The Orthodox Reception

Patrick lived and died in the fifth century, more than half a millennium before the estrangement of East and West, and the faith he confessed at the head of his own Confessio is the Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy held in common throughout the undivided Church (Confessio 4). For Orthodox Christianity he is therefore not a foreign saint to be re-canonized but a saint of the one Church recovered — a recovery carried out in the twentieth-century diaspora and given formal expression when the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church added him to its calendar on 9 March 2017.

Tradition: Pre-Schism Western (Celtic) / Orthodox reception

The Principle of the Undivided Church

The ground on which an Orthodox Christian venerates Patrick is not sentiment but ecclesiology. Through roughly the first millennium the Church was one in East and West: the same faith was confessed, the same councils received, the same saints honored from Ireland to Mesopotamia. Whatever later divided the Latin and Greek communions — conventionally dated to the breach of 1054 — lay centuries in the future when Patrick lived, labored, and died. He belongs wholly to the period before any division, to the single shared apostolic faith of the pre-schism Church. This is why the language of “re-canonization” is misplaced. The saints of the undivided first millennium were never canonized by one half of a divided Church against the other; they were glorified by the one Church before it was divided, and they remain the common inheritance of all who hold that Church’s faith. To venerate Patrick as Orthodox is not to import him but to recognize what he already was.

In Patrick’s case the principle is unusually clean, because his orthodoxy can be read directly from his own hand. The creed he sets near the opening of the Confessio confesses “the one we acknowledge and adore — one God in a trinity of the sacred name”: the Father unbegotten and without origin, the Son “begotten in an indescribable way before every beginning” and now Lord and God over all creation, and the Holy Spirit “poured on us” as “the gift and promise of immortality” (Confessio 4). This is the faith of Nicaea, with the same anti-Arian exactness — the eternal generation of the Son, his full divinity — that the Latin and British churches of the fifth century had learned to guard. The point is developed at length in this collection’s treatment of the Trinitarian confession; here it is enough to note its consequence. Patrick’s receivability rests on doctrine, not on the snakes and shamrock of the later Lives. What makes him an Orthodox saint is the orthodox creed at the head of his own authentic writing.

The same logic governs the reception of every pre-schism Western saint, and this repository treats it as a single recurring case rather than a series of unrelated ones. The companion collection on St. Claudius of Besançon works through the identical principle for a Gallican saint of the Jura — that a Western saint of the undivided millennium is venerated in Orthodoxy precisely because he was always a saint of the one Church (see St. Claudius of Besançon: The Pre-Schism Western Saints). Patrick and Claudius are two instances of one theology of reception.

The Twentieth-Century Recovery in the Diaspora

The principle is ancient, but its conscious application to the Western saints is largely a modern story, and it belongs to the Orthodox diaspora of the twentieth century. As Russian and other Orthodox Christians settled in Western Europe after the upheavals of 1917, they found themselves living on the soil of saints — the martyrs of Roman Gaul, the bishops of fifth-century Arles and Auxerre, the missionaries of Britain and Ireland — whose names appeared in no Orthodox calendar and whose veneration had often survived only locally, in the Western churches. A deliberate movement arose to recover these saints for Orthodox use: to gather their lives, to verify their pre-schism orthodoxy, and to restore their commemoration. The impulse was felt across several jurisdictions and was bound up with the Western-Rite Orthodox movement, but it found its most influential champion in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR).

The central figure in this recovery was St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco (1896–1966), the ROCOR hierarch later glorified as a wonderworker. During his episcopate in Western Europe in the 1950s, where his see embraced the ancient Christian territories of France and the Low Countries, St. John turned his already prodigious devotion to the saints toward the West specifically. He was, his hagiographers record, keenly aware “of the multitude of saints who pleased God in the West before the Great Schism of 1054,” and he “venerated their memory and strove to make them better known to other Orthodox Christians” (“St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco,” OrthoChristian.com). He collected their lives and images, exhorted his flock to confess the same Orthodox faith those Western hierarchs had held, and submitted a long list of pre-schism Western saints to the ROCOR Synod for their commemoration to be restored. His Decree No. 223, “On the Veneration of Ancient Saints of the West” (23 April 1953), explicitly directed that the saints of ancient Gaul and the other Western lands who had been confessors of the Orthodox faith in the first centuries should be honored. Through this labor “a great many pre-Schism western saints became known in the Orthodox Church and continue to be venerated to this day, including Saint Genevieve of Paris and Saint Patrick of Ireland” (“St. John (Maximovitch),” OrthoChristian.com). The wider treatment of St. John’s life and ministry is gathered in this repository’s St. John of Shanghai collection; what matters here is that Patrick’s Orthodox veneration in the modern West runs directly through St. John’s recovery of the Western saints.

This diaspora movement was not a matter of decree alone. It produced parishes, service texts, and dedications. Western-Rite Orthodox communities — including those under ROCOR — have established parishes under Patrick’s patronage, and his name entered the liturgical life of Orthodox congregations in Britain, France, and North America well before any synod acted. The formal decision of 2017, when it came, was in large part a ratification of a veneration already alive on the ground.

