The official version of Ireland's conversion to Christianity is that Patrick was born of a Romano-British father and a Gaulish mother at Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton, in Scotland, in the year 387; that he came to Ireland as a slave in 403, escaped back to Dumbarton in 409, was ordained a priest in Gaul, came back as a bishop in 432 and died at Saul, Downpatrick, Ireland, 17 March, 493 after single-handedly converting the Irish from absolute paganism and druidism.

The story of how he achieved it is full of miracles, angels, demons and direct intercessions by Patrick with God on behalf of the pagan Irish.

What really happened was that Ireland was already Christian but had got caught in the crossfire between Augustinianism and Pelagianism. It was all about the question of original sin and the fallen nature of man. According to Augustine no person who lived before Christ could have lived a good life and was inherently evil. This was a hard pill to swallow for people like the Irish who were very proud of their ancestors.

Augustinianism won and Pelagianism lost. Everything in Ireland that preceded St. Patrick's mission was condemned as evil. To this day there is a great reluctance in Ireland to even look at anything pre-Patrick because it is perceived as pagan and evil.

Before he baptized any Irish person Patrick asked a series of questions starting with: "Do you believe that by baptism you erase the sin inherited from your first parents?"  This gives a powerful clue as to what Patrick was really all about and who sent him.

Pelagius was a learned Irish Christian lay scholar who thought that St. Augustine's teachings were overly harsh in that they taught that man was a sinner by nature and that without the grace of God he was condemned to eternal damnation. Roman scholars said he was "full of Irish porridge" which is one of the ways we know he was Irish.

According to Augustine man was totally dead in sin by virtue of being born of a woman. Salvation could only come through the grace of God which had been earned by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and that even then it was entirely at God's pleasure whom he chose to save and whom he didn't and that there was nothing man could do about it.

The idea of the fall of Adam, largely blamed on Eve, was very deep in Christian thinking. There was no corresponding belief in ancient Ireland who held women in equal regard. Ancient Ireland seems to have seen the earth as female and the sun as male and worshipped both equally. Newgrange is a good example.

Pelagius protested that Augustine's doctrine required a cruel and exclusionary God on whose whim some individuals were saved leaving others without hope of salvation  no matter how much they might want it. He on the other hand felt that man was basically good and had control of his own eternal destiny and that there was no such thing as being born dead in sin from which we must be saved by Baptism; Christ came to help and forgive but man, if ignorant of Jesus, could still save himself if he lived a good life.

But as we all know the church chose Augustine's vengeful God over Pelagius' more benign God because Pelagius version would not have required Jesus to be sent in the first place. The whole point of Christianity was salvation through Christ.

Patrick's mission was all about wiping out Pelagianism and establishing St. Augustine's doctrine of original sin among the already Christian Irish. Patrick therefore did not convert the Irish from paganism he converted them from Pelagianism.

Everything that survived of the old Pelagian Christianity was destroyed as inherently evil. Ireland was born again and history started with St. Patrick. God had come to the rescue of the Irish in the person of St. Patrick and all before him must be buried and forgotten. Very little of pre-Patrician Ireland has survived.

The six theses of Pelagianism were set out as follows in 411:

1. Even if Adam had not sinned, he would have died.
2. Adam's sin harmed only himself, not the human race.
3. Children just born are in the same state as Adam before his fall.
4. The whole human race neither dies through Adam's sin or death, nor rises again through the resurrection of Christ.
5. The Mosaic Law is as good a guide to heaven as the Gospel.
6. Even before the advent of Christ there were men who were without sin.

The 418 Council of Carthage responded with the following nine canons which every Bishop of the Roman Church had to sign and return to Rome or lose his See:

1. Death did not come to Adam from a physical necessity, but through sin.
2. New-born children must be baptized on account of original sin.
3. Justifying grace not only avails for the forgiveness of past sins, but also gives assistance for the avoidance of future sins.
4. The grace of Christ not only discloses the knowledge of God's commandments, but also imparts strength to will and execute them.
5. Without God's grace it is not merely more difficult, but absolutely impossible to perform good works.
6. Not out of humility, but in truth must we confess ourselves to be sinners.
7. The saints refer the petition of the Our Father, "Forgive us our trespasses", not only to others, but also to themselves.
8. The saints pronounce the same supplication not from mere humility, but from truthfulness.
9. Children dying without baptism do not go to a "middle place" (medius locus), since the non reception of baptism excludes both from the "kingdom of heaven" and from "eternal life".

A similar Council was held at Ephesus in 431 which eliminated Palagianism from the Eastern Church where Palagius had gone after being banished from Rome by Pope Celestine I. Pelagius was welcomed in the East by Nestorius who had become Bishop of Constantinople in 428. Nestorius was then himself deposed and excommunicated as a heretic by the Council of Epehesus. Patrick came to Ireland the following year 432.

Patrick's Gaulish mother was a close relative of St. Martin of Tours, probably a niece.  They were both from Roman military families. After his escape from Ireland Patrick's mother was instrumental in sending Patrick to Gaul to become a priest.

