Glorious Saint Patrick

Saint Patrick is a figure about whom much has been written but very little is know—in other words most of the stories we tell about Patrick are more legend than history.   Indeed for several decades many historians disputed the historical reality of Patrick or thought he was a combination of several individual persons.

Christianity had come to Ireland before Patrick.  Possibly as early as the late third century monks from Egypt and Syria sought the greater solitude of islands on the western coast of Ireland.  In addition trade routes from both western Britain and northwestern Spain would have caused some Continental Christians to settle in Ireland.  Some scholars maintain that Christianity had, in fact, taken a strong hold in the southern parts of Ireland by the earl fifth century, decades before Patrick arrived.  By the third decade of the fifth century there were sufficient Christians in Ireland for Pope Celestine I to send his deacon, Palladius, as Bishop there.  Unfortunately Palladius ran afoul of the King of Leinster, the south-east portion of the country and was sent back to Britain, his mission unsuccessful.

Palladius cannot be blamed for his failure.  Christianity was not an easy match for Irish society.  In the first place, the Irish had no towns or cities and Christianity is essentially an urban religion, or at least is organized on an urban plan with dioceses and deaneries and such.  And where do you build your churches if you don’t have towns?   And your schools?

But the complexity grows beyond that.  The Irish are a tribal society.  Every person belonged to a clan and the head of the clan ruled supreme.  The clans themselves were united by blood and marriage into super-clans or tribes. The heads of the various clans and super-clans each claimed for himself the title “king.”  Over this myriad of families and clans were four regional kings: Munster, Leinster, Connaught, and Ulster.  And over the four great kings, was the High King who made his capital, such as it was for a somewhat migratory people, at the Hill of Tara. No king, even the High King, really had any authority (except possibly force) over another king    Every time you turn around you have to deal with a new king.  And if King A likes you, his enemy, King B won’t.   In other words, there was no political infrastructure. 

Irish religion, like that the ancient Britons, was Druidism which was a combination of magic and spiritism.  The Irish saw the sacred everywhere—in certain groves of trees, in mountains, in holy wells.  They were convinced they lived in a world inhabited by spirits—the spirits of the dead as well as the spirits of nature.   They did practice human sacrifice, though not on the extensive scale as the Aztecs and some other societies. 

Under Brehon Law, women were equal to men and wives could divorce their husbands.  The law was harsh in its punishments, especially for thievery.  There were ten different types of marriage recognized by Brehon Law, depending on the various social standings of the partners and most marriages were easily dissolvable

Patrick himself was from an upper-class Romano-British family, probably located on the south-west coast of Britain.   His father was Calpurnius, a deacon and Decurion in the Roman Army. His grandfather had been a priest.  Yet Patrick as a young boy showed little interest in religion and was somewhat of a wild teenager. 

We have two authentic sources for Patrick’s life—both written by him.  The first is his “Confessions,” which he wrote to answer charges against him by the British bishops who were upset that he would not accept their authority over him and the Irish Church.  (It was heavily a matter of the British bishops wanting to get “their share” of the tithes of the Irish Church).  Patrick was determined to maintain the independence of the Irish Church.  In part this determination was based on the fact that Patrick had to make a lot of “adjustments” to make Christianity adaptable to the peculiarities of Brehon Laws and customs, including turning a blind eye to some of the irregular customs surrounding marriage. 

The second and shorter document which can be considered is Patrick’s “Letter to Coroticus.”  Coroticus was a Christian British chieftain, who regularly ran pirate raids on the east coast of Ireland looking for booty and slaves.  In a recent raid, Coroticus’s soldiers had come across a band of Patrick’s newly baptized converts, raped and enslaved the women and children and killed the men “still in their baptismal garments.” Patrick excommunicated Coroticus and his soldiers which enraged the bishops of Britain who saw his actions overstepping onto their boundaries.  

We are getting a bit ahead of our story, however.  Patrick as a youth of about 16 was kidnapped by Irish pirates, brought back to Ireland and sold into slavery.  He spent about seven years as a sheep-herder in Antrim, in the north of Ireland.  During the long, lonely nights on the Irish hillsides, he rediscovered his faith and developed a life of deep prayer.  One night he heard a voice: “Your ship is ready.”  Patrick, at great risk to his own life, escaped and traveled as a fugitive 200 miles to Wicklow where he was able to talk a group of sailors to take him back to Britain.  While home he had a vision of an Irishman saying: We appeal to you, holy youth, come and walk among us once more.”  Patrick felt a vocation to return to Ireland with the Christian faith. He studied under Saint Germanus of Auxerre and was eventually ordained.   Returning to Ireland Patrick did not have an easy time of it.  If his mission was to succeed he could not afford to tie himself into the clan system as being identified with one clan would alienated him from others and yet, without being part of the clan system, he had not patrons or protectors.  He also faced tremendous opposition from the druids who saw him destroying the old ways on which they depended.  At the same time the bishops of Britain were very jealous that he would not accept their oversight of the Irish Church.  They were more than suspicious of his accommodating Christianity to the Irish ways and customs. 

