Community Corner

St. Patrick: True Story that Trumps the Myth

Captured as a teenager and sold into slavery in pagan Ireland, Patrick eventually escaped—only to return decades later to convert the Emerald Isle to Christianity.

St. Patrick did not chase the snakes from 5th century Ireland. There never were any snakes on the Emerald Isle.

Nor is there evidence that he taught the doctrine of the Trinity, as myth has it, with the shamrock (three clovers into one stalk).

The legends are not true, but it doesn't matter. The real story of the Briton-born Patricius is far better.

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Captured as a teenager in northern Britain, he was sent across the sea and sold into slavery in pagan Ireland. Escaping from six years of bondage after receiving a spiritual vision, Patrick returned to Ireland decades later, armed only with a mystic’s faith, to convert the island to Christianity

"Patrick was really a first—the first missionary to barbarians beyond the reach of Roman law," Thomas Cahill wrote in How the Irish Saved Civilization. "The step he took was in its way as bold as Columbus's, and a thousand times more humane."

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Patrick's return to Ireland coincided with the sack of Rome by the Vandals and Visigoths, and the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. Cahill asserts that Patrick's introduction of Christianity, Latin and the literature of Western civilization—later tediously scribed by secluded Irish monks—preserved the great writings of the Greeks and Judeo-Christian culture through the burning of Rome and the ensuing Dark Ages.

Two of Patrick's letters survive: Confessio, a short account of his life, and Letter to Coroticus, the repudiation of a king and his soldiers' brutality. They present Patrick's trials and hard-earned spirituality in his own words.

In Confessio, Patrick writes how he was "humbled every day by hunger and nakedness" during his six years tending cattle in the Irish wilderness.

He acknowledges he did not know "the true God" and was not a good Christian when he was kidnapped and forced by his slave master to become a shepherd. He admits to a serious sin at age 15 (the exact nature isn't known), which nearly prevents his religious appointment to Ireland 30 years later.

In a strange land, unfamiliar with Gaelic, without comfort or companionship, Patrick discovers the only hope available to him. He writes in Confessio that he had begun to offer "up to 100 prayers a day, and in the night a like number."

He prayed as he "stayed out in the forest and on the mountain" and before daylight in "the snow, in icy coldness, in rain." Looking back, he said he could see he survived only "because the Spirit was burning in me."

Then in his early 20s, while sleeping one night, he heard a voice in a dream telling him that he would soon depart for his home country. A short time thereafter, he heard another voice say, "Behold, your ship is ready."

However, as Patrick later explained, his vessel was 200 miles away, over land he had never walked. He fled, nonetheless, making his way "by the power of God who directed my route to my advantage," until he reached the prophesied ship. Although an escaped slave, Patrick convinced several crew members to allow him on board.

A divine calling

Years passed before Patrick was called back by another dream: a vision of a man named Victoricus, carrying "innumerable letters," including one addressed to "The Voice of the Irish." Patrick said he heard the voices of people beside the Foclut forest in Ireland, near the western sea, crying "as if with one voice" and said his heart was "stung intensely."

After all his tribulations, he was reunited with his family. They asked that he not leave again. But he believed the vision to be a divine calling.

Needing to further his interrupted education, learn Christian theology and master Latin, Patrick studied for years in France before he was ordained a priest and then a bishop.

"He struggled," said Msgr. Stuart W. Swetland, director of Pre-Theology and director of Homiletics at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Thurmont, MD. "Patrick did not, as we can relate to today, have an easy time going back to school and learning Latin later in life."

Patrick later wrote that he remained embarrassed about his lack of formal education, hesitating to write Confessio sooner. He was 47 years old when he took his unshakable faith in God and the Holy Scriptures to Ireland around 433 A.D. His mission lasted 30 years.

He was not the first missionary sent, but he was the first who stayed. The Rev. Tommy Lane of Mount St. Mary's Seminary, by way of St. Patrick's College in Maynooth, County Kildare, and the National Seminary for Ireland, noted in a previous St. Patrick's Day homily that before Patrick, a bishop named Palladius was sent to Ireland by Pope Celestine. Apparently terrified by a Wicklow chieftain, he abandoned the project.

"How was Patrick able to convert Ireland so successfully, so easily?" Lane asked rhetorically. "Before Patrick came to Ireland, there was a strong belief here in all kinds of gods, dating back to 3,500 B.C., the pre-Celtic peoples of Ireland worshipped the sun with shrines. In the ancient religion, wells and rivers were associated with goddesses. For example, the rivers Shannon and Boyne are named after goddesses.

"Patrick tapped into these pagan beliefs and taught the people the true faith about the true God," Lane said. "Patrick's great shrine at Croagh Patrick in County Mayo had previously been a shine to the Celtic god Lugh (god of the sun). The lighting of the Spring fire at Tara by the Ard-R (high king) was taken over by Patrick and became the lighting of the Easter fire of Holy Saturday."

The perfect evangelist

As someone who had a spiritual awakening alone in the countryside and saw visions in his dreams, Patrick was a mystic who recognized the presence of a higher power in everyone and in the world around him. And as a former slave, he understood the poor, and yet was also shrewd and fearless enough to win over chieftains.

Combined with his rugged charm, Patrick's faith, empathy and courage made him the perfect evangelist to reach the Irish.

"It's very important that we get St. Patrick right," Swetland said. "He was so moved, so passionate about the Gospels and the message of Jesus that he went and shared that enthusiasm with the very people in the strange land where he had been enslaved. He is one of the patron saints of evangelizers."

In his introduction to How the Irish Saved Civilization, Cahill wrote that people typically think of history "as one catastrophe after another after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence.

"But history is also the narratives of grace," he continued, "the recounting of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance."

As Western civilization unraveled, it was Patrick, having found the gift of grace in his own story, who carried the golden thread to Ireland.

The Rev. Frank Murphy is "just a little bit Irish" and a clergy member at St. Patrick's Church in Washington, D.C., which has a huge annual St. Patrick's Day celebration. He said he hopes those celebrating the holiday take time to remember their Irish and Christian heritage on March 17, the day Patrick died.

"And then go have a corned beef and cabbage dinner."


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