Roman Christianity arrived late in Ireland because the Roman armies never invaded the island. Consequently, Roman culture, and its brand of Roman Christianity, had little influence on early Irish Christianity. Because the educated class of the Celts, the Druids, already had a long history of educational excellence and philosophic curiosity, they welcomed the new religion into Ireland as they did with all new information.

The ancient Greeks did student exchanges with the Druids, whom they considered the other great philosophers in Europe. Perhaps the most famous Greek scholar to study under the Druids was Pythagoras.

Christian worship had only reached Ireland around 400 AD. Ireland at this time was still a Celtic nation, which the Roman Church called pagan. Contrary to common myth, the Irish did not abandon their Celtic culture in favor of Christianity. Rather, Christianity was absorbed into their culture, very much like in modern day Peru were Christianity was woven into the local traditions and practices. The Celtic cross reflects this mixture of the two. Celtic culture was built upon a very cyclically minded philosophy, patterning itself after the seasonal cycles and life cycles they observed in their beloved natural world. The Celtic cross includes the cross to represent Christianity and the Circle to represent the Celtic world view.

Roman Christianity, like Roman culture, was a city-based culture. All of the letters of Saint Paul that made it into the official Roman canon of the New Testament were written to new Christian churches in various Roman cities. The Latin word for Celt was Galli. Paul’s letter to the Galatians was written to a Celtic settlement, uncharacteristically urban, in what is now Turkey. For most of its early history, the Roman church paid little attention to the country dwellers they called the “Paganus,” which is equivalent to the contemporary “redneck” or “country bumpkin.” Consequently, it was not the Roman missionaries who Christianized the vast majority of the European land mass. It was the monks from Ireland who were comfortable with the nature-loving ways of the Paganus. They traveled to mainland Europe and taught the country folk Celtic Christianity.

Despite Rome’s later philosophic battles against Celtic Christianity it remained the dominant form of Christianity in terms of numbers of adherents for the first thousand years of the Christian era. Most modern Christians do not know this because once Rome either converted, suppressed, or killed the adherents of what they saw as a heresy. They removed all reference to Celtic Christianity’s legacy from the libraries of Europe – except the Irish libraries, material being translated only since Irish Independence in the early Twentieth Century.