A major part of Patrick’s strategy in winning converts was his appeal to women.  Winning the mothers to the faith, guaranteed the children.  He also made a point of aiming for slaves and did much to better their lots.  By the end of his life vast numbers of the Irish had been Christianized but it was a somewhat unique version of Christianity, differing from nearby Romano-Britain and from Rome itself.  The Church in Ireland had a different way of calculating the date for Easter than that followed by the Roman Church, meaning that the actual dates varied from one another from year to year.  The Irish monks also did not shave the crown of their heads in tonsure, but everything forward from a line from ear to ear.  Most disconcerting to the Roman authorities, was that the Irish made their confession to priests privately rather than to the bishop and did not perform public penance but ironically it is the Irish, not the Roman form of the Sacrament of Penance that has survived.  Because the Irish did not have cities and towns, Patrick organized the Church in Ireland according to the clan system.  Each clan had its monastic establishments for men and for women.  The religious head of the family, directly under the family’s chieftain or king, was its Abbot.  The bishop was a mere functionary to ordain and perform those actions limited to bishops.  All jurisdiction was given to the Abbot.  At times, such in the case of Saint Brigid of Kildare, the Abbacy was held by a woman and thus a woman directed the Church in and among her clan.   Roman Law gave no legal recognition to women or their authority but Brehon Law had no scruples.   The Irish church was also pretty sloppy on its canon law of marriage, tolerating divorce in many cases and following the Brehon Law that accorded validity to marriages in respect to the ten different types of marriage recognized in the Brehon Law.

It was only in the twelfth century through the ecclesiastical services of Saint Lorcan O’Toole and the political skuldullgery of Stronbow, King Henry II, and Pope Adrian IV that the Irish Church was brought into conformity with and canonical union with the Church of Rome. 

Who Put the Ash in Ash Wednesday

The custom of using ashes as a mark of penitence dates back to the early centuries of the Christian Church.  From as early as the third century when the Church instituted the idea of canonical penance, there had developed a common practice of the penitents, during their time of public penance, being clothed in sackcloth and sitting or kneeling in ashes in the Church courtyard where they begged prayers from those entering the Church for the Eucharist. 

About the same time there emerged the practice of baptizing new Christians—usually adults at this period—during the night vigil of Easter.  A period of prayer and fasting preceded the baptism and in imitation of the Lord’s forty days in the desert this period was marked to last 40 days. The period leading up to the Easter baptism was marked by a series of exorcisms and other rituals and it was customary for many of those already baptized to join the catechumens (those preparing for baptism) in prayer and fasting.  This time of pre-baptismal prayer and fasting evolved into what we call “Lent.” 

When Christianity had become the overwhelmingly majority religion of what had once been the ancient Roman world, there were fewer and fewer adult baptisms and the custom of Easter Baptism became more rarely practiced.  But the Lenten fast remained and focused more and more on repentance and personal re-conversion.  The Bishop reconciled the penitents on Holy Thursday.  By the end of the 10^th century it was common throughout Western Europe for people to mark the beginning of what had become the Lenten penitential fast by having the priest sprinkle ashes on them to mark them as penitents.  This custom was unknown in Rome, however, until 1091 when it was introduced by Pope Urban II.  This is only one example of how conservative the Roman Church was in matters liturgical and so many customs that we just take for granted as part of our tradition developed not in the Roman Church but in the Churches of France, Germany, and Spain and only came last to Rome. 

One of our early sources for information on the practice of Ashes on Ash Wednesday is the Anglo-Saxon Abbot, Aelric of Eynsham (955-1010).  Aelric mentions that the ashes were “strewn” on the heads of the penitents.  It was only later that the custom emerged of tracing a cross of ashes on the recipient’s forehead.  Even today in Rome and much of Italy the practice is to strew a pinch of ashes on the crown of the penitent’s head rather than trace a cross on their forehead.

Luther favored the retention of the practice of Ashes but it died out among Lutherans.  During the reign of King Edward VI Cranmer obtained an Order in Council doing away with Ashes but the practice survived another fifty years or more in some places, especially in the more conservative north of England. Eventually, however, it died out in Anglicanism too. Calvinists—Reformed and Presbyterian—did not retain the practice in their program of Church reform. It never was a practice among Methodists.  However, first with the 19^th century invention of “Anglo-Catholicism” in the Church of England (and its American cousin, the Episcopal Church), the practice revived.  With the liturgical awakening among many mainline Protestants in the mid 20^th  century there has been a revival of the practice across denominational lines and today you will find many Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists going to Church on Ash Wednesday to have their foreheads marked with the ancient sign of penance.

