St. Patrick’s Day, for so many of us, is something of a homecoming: it reminds us of where we have come from.  It is said that everybody becomes a little bit Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. Catholics have great reason to wish to be so, out of gratitude for the Irish Church, born of the missionary effort of our great bishop, Patrick. But for a moment, let me take you on a little detour, a detour to the larger island next door to fair Erin. The larger island of Great Britain is, in fact, where our saint came from. He was British. Not English, but British.

Your Rector, too, was born on that same island, and grew up in a small village on its southwest coast.  In the churchyard there stood a monolith, some six feet tall and made of granite. If you can imagine, it is like a small obelisk standing there – but nobody really knew why. What we did know is there were some letters on this odd pinnacle, and the letters referenced a name, recorded in Latin, and that name was Goreus. This strange standing stone is in fact a monument from the fourth or the fifth centuries: that is to say just 300 or 400 years after the lifetime of Our Lord himself. It has been standing in that churchyard in the southwest of Great Britain for all these centuries, marking the spot where Goreus, who was no doubt a wealthy man and an important leader, is buried. It is his gravestone.

Goreus never had an English name at all, because English was never spoken on that island in his lifetime. It is not unlikely that Goreus was Irish, and Goreus is only the Latinized version of what his friends and his family might have called him. Whether Irish or British, it is definitely a Celtic name.  When the monument was placed there, England did not exist. When it was put up in that churchyard in the southwest of that island, that church yard was not in England, but in the remnants of Britannia Superior, a province of the Roman Empire.  The indigenous Celtic people received Roman civilization and had adopted it rather well. Romans, you see, were very respectful of local culture. When they found these woad-daubed people on a cold and rainy island in the north (the word ‘British’ means painted, or perhaps tattooed) rather than making them change their religion, the Romans assimilated it and accepted the pantheon of Gods that they worshiped as well.

The island was important to the Romans because of natural resources, chiefly gold, tin and other metals, but it was significant in other ways too. In AD 306, the Emperor Constantine the Great was proclaimed Emperor Augustus of the entire Roman Empire in the city of Eboracum (modern day York) in the northern province, Britannia Inferior. But a mere 80 years or so later, things had taken a turn for the worse, at least in terms of civilization. In AD 383, the Roman Army under Magnus Maximus left the island of Great Britain, leaving the provinces of Britannia Superior and Britannia Inferior undefended but still under the control of magistrates. As a consequence, the island began to come under attack from the East, and from the West: from the East, tribes of Germanic peoples, Angles and Saxons, started to raid the two provinces of Britannia, and indeed later on, began to settle. But from the West as well, our Irish brethren across the sea also started to raid the formerly rich Roman provinces taking some of their people away and enslaving them: people like St. Patrick.

The story then, of the Apostle of Ireland, is one which begins not in peace and harmony, but in great violence. But that is not the whole picture. The standing stone I would see every Sunday when I was a little boy, and perhaps played around, was put up there by people who had welcomed Irish colonization. It was put up there by the Deísi.  The Deísi were a tribe in Ireland who came to settle, yes, you guessed it, in Great Britain. The standing stones (139 of them in Wales, 37 in Cornwall, 11 in Devon and 5 in Dorset) are monuments to Irish culture being very much transported across the sea to Great Britain. But it was a christianized culture – and that was by the sole efforts of blessed Patrick.

Patrick was not the name he would have known himself by.  He was in fact known as Patricius, which in Latin means ‘noble’, but probably Padrig in his own native tongue. He was the son of a deacon, and grandson of a priest. His family was already Christian by the time Patrick was born in AD 385. Now, for those of you with a little bit of history of the British Isles, you might think, well, wasn’t Christianity brought to England by St. Augustine of Canterbury in the Gregorian mission in AD 597? How is it that the Christian Patrick was born and raised, in Roman Britannia, some 200 plus years earlier? The world in which Patrick was born is a world where peace was very quickly shattered. By AD 410, the Romano-British tribes had expelled the remnants of Roman law, expelled the magistrates, and the island took it upon itself to return to a looser organization of competing peoples. The raids continued, people were exchanged, and colonization happened.

