to do with environism or Gaea-worship. Except that Ireland – Eire – is a beautiful green island, truly a jewel of the Atlantic.
Green, green, green. In school, St. Patrick’s Day demanded wearing something green in school to avoid getting pinched. (Now forbidden, officially, of course.) (Some choose to wear orange, of course. Green for Catholic, Orange for Protestant. Those who are neither Catholic nor Protestant, just plain christians, were stuck with white and needed excellent situational awareness!)
Why talk about Patrick in a political commentary? Because what is “known” about Patrick is a pack of lies and misinformation and misrepresentation. Just like much of history, and even more of the media stories about current events, right here in 2023.
And because what we DO know about Patrick indicates that he was a strong advocate for liberty, as well as being an important missionary, and in many ways, a major influence on today’s Ireland.
Patrick was “English” – British. (The natives of Britain, now found primarily in Wales and Cornwall.) But of Latin/Roman ancestry. He was not Irish. He lived in the 5th Century, and was kidnapped and enslaved in Ireland. After escaping slavery, he returned to Britain and then went back to Ireland to preach the Gospel.
That is right. The Gospel – NOT Roman Catholicism. Though the Vatican, and the Catholic heirarchy in Ireland (and the States) claim he was a Catholic and preached Catholicism, he was actually what is usually called a Celtic Christian.
(The Celtic churches ultimately (centuries later) were forced into Roman Catholicism. That included accepting the primacy of the Pope and Catholic traditions and control, and actually rejecting the teachings found in the Bible.)
Among the many ideas that Celtic christians believed and taught – and which made them heretics not just in the eyes of Catholics but most Protestants? Rejecting “original sin” and the idea of national churches: that infants must be baptized and therefore belong to a church that included everyone in a nation. No free choice. And they taught and believed that humans had free will – no predestination. And that local groups of christians were to mind their own affairs, not subject themselves to priests, bishops, and popes (or presidents or whatever). That individual people – both men and women – were “priests” themselves and could talk directly to God with no intermediary.
As near as we can tell, he preached the freedom found in Christ, which includes treating one another as you want to be treated. He did not, like so many who rebel against or are freed from slavery, try to enslave others. (See Haiti, for example.) He did not believe in or teach forced conversion. Or many other doctrines essential to organized religion.
For that reason alone, lovers of liberty should respect this evangelist and the impact he had not just on Eire but on the entire British Isles and even much of Europe.
But knowing a bit about the life of this man, we also learn another important lesson. That is that the apparent winners are the ones who write the history books. And all too often, create the culture. That is, craft the memes that influence people.
If we want to win, to regain liberty, we must write and teach and create the memes that encourage us and others to be free.
The Price of Liberty 
I did not know all that about Celtic Christianity.
Just so I’m sure I understand what you said, they don’t think infant baptism essential? Children get some kind of leeway until they decide one way or the other? (Or decide not to decide; same thing as rejecting Him.)
But it does certainly mesh with what Protestants would much later complain about — that the Church of Rome was not instructing in the teachings of Yeshua, but rather had several centuries of doctrine and dogma baked into their theology. Not that the Protestants did much to fix it. My understanding is they wanted in on it.
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Steve, as I understand from my reading in history, the Celtic church rejected the idea of infant baptism, as well as its primary (if belated) justification as dealing with original sin. Both of course heretical to Rome by that time. The Celts were not alone in that, either earlier or later in history: they saw “believer’s baptism” as biblical. This is based in part on the idea of an age of accountability – a concept found in the Law of Moses and rabbinical teaching: when a human is mature enough to understand what sin – what doing right and wrong meant. And on what they saw in both testaments regarding the innocent and pure nature of children.
The Reformation is accurately named: the Protestant “founding fathers” (Luther, Calvin, Knox, even some like Menno) wanted to reform the Roman Church but retained much of that pagan, neo-pagan and Old Law traditions which had been introduced into what the Messiah (and the Apostles, including Paul) had taught.
More a theological and religious discussion than a political discussion we’re having now – but applicable to political conditions.
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