Unfortunately there is a lot of abuse of this sacramental.  Our local Episcopal priest stands at the bus stop giving ashes to morning commuters as they head into the city.  In another town I heard of a Catholic priest who left a box of ashes on the counter at the local Post Office so that customers could help themselves.  I remember being in Grad School and watching some of my friends—who never went to Mass—having ashes on their foreheads as they ate their cheeseburgers for lunch.  Ashes are a beautiful custom but they should not be separated from the liturgical context and, like all Sacraments and Sacramentals, should be distributed only after the Gospel has been read and preached.  Sacraments and Sacramentals derive their potential to be channels of grace from the Word and normally they make no sense apart from the Word.

So What's The Deal About This Permission To Absolve Abortion

A More Open-minded Papacy 

Pope Francis’ recent pastoral directive extending to all priests, even those of the semi-schismatic Society of Saint Pius X, the faculty to absolve the sin of abortion has created a remarkable stir on several levels. 

I must admit that I am not sure quite why this was seen to be such a huge step as, at least here in the United States and I presume through much of the world, the reservation of absolution to the bishop or his authorized confessor was largely bypassed for sound pastoral reasons.  The minor flap associated with this “temporary provision” for the upcoming Holy Year of Mercy is how many people didn’t know that there are sins beyond the authority of the priest to absolve.  I am going to use the word “absolve” here rather than “forgive” to differentiate between God’s forgiveness of sins and the Church’s authority to absolve sinners from their sin. God’s power to forgive is not limited to the Church’s sacramental system which is not to say that we should not avail ourselves of Sacramental absolution.

So much of the Second Vatican Council has been overlooked and allowed to lie somewhat dormant and unexplored.  One of these facets of our faith towards which the Council took a radically different stance than had the theologians of the previous four or five previous centuries is about the sacrament of Penance or, as some call it today, Reconciliation. Due heavily to the work of Bartolomé Xiberta, a Catalonian Carmelite professor of moral theology teaching in Rome and a peritus at the Council, there was a return to the Patristic understanding that the Sacrament of Penance reconciles the sinner to the Church. The Church, that is the Christian community itself through the ministry of the Bishop—and by extension the ministry of the priests to whom he gives “faculties” for absolving the people entrusted to his (the Bishop’s) care, forgives sin in the Name of Christ and restores the penitent to the community of the Church from which the sin had separated him (or her).  The Church is the Body of Christ and thus to be reconciled to Christ means also to be reconciled to the Church.  Perhaps even more accurate is to say that in being reconciled to his Body, the Church, we are reconciled to Christ. Christ and his Church cannot be separated; they are indissolubly united.  This puts the sacrament in a whole different context than the popular ideas created by the good Father Simplicius O’Finnegan when he came into Sister Mary Winged Seraph’s fifth grade class at Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering Academy sixty some years ago and told us of his various “magic powers.”   The priest does not—and never did—“forgive” sins in his own name or by his own authority but always as an extension of the Bishop as chief pastor of the local Church. 

When a bishop gives faculties to a priest to absolve the faithful he can hold back certain cases to himself should there be good reason.  Historically it was seen wise for the bishop to “reserve” such sins as abortion, renouncing the faith, or going into schism to himself or to a priest whom he specifically named to deal with more complicated cases.  Frankly this was done because no few priests were too ignorant to deal with the complexity of these issues and the fear that they might be too harsh on the one hand or too cavalier on the other. 

In fact, many priests have always had the faculties to absolve reserved sins.  The Holy See has granted priests of the Mendicant Orders and some other religious communities known for their work in the confessional, in particular the Jesuits, the faculties to absolve most of the sins reserved to the bishop, including abortion.  In addition, any priest—sensing that the person might not return a second time for the absolution from either him (once he had permission from the bishop to absolve the penitent) or from a designated confessor, could presume the faculty so that the sin would not go unabsolved.  This really is not such a big deal.   

There are sins reserved to the Holy See, absolution for which is not granted to priests but which must be referred to Rome for special faculties of absolution.  These are mostly sins by priests: breaking the seal of the confessional or attempting to absolve one’s accomplice in a sexual sin are two such examples.  A bishop who consecrates another bishop without the proper authorization from the Holy See or the bishop who receives such an illicit consecration are other examples.  Desecration of the Blessed Sacrament is also a sin reserved to the Holy See.  A physical attack on the person of the Pope is still another.  These sins have to be referred to Rome as there is never permission granted to any priest, or even a bishop, to absolve them except in danger of death of the penitent. 

