Saint Patrick,

c.389-461, the patron of Ireland, was a bishop and missionary. He was born in Roman Britain and, at the age of 16, was captured and sold into slavery in Ireland. During his captivity he turned to religion. After 6 years of labor as a shepherd, Patrick escaped to the Continent. He returned to Britain at the age of 22, determined to convert the Irish to Christianity. This goal led him to Gaul, where he studied, was ordained (c.417) to the diaconate, and spent 15 years in the church of Auxerre. His first nomination as bishop to the Irish was rejected because of a sin in his youth. On the death of PALLADIUS—appointed first bishop of the Irish in 431 by Pope Celestine I—Patrick was ordained a bishop (432) and set out for Ireland.

Although opposed by priests of the indigenous religion, Patrick secured toleration for Christians and, through active preaching, made important converts among the royal families. He developed a native clergy, fostered the growth of monasticism, established dioceses, and held church councils. Patrick's doctrine is considered orthodox and has been interpreted as anti-Pelagian. Although he is not particularly noted as a man of learning, a few of his writings remain extant: his Confession, a reply to his detractors, and several letters. The Lorica ("Breastplate"), a famous hymn attributed to Patrick, may date to a later period. Feast day: Mar. 17.

Saint Patrick

What do most of us know about the apostle with the adopted Roman name whose memory has been cherished for over fifteen hundred years by Irish people? For most of us the picture of a white-bearded personage banishing a wriggling snake covers a great deal of what we know about him. Or else we see him as an open-air preacher holding up a shamrock by way of illustrating the doctrine of the Trinity. This second image can be more easily disposed of. Undoubtedly he was a strong Trinitarian (Churchmen had to be strong for this point of faith in the fifth century), but it is unlikely that Patrick would have made use of such an inadequate illustration: Irish people wore the shamrock because it had a resemblance to a cross; its association with the Trinity is through an afterthought. The first image, the one that has a snake in it, requires a little more comment.

There were never any snakes in Ireland, and so our saint was under no necessity to banish them. Now the Norse word for "toad" is "paud"; coming to Ireland they noticed there were no such creatures there. They heard of a man whose name was "Paudrig," and they thought that this name meant "toad-expeller," and out of that misunderstanding came the legend of Patrick's banishing not only toads but snakes. Of course that helped to add veneration to his name, for the snake was the emblem of evil. And so the most popular of the stories about Ireland's apostle has a Norse and not an Irish origin.

We have to get past both the shamrock and the snake to perceive what sort of a man the apostle really was. He was a man of great conviction, great energy, great charity; he combined great visionary power with a practical sense and a soldierly audacity; he could have been a good general and a remarkable poet. He was a saint because he loved men and loved God. He brought Christianity to a people ubi nemo ultra erat —"beyond which no man dwelt." Beyond the limit of the Roman world was a country that had not known the Roman order. Patrick who had been a captive in that land, who knew its people and their language, dedicated his prime of life to making himself fit for missionary service in it. In a vision he saw one coming to him with papers bearing the inscription "the voice of the Irish"; he felt himself possessed by a spirit urging him to go back amongst a people who had held him as a slave.

He belonged to the time of Saint Ambrose, Saint Augustine, Pope Leo the Great, to the period of important Church councils. As a missionary he was the accredited representative of a Church that had a great organization, a highly developed doctrine, a remarkable personnel. He was associated with a group of Churchmen who were striving to bring a new order into Europe. There was a conference at which the project of a mission to Ireland was discussed. Patrick knew he was the man for the mission; his captivity in the country, his knowledge of the language, the voices that had come to him made him know himself as the man singled out by God for this work. How terrible his disappointment must have been when, on the advice of one whom he had trusted, he was passed over and another missionary was sent to Ireland. At the end of his life, even when he knew he had done the work that had been appointed to him, he remembered the bitterness of that disappointment. But the first missionary failed; then he was consecrated bishop and commissioned to go to Ireland. Patrick was about forty-five years of age then.

