I write this short biographical essay for folks who haven’t seen biographical films such as Patrick: The Patron Saint of Ireland (2020), St. Patrick: Apostle of Ireland (2004), and St. Patrick: The Irish Legend (2000), or haven’t read books such as Roy Flechner’s Saint Patrick Retold (2019) and Thomas O’Loughlin’s Discovering Saint Patrick (2005).

It was news to me, some years back, when I learned that St. Patrick had authored a couple documents. In all my celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day, including some in Chicago with its three-hour parade and the dying of the Chicago River green, I had never heard of these documents. Perhaps their existence is news to you. Both are short and available online. Both were written in his later years, well after he had been consecrated a bishop and had been working as a missionary in Ireland. Both had been preserved — for 1,600 years — because of his importance.

One is about 18 pages in length and is autobiographical. It is called Confessio, in the Latin in which he, known by his Latin name as Patricius, wrote. It can be found here and here. He wrote it to defend himself against attacks that he had engaged in financial improprieties. The second document is the even shorter Epistola (Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus), which is Patrick’s excommunication of a British Christian chieftain, Coroticus, and his soldiers, for raiding Ireland and kidnapping and enslaving Patrick’s converts. A third writing, a hymn, is attributed to St. Patrick but likely is not his. Nonetheless it is ancient and dated about early 8^th century — within 50 to 100 years of Patrick’s death. I include this document at the end. (When I taught Latin, I used it to teach prepositions. You’ll see why.)

Patrick was born no earlier than 400 A.D. and likely no later than 410 A.D., when Rome abandoned Britain. In his Confessio, Patrick says that, as a teenager, he did not believe in God and, moreover, when he was 15, he spent an hour committing a grave sin. He never says what the sin was (ch. 27). Did he kill a slave or servant? Participate in pagan worship? Was it sexual? Was it teen-aged rebelliousness in some form? This episode may call to mind two episodes of sin that St. Augustine recounts in his Confessions, a book which St. Augustine wrote two centuries earlier, in 397. One was stealing pears at night with some supposed friends. I described this in an essay on these pages. Another was an undescribed grave sin that occurred in church during Mass! (Book Three, III.5) 

At age 16, Patrick and “thousands of others” were kidnapped, transported to Ireland, and enslaved. In Confessio he attributes these events as God’s punishment for being rebellious and ignoring the lessons of priests (ch. 1).

During his enslavement, he was a shepherd (ch. 16), during which time he did not attend school and had infrequent interaction with the local people, preventing him from learning Irish or anything about them (their customs, religion, folklore, kinship structure, political organization). Despite his lack of human contact, much less contact with the religion in which he was baptized, he was touched by God:

And there [in Ireland] the Lord ‘opened my understanding to my unbelief,’ so that however late, I might become conscious of my failings. Then remembering my need, I might ‘turn with all my heart to the Lord my God.’ For it was He Who ‘looked on my lowliness’ and had mercy on the ignorance of my youth, and Who looked after me before I knew Him and before I had gained wisdom or could distinguish between good and evil. Indeed, as a father consoles his son, so He protected me. (ch. 2, quoting Scripture)

After six years’ enslavement, he had a dream of escaping and acted on it. He wrote that he walked about 200 miles and persuaded a ship’s captain to transport him to Britain (ch. 17 and 18).

What did Patrick do with his freedom? He left home again — this time to study to become a priest, apparently in Auxerre, a hundred miles southeast of Paris.

And what did he do with his priesthood? He had a dream not unlike the Apostle Paul’s about a man from Macedonia (Acts 16:9). In Patrick’s dream, the Irish were pleading for him to return. Based only on a call for help seen in this dream, Patrick not only sought to return to Ireland but sought to return as a bishop so that he could ordain priests. The educated and urbane British bishops belittled him as an uneducated, uncultured rustic, and did not support his mission to the ruffian, low-life Irish. As Patrick recounts:

There were many who forbade this mission. They even told stories among themselves behind my back, and they said: “Why does he put himself in danger among hostile people who do not know God?” It was not that they were malicious — they just did not understand, as I myself can testify, since I was just an unlearned country person. (ch. 46)

Without enthusiasm, they consecrated him.

Patrick courageously went by himself, without the protection of a chieftain, to the land whose people, if they recognized him, would see him as a fugitive slave.

It was not an easy life. He writes that he was on one occasion put in chains for two weeks and feared his execution (ch. 52), and another time he was imprisoned for 60 days (ch. 21). To evangelize, “I have travelled everywhere among you for your own sake, in many dangers, and even to the furthest parts where nobody lived beyond” (ch. 51). “[E]very day there is the chance that I will be killed, or surrounded, or be taken into slavery, or some other such happening” (ch. 55). Women who wished to consecrate themselves as virgins did so without “their fathers’ consent [and] enduring the persecutions and deceitful hindrances of their parents” (ch. 42).

Patrick knew sheep; he didn’t know the Irish. But he met with success, baptizing thousands (ch. 14 and 50), ordaining priests (ch. 50), creating dioceses, and founding monasteries of men and women (ch. 41, 42, and 49). He died sometime between 457 and 493. (That is not a typographical error; it is a large range of dates.)

I think many people, when they imagine the looks of St. Patrick, envisage an older man, which is how he is typically depicted. But here is a statue of him erected in 1990 in Westport, Ireland, depicting him as a shepherd wearing Roman British clothes. And here is a group of stained glass windows in churches of New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey, many of which show him younger.

Patrick had returned to the people who had enslaved him to bring them the ultimate freedom. He was not timid in the face of the pagan Irish, in the face of the British bishops, in the face of British Christian warriors. He succeeded by the grace of God. Patrick’s success in bringing the Christian Faith to the Irish people in the 5^th century resulted in a boon to all humanity since, as in the title of Thomas Cahill’s 1996 book, “the Irish saved civilization.”

What might St. Patrick’s life mean for us today?

Like Patrick, none of us — bishops, priests, religious, lay — should be timid. As Pope St. John Paul II so frequently exhorted, “Be not afraid.”

We today actually have the same opportunity as Patrick and his spiritual sons and daughters of Ireland, namely, that of saving civilization — this time from the pagan officials, media, and academics throughout the West. We who are Christian today inhabit lands that have become strange to us, and foreign to God. Our lands are filled with people described by St. Paul as the “enemies of Christ” (Phil. 3:18).

Let us bring change to our lands, true freedom to our lands. In words taken from President Kennedy’s Inaugural, “Let us go forth to lead the land we love, knowing that, here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.”

EWTN’s translation of Lorica (or Hymn) of Saint Patrick  also known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” (for protection):

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ’s birth and His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion and His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection and His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In obedience of angels,
In service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In preachings of the apostles,
In faiths of confessors,
In innocence of virgins,
In deeds of righteous men.

I arise today
Through the strength of heaven;
Light of the sun,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of the wind,
Depth of the sea,
Stability of the earth,
Firmness of the rock.

I arise today
Through God’s strength to pilot me;
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s way to lie before me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s hosts to save me
From snares of the devil,
From temptations of vices,
From everyone who desires me ill,
Afar and anear,
Alone or in a multitude.

I summon today all these powers between me and evil,
Against every cruel merciless power that opposes my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of women and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul.

Christ shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that reward may come to me in abundance.

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye that sees me,
Christ in the ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through a confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation.