Ireland’s Patrick: Saint, Yes! Catholic No!

I recently read an article in Wikipedia about the Hebraic Roots movement, and found it mostly accurate. In it, the author pointed out that we, in this walk “seek out the history, culture, and faith of first century believers. To this I have to add, we shouldn’t stop at the first century. In contending for the faith once delivered to the Saints (Jude 1:3), it is imperative that believers learn and disseminate historical truth. So much has been perverted.

The Roman Catholic Church changed more than doctrine. They rewrote history. In the case of St. Patrick, the historical lies were written by Probus and Joscelyn in A.D. 1130. More than 500 years after Patrick’s death! Seeking to garner Patrick’s fame for the glory of the Roman Catholic Church, they fabricated history. Papal biographers have ever since spun their web of lies about Patrick from this fanciful work.

The Pope never ordained Patrick in Rome, and Patrick was never a Catholic. He was a Messianic Jew!

The source for this amazing fact is the medieval Book of Leinster, a compilation of Ireland’s oldest documents, stored under lock and key in Trinity College, Dublin. According to the research of Dr. Robert Heidler, Patrick was a “son of Israel.” His ancestors were among the Jewish believers in Messiah Yeshua who fled Jerusalem in 70 A.D when Rome sacked the Holy City.

Patrick was born in a providence of Britain in 360 A.D. It was in the Scottish, not Irish, town of Bonnaven, between Dumbarton and Glasgow. His father was a deacon in the Celtic, not Catholic, church! According to the research of Dr. Heidler, senior teacher at Glory of Zion International Ministries, and other sources, the Celtic church was the last surviving outpost of the first century apostolic church. And it operated in miracles.

Signs and wonders had powered the early church, spurring its growth until the 4th century, when compromise with Paganism under Constantine pulled the plug. No more power. God’s Glory departed . . . except in remote outposts. One was 4th century Ireland, in the Celtic church.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Celtic church did not believe in purgatory, did not pray to Mary, and did not honor the Pope. Clergy married and reared children. Believers, not infants, were baptized by immersion. And . . . are you ready? They celebrated Passover, not Rome’s Easter, and kept God’s 7th day Sabbath. They also shunned unclean meats and decried the Roman Church’s hierarchy.

But young Patrick did not develop a personal relationship with Yeshua until after he’d been captured by raiders at age sixteen. He turned to God while enslaved in Ireland.

Crying out to the Lord, from hilltops where he shepherded sheep, he learned to trust God. Then one day, six years hence, God said it was time to go home. So Patrick escaped and boarded a ship that was setting sail for Scotland. There, he spent the bulk of his time in prayer and Scripture study. Then, the Lord told him, “Return to Ireland. Lead them to the Messiah!”

Patrick spent the next 30 years preaching the gospel of the Kingdom. History records that God used Patrick to heal the sick and raise the dead. According to one account, Patrick raised to life the son and daughter of King Alphimus, after which this Pagan King, his nobles, and the entire town accepted the Lord and were baptized.

Another amazing, although little known, saint that the Catholic Church also falsely claims is a man named Columba. Born in 521 in Donegal, Ireland, where he planted over 300 churches, he rejected his noble birth, accepting instead the life of an apostle. He and 12 of his followers departed Ireland for Scotland, where on the rocky little island of Iona, Columba established a Christian community of believers known as the Culdees. This was no Catholic monastery! It was a training center. The Culdees taught it was imperative that each person study God’s word for themselves. These religious men married and reared children.

Iona was a base for evangelism reaching all the Scots and the Picts. These Culdees of St. Columba kept the Sabbath and the Feasts. They bought slaves, set them free, then taught them to read Scripture in Hebrew, Greek, and Gaelic. They trained them as missionaries during a time in history when most kings in Europe were illiterate.

Here is an excerpt from Dr. Robert D. Heidler’s book: The Messianic Church Arising! (pg 67, paragraph 4)

In identifying Iona as a remnant of the Messianic Church, we should not assume they thought of themselves as Jewish. The observance of Passover or the Sabbath did not seem Jewish to them, any more than reading the book of Psalms or taking the Lord ’s Supper seems Jewish to us. For Columba these things were simply part of normative Christianity. These things practiced by the Culdees had been part of biblical Christianity since the times of the apostles. These things only seem foreign to us because they were forcibly removed from the church in the Middle Ages.

In closing, I’ve listed some interesting excerpts from other documents on this subject.

“I, Patrick, …had Calpornius for my father, a deacon, a son of the late Potitus, the presbyter, who dwelt in the village of Banavan….I was captured. I was almost sixteen years of age…and taken to Ireland in captivity with many thousand men.'” (William Cathcart, D. D., The Ancient British and Irish Churches, p.127).

“He (Patrick) never mentions either Rome or the pope or hints that he was in any way connected with the ecclesiastical capital of Italy. He recognizes no other authority but that of the word of God. …When Palladius arrived in the country, it was not to be expected that he would receive

a very hearty welcome from the Irish apostle. If he was sent by [pope] Celestine to the native Christians to be their primate or archbishop, no wonder that stout-hearted Patrick refused to bow his neck to any such yoke of bondage.” (Dr. Killen, Ecclesiastical History of Ireland, vol.1, pp.12-15)

“It seems to have been customary in the Celtic churches of early times, in Ireland as well as Scotland, to keep Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, as a day of rest from labor. They obeyed the fourth commandment literally upon the seventh day of the week.” (James C. Moffatt, D. D., The Church in Scotland, Philadelphia: 1882, p.140)

“In this latter instance they seemed to have followed a custom of which we find traces in the early monastic church of Ireland by which they held Saturday to be the Sabbath on which they rested from all their labours.” (W.T. Skene, Adamnan Life of St. Columba, 1874, p.96)

Other doctrines that Patrick, Columba, and the Celtic assemblies held included the observation of the other Festivals of the Eternal (Lev.23), the belief in the mortality of man and the hope of the resurrection (vs. immortality of the soul and going to heaven, hell, and/or purgatory); the distinction between clean and unclean animals; “improvised” prayers (from the heart, rather than merely from the lip with repetitions); that Christ Jesus is our only Mediator–as opposed to various “saints,” Mary, angels, etc.; and that redemption and atonement comes through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ alone–separate from works and heeding commandments/ doctrines of men (see The Celtic Church in Britain by Leslie Hardinge, as well as Truth Triumphant by B.G. Wilkinson, for documentation).

“The Roman Catholics have proudly and exclusively claimed St. Patrick, and most Protestants have ignorantly or indifferently allowed their claim…But he was no Romanist. His life and evangelical Church of the 5th century ought to be better known.” (McClintock and Strong, Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, Vol. VII, p.776, article Patrick, St.)