He was ordained at Auxerre by St. Germain who was later commissioned in 429 by Pope Celestine I, a personal friend of Augustine's, to go to Britain to combat Pelagianism and he brought Patrick with him.

So Patrick through his mother was well connected in both church and civil circles at a time of almost total identity of church and state in the Roman world (heresy was actually considered rebellion by the Emperor).

Germain was from one of the noblest (and richest) families in Roman Gaul. His high birth and first class education brought him to practice law at the supreme court in Rome where he met and married Eustachia a lady from the top rank of Roman society.

Gaul was divided into six provinces and was governed by six Roman dukes. The talented young Germain was sent from Rome to Auxerre as one of these six dukes by the Emperor. You couldn't get any higher than that, but he also became the Christian bishop of Auxerre in 418.

He visited Britain on more than one occasion as the authoritative representative of Rome, both spiritual and temporal. Tradition has it that Patrick was attached to his first mission where he successfully challenged and defeated the Pelagians at St. Albans. So Patrick was an experienced anti-Pelagianist long before he came to Ireland.

Based on his anti-Pelagianist experience and his knowledge of the Irish language, learned while he was a slave there, Germain sent Patrick to Rome with strong recommendations that Celestine send him to Ireland to combat its Pelagianism. Celestine gave him the title of Patricus or father but did not consecrate him bishop because he had already sent a bishop called Palladius to Ireland the previous year.

But Palladius had been badly received by the Irish and had repaired to Britain where he died within the year.  Accordingly, on his way to Ireland Patrick was instructed to stop at Turin where he was consecrated bishop and the task of eliminating Pelagianism in Ireland, as Germain had done in Britain, was now placed on Patrick's shoulders.

Heric of Auxerre, a biographer of St. Germain writing in the ninth century, said that of all the great things accomplished by Germain in a long lifetime of service to the Empire and the Church the greatest of all was sending Patrick to Ireland.

How then had pre-Patrician Christianity got to Ireland? The same way most things reached Ireland in the ancient world, by sea, and mainly through Spain.

The popular European image of  Ireland lying isolated out beyond the island of Britain in the mists of the Atlantic is exactly that, a European image. To the peoples of the Mediterranean it appears far closer than continental Europe north of the Alps.There is abundant evidence of long association between Ireland and Spain and in turn with the rest of the Mediterranean cultures, Roman, Egyptian, Syrian and Greek.

Christianity spread very quickly through the ancient world and would have reached Ireland almost as quickly as it reached Rome.

There must have been a sizable Christian population in Rome by 64 for Nero to blame them for the great fire he is reputed to have started in order to build a whole new city as a monument to himself to be called Neronia. Peter and Paul were executed with many other Christians during the Neronian persecutions that followed the fire until Nero fled Rome and committed suicide in 68.

Judging by the extensive wanderings of figures in the ancient world, Peter and Paul for example, the sea was the highway of all Mediterranean cultures. With all the sea trade between Ireland and the Mediterranean it would be impossible that Christianity did not reach Ireland at an early stage as it did throughout all of the Mediterranean.

The belief that apart from a few Roman trading posts on the east coast Ireland was largely pagan as late as the fifth century is highly questionable when it is known that sailors from the west of Ireland were as familiar with the great trading city of Alexandria on the Nile as they were with Galway Bay or Clew Bay in County Mayo.

The further assertion that the vast outpouring of Irish Christian writing and missionaries after St. Patrick suddenly sprang from a formerly illiterate and pagan people is hard to rationalize. There must have been some kind of continuity of scholarship and belief.

It is also surprising that only orthodox Christian manuscripts survive. We are asked to believe that the early Irish monks quickly acquired all this writing ability only after the mission of Patrick and wrote only Roman Christian books.

It is much more likely that these early monks learned their craft from earlier Irish scribes both secular and religious who wrote about all kinds of things they considered important such as the natural world and the science of sea travel and that they were in constant touch with scholars all over the Mediterranean and the Orient.

The Irish language and script is much more akin to Middle Eastern languages than any European language. Pelagius for example was fluent in Greek and other eastern Mediterranean languages. He did not need a translator when he had to defend himself in various Eastern venues while his Roman accusers such as Augustine often did.

Many similarities between the so-called Celtic church and the Egyptian church for example have been noted. The Irish illuminated manuscripts have many similarities with Coptic and eastern Mediterranean art generally. The various sophisticated colored inks used in Irish literary works are thought to have come mainly from the Orient.

The need to paint Ireland as a backwater of Europe lost in dark barbaric pagan practices was necessary in order to wipe out all traces of pre-Patrician orientalism. Those who have done so failed to explain Ireland's sudden transformation from illiterate darkness to brilliant illumination as the savior of Western Civilization itself.

Hopefully Irish scholars will soon start to look at the incredible richness of their pagan past before it is erased by the frenzied building of infrastructure associated with the economic miracle now taking place in Ireland as the Irish race to become just like the rest of Europe. In the meantime Irish antiquities are being lost at an alarming rate.