I thought St.Patrick drove the slaves out of Ireland.
He may have been a Visigoth transvestite spy who could have put on a lavender toga and danced the maranga in high heels while juggling flaming weasels. Did he ever deny it?
I thought not.
More revisionist BS to undermine our culture & traditions; this is the kind of BS I would have expected from the History Channel nowadays (sandwiched between “documentaries” on the many wives of Jesus and His mother’s black slaves she mistreated).
We’ll be bombarded with the most bizarre nonsense, but not much on St. Patrick or the Irish on TV today.
Show me the receipts…!
Someone was working hard to find something controversial to say about St. Patrick. This is beneath the level of Ancient Aliens-style speculation.
Hmmmm...NO primary or secondary sources? Must be purely attempting to question/revise history to support some agenda...
Cambridge prof says “there are reasonable grounds” - means no hard evidence. Just liberals trashing St. Patrick.
I am surprised they are not claiming he was gay.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! :)
You might get a kick out of this Irish Jig! http://lizabdesired.hubpages.com/_wh3d3iyg0t1q/video/happy-st-patricks-day-2012
This has got to be one of the most ridiculous things that ever came out of the academic mind. St Patrick wrote an autobiography and was not responding to “charges” of any kind. Kidnapping by Irish raiders was quite common, and he went and worked peacefully as a shepherd for 6 years until he had a dream of an angel telling him to go down to the harbor and he would find a ship that could take him away. The legend is that he went to the Continent with a shipload of Irish hounds being sent to France to be sold for hunting dogs for the nobility.
His Latin was very poor when he arrived in Europe and he actually had to relearn it so that he could make it through his priestly training, although it is not known where he did this.
When he returned to Ireland at the Pope’s orders (after the Briton Pelagius had failed in his commission) he looked up his former owner and paid him the price that the owner had paid for him when the owner bought him.
St Patrick’s father was a Christian Roman and does not seem to have been trying to “get out” of anything. He was not a very high-ranking official and certainly calling him “aristocracy” is a bit of an overreach.
But nothing is too much of an overreach for a loser academic who’s going nowhere with his life and doing nothing but sniping.
Leave St. Patrick alone!! I like the legend I’ve known since I was a wee lass!
If MSNBC doesn’t survey the sewers for stories, who will?
St. Patrick WAS a slave for many years.
It's unclear to me why these (in lieu of a better description) almost ethnically suicidal elements exist; to what end? Maybe someone can offer up some explanation. They make me want to puke all over their loafers.
And why does he say slaves, when the most recent archeology (at U Penn museum lecture) says that western areas of what is now England had trade with the Mediterranean up to and after Roman times, so they are rewriting the books on that period. link
BULL$%#&@!!!
Once again, some atheistic, sophomoric (sophos = wise, moros = fool) idiot is promulgating an anti-western, anti-Christian personal opinion of a western hero based on his own personal opinion totally divorced from any real facts to substantiate them.
Sub-Roman Britain has provided very little written documentaiton of what was going on there. Absent any other legimitimate source of information on this subject aside from St. Patrick’s writings, I will take the Saint’s views over those of this revisionist academic.
We KNOW Mohammad WAS a slave trader, desert bandit and pedophile, but the verminous source of this scurrilous article would NEVER present THAT view of Mohammad in his writings!!!!