{"id":337,"date":"2009-03-17T09:56:06","date_gmt":"2009-03-17T09:56:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/03\/st-patrick-did-he-exist-what-d.html"},"modified":"2009-03-17T09:56:06","modified_gmt":"2009-03-17T09:56:06","slug":"st-patrick-did-he-exist-what-d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/03\/st-patrick-did-he-exist-what-d.html","title":{"rendered":"St. Patrick: Did he exist? What did he look like? Does it matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n\"St.<\/span>At America <\/em>magazine<\/a><\/a>, author Jon M. Sweeney examines what we know of the Saint’s life, and what is fanciful–but perhaps just as important.<\/p>\n

\n

Both the hard facts and the fanciful legends about Patrick have the power to fascinate and instruct; it is best to strike a balance between the two. Since so many centuries have passed, we will likely never know more about the man who was Patrick than we do today.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, it is the Patrick of legend that appears in all the art, not the life the saint himself recorded in his writings. And that’s not such a bad thing, not when you recall some of that art. Watch a slide show<\/a> of some powerful and humorous images of Ireland’s patron saint. <\/p>\n

Also, at the magazine’s blog, “In All Things,” <\/a>Jim McDermott recounts three things you may not know about St. Patrick:<\/p>\n

1) He wasn’t Irish.<\/p>\n

2) He never banished any snakes–as there never were snakes in Ireland.<\/p>\n

3) He was never canonized. Really. Check it out…<\/a><\/p>\n

ALSO NOTE: <\/strong>For a superb recounting of St. Patrick’s heirs who arrived in America, and what happened after that, check out a review at America<\/em> of “The Irish Americans: A History,” <\/strong><\/a>by the eminent historian of Catholicism in America, Kay Dolan. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At America magazine, author Jon M. Sweeney examines what we know of the Saint’s life, and what is fanciful–but perhaps just as important. Both the hard facts and the fanciful legends about Patrick have the power to fascinate and instruct; it is best to strike a balance between the two. Since so many centuries have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nSt. Patrick: Did he exist? What did he look like? 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Since so many centuries have…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/03\/st-patrick-did-he-exist-what-d.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-03-17T09:56:06+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/files\/import\/imgs\/St.%20Patrick.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"David Gibson\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"St. Patrick: Did he exist? What did he look like? 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}