His conversion of Ireland was not a local event; ultimately it was a European event. Christopher Dawson in one of his essays has shown us that it was only when Churchmen were forced away from the typical organization of Christianity, the Greek and Roman urban organization, that they were able to deal with the barbarians of the North. Well, Patrick went into a country that had no towns, no urban life; he had to build up a church that was different in its organization from the churches of Romanized Europe. In after centuries the Irish missionaries and the Saxon missionaries who had been trained by them were able to reach hunters, fishers, and tillers by being able to think, speak, and act like them.

A hump-shaped eminence of basalt with scant herbage and scrub upon it — this is Slieve Mis, or Slemish, and we come upon it suddenly as we pass from Antrim into Down. It was from the slopes of this eminence that the youthful captive who afterwards took the name of Patrick watched over his master’s flocks or droves. Often he prayed up there; his prayers were said in frost and hail and snow, sometimes as many as a hundred a day. And then he made an escape from the place. When he returned to Ireland, a bishop and a missionary of Rome, he went towards this mount, sailing up the river we see, the river Quoile. The ruler of the territory, believing that his captive was returning with strange, immense powers and with vengeance in his heart, fired his house and gave himself to the flames. Then another local magnate presented the missionary with a barn; in it he celebrated Christian rites, establishing his first church in Ireland. Years later, an old man, he came back to the place of his first foundation; he died here and was buried nearby.

Often, as a youthful captive who was swineherd and shepherd, he must have climbed these rugged slopes to look towards the land from which he had been taken. The Roman communities in Britain, although a doom hung over them, to him represented civilization. His dream was to return. Once he heard a directing voice; he made a flight; he found a ship (helped, Oliver St. John Gogarty has suggested, by an "underground") about to sail from Ireland. After he came to it he had moments of tragic suspense. He was willing to work his passage to the port to which the vessel was bound. His proposal was entertained by the mariners, but afterwards the ship-master objected, saying sharply, "Nay, in no wise shalt thou come with us." The disappointment, coming as the end of his captivity seemed to be in sight, was bitter. He turned away from the mariners to seek shelter. As he went he prayed, and before he had finished his prayer he heard one of the crew shouting behind him, "Come quickly, for they are calling you." The ship-master had been persuaded to forego his objection, and Patrick, now about twenty-one years of age, set sail from Ireland in rough company.

The ship, the cargo, and the voyage were as strange as any romance-writer need devise: dogs were part of the cargo — great Irish wolfhounds. The crew wished to enter into a compact of friendship with him, but he refused; probably it involved some Pagan rite. They reached port (on the continent) and then made a journey overland; they wandered through a desert country for eight and twenty days; many of the dogs became exhausted and were left to die on the road. What was the desert land they traversed? Probably Southern Gaul. "It was the last night of the year 406 that the Vandals, Suevi, Alans, and Burgundians burst into Gaul." The picture of the desolation that he gives has helped Professor MacNeill to date Patrick’s journey.

Apparently Patrick and his company went into Italy; afterwards he wandered back to the South of France. For a while he stayed at the monastery of Lerens; then, after great labors, he won home again to his friends in Britain.

PATRICK TAKEN CAPTIVE

Patrick's native place according to the Irish scholar, Eoin MacNeill, was Abergavenny, in the country that is now Wales. Here, along ways that still communicated with the Roman center, lived communities loyally Roman, devotedly Christian. Patrick spoke the language of the British Celts as well as the Latin tongue. But at the time he was taken captive-he was fifteen then, it is surmised-he had not been trained in the schools. He speaks in his Confession of his inability to write good Latin, "apologizing that he has not had the double advantage that others (of his calling and station) have had, who, as is most fitting, have been educated in sacred literature, and have not lost the Latin speech of their childhood, but have rather constantly acquired a more refined use of it, whereas he, as his style, he says, betrays, was forced in his youth to adopt a strange language in place of Latin. "His style, indeed, suggests," remarks Professor MacNeill, "that, like many a candidate for examination in our time, his conscious weakness in Latin composition caused him to fill out his sentences with phrases taken from other writings, and not always apt to express the intended sense." Well, on this Roman and Christian community that still had communication with the Roman center, Irish raiders descended in 4Ol. The raiders were probably under the command of the high-king Niall. "The object of the raid was to secure a large booty in slaves and other things of value." The household of the decurion Calpurnius hardly survived the raid: its youthful heir (Patrick) was carried off together with its man-servants and maid-servants. Thousands of captives were brought from Britain by these particular raiders. They were sold as slaves, Patrick tells us, and scattered among many tribes, even to the farthest part of Ireland.

