St. Patrick Digging Up a Grave
Sometimes the Saints were… hmmm… jerks?
St. Patrick is one of those saints that even non-Roman Catholics know to some extent. Perhaps most recall that he is the Patron Saint of Ireland, and that he drove the snakes out of that country. Some may know that he is the patron saint of engineers and paralegals(!). And almost everyone knows about green beer (completely unrelated to St. Patrick, but some things just stick).
Patrick is a fascinating character. No one is quite certain when he was born, but the approximate date often given is around 385 CE. This puts him living towards the end of Roman rule of Britain, and he was certainly born somewhere in England. According to his own autobiography (when you write your own hagiography, it is an “auto-hagiography” — but I digress), he was the son of a Roman tax collector and was not very religious in his childhood.
At the age of 16, he was captured by Irish pirates and held as a captive slave in Ireland for six years. It was during this time that Patrick “got religion”.
There are many stories about St. Patrick, but this one shows what a horrid little man he could be. It’s taken from The Tripartite Life of Patrick with Other Documents Relating to that Saint (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887). It is meant to show Patrick’s elevated level of holiness, but I think it just shows how petty he could be.
According to this work, Patrick had an obsession with the cross. He set a rule for himself that every day and every night he would make the sign of the cross at least 100 times. Furthermore, whenever he travelled, whether it be on foot, or on horseback or in a chariot type of conveyance, he would stop wherever he spotted a cross and pray. Even if the cross was “one thousand feet away”, if he saw it or knew it was there, he would stop everything and visit. I’m sure this would get tedious for his driver (he often had a chariot driver to get him from place to place). “Oh Lord, not another cross — we’ll never get where we’re going at this rate”!
One day, Patrick passed by a standing cross without being aware of it and so did not stop. His driver mentioned it to him later at dinner, and so Patrick immediately interrupted his meal (and likely that of the driver too), set out to find the cross and pray over it as was his habit.
His driver took him there, and while Patrick was praying, he noticed that the cross marked a grave. Patrick, being Patrick, immediately demanded:
“Who is buried here?”
As happens in these stories, a voice came from below.
“I am a wretched pagan. While I was alive, great pain wracked my soul and I died, and then I was buried here.”
Patrick is shocked; not by a buried corpse speaking to him, but by the fact that a pagan had a cross erected on his grave. He asked the dead man why this had happened. The corpse replied:
“A woman who lived in a distant land lost her son in this country, and he was buried hereabouts. When she came from her home faraway, she mistook my grave for his and raised this cross upon it. Her grief did not allow her to realize her mistake.”
The corpse evidently didn’t feel the need to further upset the grieving mother. Not Patrick, however.
In fact, Patrick was now vindicated. His “cross-radar” was perfectly functional. Of course! He had passed the cross without sensing its holy presence because it was besmirched by a pagan.
Being the jerk that he was, he immediately had the cross dug out and moved it to a Christian grave.
And so, on March 17th, St. Patrick is celebrated with green beer and sometimes a parade.
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