But there was a breakthrough on the verdant Emerald Isle, and the breakthrough was the young British prince, Patrick. Having been sold into slavery in Ireland, he managed to escape by walking 200 miles across Éire, and sailing back across the sea to Britain, his home. In Britain, or more likely in Gaul, he was trained for the priesthood and later consecrated a bishop.  Then, God told him to return to the place of his slavery.

The breakthrough for Irish evangelization was that they had a cousin, somebody who understood their culture; understood how they think; understood their religion. Perhaps where others had failed, Patrick succeeded, because he realized that the Irish were searching for the light. So much is rather clear in our northern climes, where in the winter, light is scarce and the sun rarely shines. No wonder that for the Irish people, religion was organized around light, and particularly around the strength and power of the sun.

Patrick’s insight was that he showed the people that he loved them, even when they had hurt him, and he helped them understand that Christ was their light. The Host, yes, the very same Host that will be lifted up before your eyes tonight, replaces any inferior scrabbling for the true light. Therefore, the people of Ireland saw in the Eucharist, their true God, who in years before they had worshiped in shape and in shadow.

Patrick was a Christian, Patrick was Catholic, and the people that he loved so dearly became great missionaries in the Church and great innovators. You can forget the green rivers of beer and all the craic. Perhaps we will have that later after Mass. But to be serious for a moment, we have an awful lot to thank the Irish Church for, because that Hibernian spirit changed the face of Christianity across the world. Not only did they send out great missionaries founding monasteries in Germany, and even in Italy, but because of their understanding of monasticism, they gave us one of the Seven Sacraments. That’s right; One of the Seven Sacraments is truly an Irish Sacrament. It was an innovation that unlocked what had been given by Christ to the Apostles, unlocked it in a way which was so humane and so familiar to us now. Of which Sacrament am I talking? It is Confession: the great Sacrament of Reconciliation.

It was an innovation that came from the monasteries of Ireland, and nowhere else. It arose, because they realized that to reconcile to Christ was the pre-eminent way to accept Christ as light. To understand how it arose, you have to understand briefly how folk were reconciled after Baptism. If you committed sin after Baptism, reconciliation was a public affair – the practice arose that you would go to your bishop, admit your sin and be admitted into the ‘Order of Penitents’ for a period of time. That is to say you were excluded from the worship of the Church – expelled, in fact.

But if you were a monk, there was something of a problem: monks cannot be expelled from their vows into the Order of Penitents for a season and a season again. You cannot be expelled if you live in a monastery! So instead of being admitted into the Order of Penitents, Irish monks, recognizing that all the power of Christ had passed into the Sacraments, discerned a new method of reconciliation, based on the power given by Christ to priests as shown in John 20:23 to forgive sins by auricular Confession. Therefore, wherever they went evangelizing, they brought with them this treasure that the key had unlocked. And the key to that lock was Patrick. Patrick knew that everything was Christ; he knew the awesome power of the Son of Man had passed into the priesthood. But don’t take my word for it: take his:

Críost liom,
Christ with me,

Críost romham,
Christ before me,

Críost i mo dhiaidh,
Christ behind me,

Críost istigh ionam,
Christ within me,

Críost fúm,
Christ below me, 

Críost os mo chionn,
Christ above me,

Críost ar mo lámh dheis,
Christ on my right hand, 

Críost ar mo lámh chlé,
Christ on my left hand,

Críost i mo luí dom,
Christ in my sleeping,

Críost i mo sheasamh dom,
Christ in my waking,

Críost i gcroí gach duine atá ag cuimhneamh orm,
Christ in the heart of all who think of me,

Críost i mbéal gach duine a labhraíonn liom,
Christ in the mouth of all who speak to me,

Críost i ngach súil a fhéachann orm,
Christ in every eye that looks at me,

Críost i ngach cluas a éisteann liom.
Christ in every ear that listens to me.