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Kidnapped Twice
The man we know today as Saint Patrick was kidnapped twice: first by Irish pirates, and then again after his death by the Roman Catholic religion, which claims him as one of their own. In fact, he was not affiliated in any way with the Roman hierarchy, and his doctrine was contrary to that of the apostate Romish church on several vital points. Patrick was more of a Baptist than a Catholic!
Many misconceptions exist today about Patrick. The truth is, he wasn’t Irish, he wasn’t an emissary of the Pope, and his real name wasn’t Patrick! He was a Briton, he died 175 years before his name was even mentioned in Catholic writings, and his real name was Sucat, which means “warlike” in Modern Welsh. For the sake of simplicity, though, throughout this article we will refer to him as Patrick.
Patrick was born in the late 300s in what is now Great Britain. At age 16 Patrick was kidnapped by Scottish pirates and sold as a slave to a Druid chieftain named Milcho, who reigned in Northern Ireland. The people who inhabited its primeval forests were animists, and they worshiped such things as trees and stones and wells. They believed that spirits dwelt in these idols and they sacrificed their little children on heathen alters to appease the gods and to secure, so they thought, better harvests.
During this time of captivity, Patrick trusted Christ for salvation. He told how God’s providence led to his escape after six years and return to his parents, who had assumed long before that he must surely be dead. Several years later, at the age of 40, he returned to Ireland as a missionary, seeing thousands of people trust Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. The real Patrick experienced salvation by grace through faith and sought the salvation of others. He was a Bible-reading, Bible-believing, Bible-preaching missionary and it was the unadulterated Gospel of the Son of God that lifted the Irish out of the darkness of paganism into the glorious light of the Truth.
Patrick preached the Gospel from the Word of God, established an indigenous church (over which Christ was Head, not the Pope), baptized believers, and ordained clergymen. The Celtic church, as Irish Christians were known, helped lead the way in evangelizing Europe in the next 100 years. Patrick died in the mid-fifth century, but not before the entire island had been evangelized.
~Excerpted in part from the sermon, “St. Patrick was a Baptist,” by John Summerfield Wimbish, delivered on March 12, 1952. You can find a transcript of this sermon at http://www.reformedreader.org/history/patrick.htm