The 2017 Decision of the Russian Orthodox Church

On 9 March 2017, at a session chaired by Patriarch Kirill, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church formally added St. Patrick of Ireland, together with more than fifteen other pre-schism Western saints, to the Church’s calendar and liturgical menologion (“St. Patrick of Ireland and Other Western Saints Officially Added to Russian Orthodox Church Calendar,” OrthoChristian.com, 2017). The decision followed a report by Metropolitan Clement of Kaluga and Borovsk, chairman of the commission charged with compiling the Russian Church’s Menaion, who proposed the inclusion of ancient saints “who labored in western lands before the Great Schism of 1054” — explicitly invoking the pre-schism principle. Among the criteria the commission applied was each saint’s “unblemished confession of the Orthodox faith,” a standard Patrick meets squarely on the evidence of Confessio 4. The list approved alongside Patrick included other luminaries of the early Western Church: St. Alban the protomartyr of Britain, St. Genevieve of Paris, St. Honoratus of Arles, St. Germanus of Auxerre, and St. Vincent of Lérins among them (OrthoChristian.com, 2017).

The measure was understood, by the Church itself and by those who reported it, as an affirmation of the undivided Church rather than an expansion of jurisdiction. As the OrthoChristian commentary put it, “The Church was united in both the East and West for roughly the first millennium… the faith was one, and the Church was one in all places.” Russian Orthodox commentary made the same point: the inclusion of the Western saints’ names on the Moscow Patriarchate’s calendar was meant to remind the faithful of the era of the undivided Church (Pravmir, “Inclusion of Western Saints’ Names on Moscow Patriarchate Calendar Aims to Remind of Times of Undivided Church,” 2017). The decision was reported in the wider press as well, including by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and by Russia Beyond (rbth.com) in March 2017, and was widely noted for its ecumenical resonance — a Russian patriarchate adding the apostle of Ireland to its saints. It was also explicitly a first step rather than a closed list; the Synod and its menological commission have continued to add pre-schism Western (and other ancient) saints in subsequent years.

The decision had immediate practical effect in the Russian Church’s Western European dioceses, where many of these saints — Patrick among them — were already venerated by local communities and now received the whole Church’s sanction. For the first time the Russian Orthodox Church officially celebrated Patrick’s feast in 2017.

The Feast and Its Date

Patrick’s feast is kept, in the Orthodox reception as in the West, on 17 March — the traditional day of his death, the basis of the cult treated in this collection’s feast-and-cult file. In the Russian Orthodox reckoning, which follows the Julian (Old Style) calendar for the fixed feasts, that 17 March falls on 30 March on the civil Gregorian (New Style) calendar in the present era. The feast is therefore stated as 17 March (OS) / 30 March (NS), and it was under this dating that the Russian Church marked Patrick’s commemoration for the first time in 2017 (OrthoChristian.com, 2017). The thirteen-day gap is the standard offset between the Julian and Gregorian calendars for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; Orthodox jurisdictions that observe the Revised Julian calendar for fixed feasts keep the day on 17 March civil-calendar, coinciding with the Western observance.

What the date marks, in the end, is continuity. The day on which Western Christians have honored Patrick for fourteen centuries is the day on which the Orthodox Church now honors him too — not as a borrowed saint, but as one of its own from the undivided age, restored to a calendar from which only the accidents of later history had kept him.

See Also

• Feast and Cult — the feast of 17 March and the historical growth of Patrick’s veneration in the West
• Rome, the Paschal Question, and the Wider Church — the early Irish Church’s place within the wider communion
• The Trinitarian Confession — the Nicene orthodoxy of Confessio 4 that grounds Patrick’s reception
• St. Claudius of Besançon — the same theology of reception applied to a Gallican pre-schism saint
• St. John of Shanghai — the ROCOR hierarch who led the diaspora recovery of the Western saints
• The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church of the first millennium to which Patrick belongs

References

• “St. Patrick of Ireland and Other Western Saints Officially Added to Russian Orthodox Church Calendar.” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/101734.html), March 2017. (The 9 March 2017 Holy Synod decision under Patriarch Kirill; the report of Metropolitan Clement of Kaluga and Borovsk; the criterion of “unblemished confession of the Orthodox faith”; the addition of St. Patrick and more than fifteen pre-schism Western saints, including SS. Alban, Genevieve, Honoratus, Germanus, and Vincent of Lérins; the feast of 17/30 March; the principle of saints who “labored in western lands before the Great Schism of 1054.”)
• “Inclusion of Western Saints’ Names on Moscow Patriarchate Calendar Aims to Remind of Times of Undivided Church.” Pravmir (pravmir.com), 2017. (The Russian Church’s own framing of the decision in terms of the undivided Church.)
• Reporting in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (rferl.org) and Russia Beyond (rbth.com), March 2017. (Wider coverage of the Russian Orthodox Church’s addition of St. Patrick to its calendar.)
• “St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco.” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/97771.html); and hagiographic sources on St. John’s recovery of the Western saints, including his Decree No. 223, “On the Veneration of Ancient Saints of the West” (23 April 1953). (St. John’s veneration of the pre-schism saints of Gaul, Britain, and the West; his collection of their lives; his submission of their names to the ROCOR Synod; the resulting recovery of saints including Genevieve of Paris and Patrick of Ireland.) See further the repository’s St. John of Shanghai collection.
• Patrick. Confessio 4. Latin text and English translation at the Royal Irish Academy’s St Patrick’s Confessio hypertext archive (confessio.ie); cited by section. (Patrick’s Trinitarian creed, the doctrinal basis of his reception as a saint of the undivided Church.)
• OrthodoxWiki, “Patrick of Ireland” (orthodoxwiki.org). (General orientation to Patrick’s place in the Orthodox calendar; consulted to locate sources, not relied upon as a terminal authority.)
• On the pre-schism principle generally, see this repository’s pre-schism-church file and the St. Claudius of Besançon collection’s treatment of the same reception.