They do what Mark Driscoll does in this post where he drains St. Patrick of any residual Catholicism and makes him sound like your typical 21st Century mega-church pastor, i.e,. like Mark Driscoll.
Driscoll writes:
Saint Patrick is technically not a saint, as he was never canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Additionally, Patrick was not actually Irish. Rather, he was an Englishman and a Roman citizen, who spoke Latin and a bit of Welsh.
Nonsense. St. Patrick is "technically" a saint and he was "technically" canonized inasmuch as he is on the Roman calendar of feast days, which is what it means to be "canonized."
Driscoll might be confusing the modern system for centralized determinations of canonization with the fact that in the Fifth Century determinations about holiness were decided more locally. If so, he needs to make that explicit, rather than appealing to the anti-Catholic phobia of his readership with half-truth.
Driscoll also writes:
Upon returning home, Patrick enrolled in seminary and was eventually commissioned as a pastor. Some years later, God spoke to Patrick in a dream, commanding him to return to Ireland to preach the gospel and plant churches for the pagans who lived there.
Right, "commissioned as a pastor."
Or more accurately, "ordained as a priest" by a Catholic bishop.
Driscoll writes:
The Roman Catholic Church had given up on converting such “barbarians,” who were deemed beyond hope.
Nonsense and hypocrisy.
Unlike Protestantism, which until the mid-nineteenth century universally held that the "Great Commission" did not pertain to the post-apostolic age (See e.g., McGrath's, Christianity's Dangerous Idea), Catholicism has always held that the church had an obligation to preach to the ends of the Earth.
Also, Patrick was sent into Ireland to become the first bishop with the support and at the orders of his Catholic superiors, and he was not the first Catholic missionary to Ireland:
Patrick was not necessarily the first missionary to Ireland. His main ambition was to become Ireland's first Bishop, but his monastic superiors did not believe he was adequately qualified for the position and passed him over in favor of Palladius. Palladius' mission lasted only a short time due to the fierce opposition of a Wicklow chieftain and abandoned the sacred enterprise after about a year.
It was Germanus who commended Patrick to Pope Celestine. It was only shortly before his death that Celestine gave this mission to Patrick and on that occasion bestowed on him many relics and other spiritual gifts, and gave him the name "Patercius" or "Patricius". Patrick, returning from Rome, received the tidings of the death of Palladius, and traveled to the nearby city of Turin where he received episcopal consecration at the hands of its great bishop, St. Maximus. He quickly hastened to Auxerre to make preparations for the Irish mission.
Driscoll concludes:
Patrick gave his life to the people who had enslaved him, until he died at 77 years of age. He had seen untold thousands of people convert, as between 30-40 of the 150 tribes had become substantially Christian. He trained 1000 pastors, planted 700 churches, and was the first noted person in history to take a strong public stand against slavery.
"Trained pastors" and "planted churches."
Well, I guess Driscoll has to speak in the vernacular of his readership, who might become disturbed if they read "ordained priests" and "established Catholic churches."
The serious point is that this is the technique that permits modern, historically ignorant people to retroject their own assumptions and culture back into the past. This is the technique that permits "bible Christians" to look back to First Century Judeah and see nothing more surprising than what they would expect to see in their Clovis mega-church.
But the past is a different country. The past should be different, it ought to be unsettling, and uncomfortable, and jarring. It ought to make us look at our own time from a different perspective. Just as we learn, and thereby grow, by being exposed to the customs of different countries, we ought to learn, and thereby grow, by being exposed to the customs of different times.
Shorter conclusion: A large portion of the Christian past was Catholic - deal with it.
Via Mark Shea.
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