At the time he began his mission, the most powerful king in Ireland was Laegaire (Leary) , the second in succession from Niall who had carried Patrick ovcr thirty years before. Laegaire claimed to be Ard-ri, high-king or emperor of the Irish, and his seat was at Tara. Patrick went to Tara and preached before him. Laegaire did not adopt the new creed, but he put no obstacles in the way of Patrick's mission.

He sat with three kings to revise the laws of Ireland. That revision was an acknowledgment that his mission had been successful, for it was to incorporate teachings in the national law. But still Patrick looked on himself as an exile and a man of little account. The world that he felt he belonged to—the world of his father, the decurion— was perishing in his sight: the Roman legions had been withdrawn from Britain, and Germanic Pagans with Gaels and Picts were rending what had been left of the Roman order. Nay, Christianity itself was no restraint upon men who had knowledge of the Latin language and who claimed some shadow of Roman authority. The soldiers of the King of North Britain massacred Patrick's converts and mocked the envoy whom he had sent to rebuke them. "In hostile guise they are dead while they live, allies of Scots and apostate Picts, as though wishing to gorge themselves on the blood of innocent Christians whom I in countless numbers begot to God and confirmed in Christ." So Patrick writes in one of the great letters that have come down to us from those days, his letter to Coroticus. This was a British prince who had raided Ireland and carried off as captives a number of converts, youths and maidens. We today might think that that would be a commonplace of the fifth century, something that a busy man would hardly get wrought up about, like the bombing of a town in our day. But injustice and violence would always be battled against by Patrick. With an indignation that makes us ashamed of our own lukewarmness, he denounces the tyrant of that day. "You deliver the members of Christ as it were to a house of ill-fame. What manner of hope in God have you, or any who cooperate with you? God will judge."

Through fifteen-hundred years the Christianity that was the core of Patrick comes over to us. "Aye, and where shall Coroticus with his most villainous followers, rebels against Christ, where shall they see themselves, who distribute baptized damsels as rewards, and that for the sake of miserable temporal things which verily pass away in a moment like a cloud of smoke which is dispersed by the wind." Then he makes appeal to all whom his letter may reach "That they may liberate the baptized captive women whom they have taken, so that they may deserve to live to God and be made whole here and in eternity."

In that letter comes the bitter cry of the exile, although perhaps twenty years had been spent in labor in Ireland and he was now an old man. "Did I come to Ireland without God or according to the flesh? Who compelled me—I am bound by the spirit—not to see any of my kinsfolk? Is it from me that I show godly compassion towards the nation who once took me captive and harried the men-servants and maid-servants of my father's house? I was free-born according to the flesh. I am born of a father who was a decurion, but I sold my nobility, I blush not to state it, nor am I sorry for it, for the profit of others."

When he died many communities contended for the glory of having his burial in their grounds. Tradition says that, leaving it to Providence to resolve their claims, the bier was laid on a wagon to which four white oxen were yoked: from the church that was his first foundation, the oxen with their burthen were turned and were permitted to fare on without human direction. On a slope above the river Quoile they stayed and there, in Downpatrick, the body of Patrick was laid in earth. A community grew up around the burial place, and the round tower that still stands was raised. The National Museum in Dublin has the little bell that he held in his hand when he summoned his congregation in the Ireland of fifteen hundred years ago—always and by all visitors it is looked at with special reverence. Beside it is a reliquary made in honor of the saint by one of the Norman lords of the West of Ireland-one of the De Berminghams. It is covered over with the figures of the French saints who were thought most of at the time-one thinks of how present Patrick is in comparison with any of them, and of how deep is the veneration in which he has been held by all comers into Ireland. "I, Patrick, a sinner, the most rustic, and the least of all the faithful, and in the estimation of very many deemed contemptible."

Saint Patrick, A Treasury of Irish Folklore, 1967, Crown Publishers, New York, ed. Padraic Colum