If the Bishop of Rome had been reputed to be Patriarch of Britain, and much more if he had been acknowledged to be a spiritual monarch, it is not credible that the Britannic Church should have applied itself for assistance altogether to their neighbours and not at all to their superior.
When he turns to the mission of Patrick, Bramhall declares that it likewise demonstrates "not one syllable of any jurisdiction" claimed by the Roman See, but rather evangelisation and the building up of a national Church in communion with its neighbours:
I confess, here are store of instances for preaching and baptizing and ordaining and converting; but if every word he saith was true, it is not at all material to the question. Our question is concerning exterior jurisdiction in foro Ecclesie; but the acts mentioned by him are all acts of the key of order, not of the key of jurisdiction. If he do thus mistake one key for another, he will never be able to open the right door. He accustometh himself to call every ordinary messenger a "legate". But let him shew me that they ever exercised legantine authority in Britain. That he doth not, because he cannot. The Britannic and English Churches have not been wanting to send out devout persons to preach to foreign nations, to convert them , to baptize them, to ordain them pastors; yet without challenging any jurisdiction over them ...
If there be nothing in it but baptizing, he [i.e. the Roman apologist] may as well save his labour, unless he think that baptizing is an act of jurisdiction, which his own schools make not to be so much as an act of the key of order. Ireland was the ancient Scotland. The Irish Scots were converted by St. Patrick, the British Scots by St. Columba ...
In all the instances, which he hath brought hitherto, we find nothing but preaching and converting and christening, not one syllable of any jurisdiction. Will the British records afford us so many instances of this kind, and not so much as one of any legislative or judiciary act? Then certainly there were none in those days.
Bramhall, in other words, portrays the mission of Saint Patrick cohering with the Laudian vision of episcopal national churches maintaining communion without claiming jurisdiction - of the 'Britannic Churches', of which Saint Patrick was one of the founders, standing alongside "the Churches of Italy, France, Spain, Germany" (Canon XXX of 1604), with the Roman Church being "a sister to the British Church, but a mistress to no Church".
From The Works of The Most Reverend Father in God, John Bramhall, Volume II.
(The icon of Saint Patrick is by contemporary Orthodox iconographer Aidan Hart.)
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