The Legend of St. Patrick

Today we celebrate St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland and vomiting. St. Patrick usually tops the list of “most popular saints,” right up there with St. Francis of Assisi, St. Peter, and St. Jesus. He is also generally regarded as the saint you would most want on your side in a pickup basketball game. This was affirmed by the 1935 papal bull Ecce non makitus takitus.

Strangely, though, few people know the real story behind St. Patrick. It’s a story of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, minus the sex, the drugs and the rock n’ roll. It’s a globetrotting adventure, spanning all the way from east Ireland to southeast Ireland.

Our tale begins in 440 AD, in the tiny English village of Shoringham. It was an extremely, extremely tiny village. The tallest building stood a mere two feet off the ground. Patrick’s family, mired as they were in crippling poverty, had to make do with a shack that was less than six inches tall.

Ironically, Patrick’s father was a freelance heretic. Having received an advanced degree it heterodoxy from the University of Cam—this was before they added the “-bridge”—he would wake up bright and early and scour the countryside looking for monks to offend. More often than not, his plans ended in failure, as his fellow Englishmen were too busy dying of the pox to care about religion.

Tragedy struck the young Patrick when he was only eight years old. Specifically, it struck him just above the left eye, leaving him with a permanent scar. This explains why St. Patrick is also the patron saint of scars caused by rocks. This may seem rather specific, but hey—there’s a lot of saints, and nobody wants to feel left out.

When Patrick was but eight years old, he was kidnapped by a group of Viking venture capitalists. They planned to use the young boy as slave labor in their scheme to grow turnips on board their longboats. To their chagrin, it turned out that turnips could not be grown at sea, no matter how much manure was spread on deck.

Originally, the Vikings planned to kill Patrick for the insurance money—the boy was insured for two pieces of baked cod by Old English Mutual Insurance & Coddery. However, on discovering that one of the cod had been eaten and the other was actually a shad, they devised a more horrific end for Patrick. They decided to strand him in Ireland.

Ireland at that time operated on a starvation-based economy. The life expectancy of the people was actually negative. You had reached a ripe old age if you lived to five; to survive to the age of ten was a wondrous achievement.

Christianity was unknown in Ireland at the time. The nation was mostly Buddhist, with a small smattering of Muslims and Hindus. This fact has often been forgotten by history, which tends to gloss over the history of Buddhism, particularly the parts that I made up just now.

St. Patrick used the shamrock to illustrate the three-fold nature of God to the Irish. Frustrated by his failure to get through, he then told them that the shamrock represented God’s nature as a massive three-headed green monster. This proved much more effective, and also helps to explain some of the very odd illustrations in early Irish Bibles.

Though he is best remembered for driving the snakes out of Ireland, St. Patrick also rid the island of its substantial elephant population. There were only minor elephant flare-ups in the years afterward. These included the Great Elephant Massacre, the Elepho-Irish War, and the Elephant Famine of 1883.

At the age of 50, St. Patrick was named the first bishop of Ireland. He set a pattern for all future bishops of Ireland by immediately fleeing the island for Rome. After arriving in Rome, he recommended to the pope that Ireland “be bombed back into the Dung Age.” Ireland had only recently advanced from the Dung Age into the Mud Age.

Thankfully for Patrick, word of his betrayal never reached Ireland. As such the Irish still cherished their memories of the saintly bishop. They promptly renamed the island Patrickland, with its capital and Patricklin and smaller cities at Patrickfast and County Patrick. This continued until they realized this was a damn stupid idea.

St. Patrick is traditionally associated with the color green. This is because he had green skin and also sported a pair of gills. But that’s a whole different story…