What might be more interesting then than this extending a faculty already widely extended and even more widely presumed, is that the Pope also gave this faculty to priests of the semi-schismatic Society of Saint Pius X—the Lefebvre group that rejects the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.  This certainly makes it easier for the faithful from that movement who have had or procured for another an abortion to be given absolution.  But it also is an olive branch to the Society itself in the hopes of reconciling them to the Church.  It is, however, a blind alley as Francis can’t integrate them back into the Church unless they accept the teachings of the Church and that would require an acceptance of certain doctrines—most notably those in the Vatican II Decrees Nostra Aetate and Unitatis Reintegratio and that is most unlikely.  But where there is charity there is hope.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church, VI

St. Hilda of Whitby

The British historian, William Henry Maitland, (1850-1906-) was known for his sharp tongue and ironic sense of humor which provided several famous quips.  My favorite runs something like this: “High-Church historians are anxious to show that the Church of England was Protestant before the Reformation and Catholic afterwards.”  Maitland was correct in his ironic twist, but nevertheless there is some truth to the alleged claims of Maitland’s high-Church historians.  I am going through this Anglican history to show that the English Church indeed had a great measure of autonomy before the Reformation broke its communion with Rome and that even after the Reformation there were serious efforts to preserve much of its Catholic heritage. Right now we are focusing on that first premise and I want to be very clear that the Ecclesia Anglicana—the Anglican Church—was not something “invented” by Henry VIII but had existed within the Roman Communion for centuries yet with sufficient uniqueness and autonomy to be in its own right a “branch” of the Universal Church.  Indeed the very term, Eccclesia Anglicana, The Anglican Church, can be found as far back as the 13^th century, three centuries  before Henry VIII,  but the concept of an autonomous (which implies a measure of independence but not separateness) English Church can certainly be found in Bede and reflects the heritage which Bede chronicles. 
The North British Church which followed the Irish Celtic traditions it inherited from Iona was in full communion with the Roman Church but differed from it in several important matters of ritual and discipline.  The papacy never made any attempts to bring the North British Church—or its Celtic mother-Church—under Roman control, nor did it feel any need to.  (The Irish Church would eventually be Romanized in the twelfth century through the efforts of its primate, Saint Laurence O’Toole, 1128-1180.)  While there were difference in ritual and canon law, there was a unity of faith.  Of course many of the doctrinal issues which today divide Christianity: notably the Real Presence and the Marian dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption—were then non-issues because they did not yet comprise part of the canon of faith. 
One of the crucial differences between the Roman and Celtic/British Churches that is often overlooked is the different approaches to canonical penance.  In the Roman practice a Christian only submitted to Penance for extremely grave faults, most notably apostasy, murder, and adultery.  The first of these sins was not as rare as one might think.  Many Christians in times of persecution gave way to their fears and performed the ritual offering of incense to an image of the Emperor.  There was quite bitter argument in the early Church over whether this sin could be forgiven at all.  The consensus was yes, once.  Thus in the Roman Church one only received penance once in one’s lifetime and only for extremely grave sins as aforementioned.   Penance was public, it was imposed by the bishop, it lasted over a period of time, and the individual could not receive Holy Communion until it was completed.  Penitents were not even allowed to be present for the Eucharist, but like the catechumens had to leave the assembly after the homily and then devote themselves to prayer and penitential practices while the community proceeded with the Eucharist. 
The Irish had a different practice for penance.  The Irish Church was not organized into dioceses like the Church in the old Roman Empire.  The clan provided the basis for religious organization.  The clergy were all monastics and the leading ecclesiastic of the clan served as the abbot or abbess who did not have the sacramental powers of a bishop but exercise the episcopal jurisdiction over the clan members, religious and lay.  One of the monks would be an ordained bishop and the sacramental responsibilities fell to him, but not the jurisdiction.  And we know in several instances, such as that of Brigid of Kildare, that women sometimes held this jurisdiction.  (Incidentally, it was not rare on the Continent for Abbesses to hold ordinary jurisdiction over local churches either.  More on that in other entries, but as late as the eighteenth century there were over a hundred surviving abbesses nullius.)  To refocus on our topic of penance in the Irish/Celtic Church, monks and nuns would “confess” their faults (not only their sins) to the abbot or to a wise older religious designated by the abbot or abbess to be ones anam cara, or soul friend.  The Irish developed an elaborate system of penitentials, books containing advice and suitable penances for every fault and sin.  Some of these were quite harsh.  Indeed Celtic Christianity tended to be more puritanical and harsh than Mediterranean Christianity.  The sacrament of penance in the form we know it owes more to the Irish practice than the Roman, not in its severity but rather in the practice of more frequent confession and confession of minor (venial) sins, as well as it being a private arrangement between penitent and confessor.  On the other hand, limiting the role of confessor to an ordained person acting in the name of the bishop is a survival of the Roman tradition.  The synod held by King Oswig at Saint Hilda’s Abbey of Whitby in 664 marked the abandonment of Celtic customs for Roman, but at least in terms of the reconciliation of penitents, the Celtic custom won out.