SAINT PATRICK

Today our country and much of the world, celebrates Saint Patrick’s Day, especially in Ireland, where Saint Patrick is their patron saint. Saint Patrick’s Day is considered the day of his death.

Saint Patrick was a 5^th century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland known as the “Apostle of Ireland.” However, neither the date of his birth or death can be identified with certainty. Because I couldn’t locate my book of the saints, which was an old edition, I went to Wikipedia. All the following information is there and annotated with references. Because the information was pages and pages long, I shortened it.

There are many versions of his life, but the generally accepted one by modern scholars, is that Patrick, originally named Maewyn Succat, was born in 387 A.D. to the parents Calpernius and Conchessa. At the age of 16 in 403 AD Saint Patrick was captured by the Irish and sent to Ireland to serve as a slave herding and tending sheep in Dalriada. During his time in captivity Saint Patrick became fluent in the Irish language and culture. After six years he escaped captivity after hearing a voice urging him to travel to a distant port where a ship would be waiting to take him back to Britain. On his way back to Britain, he was captured again and spent sixty days in captivity in Tours, France. During his short captivity within France, Saint Patrick learned about French monasticism. At the end of his second captivity he had a vision.

St. Patrick recounts that vision he had a few years after returning home: “I saw a man coming, as it were from Ireland. His name was Victoricus, and he carried many letters, and he gave me one of them. I read the heading “The Voice of the Irish.” As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood of Foclut, which is beside the western sea – and they cried out, as with one voice: ‘We Appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.’”

Acting on the vision, Patrick returned to Ireland as a Christian missionary. However, tradition has it that St. Patrick was not welcomed by the locals where he landed and was forced to leave to seek a more welcoming landing place further north.  St. Patrick’s position as a foreigner in Ireland was not an easy one. His refusal to accept gifts from kings placed him outside the normal ties of kinship, fosterage, and affinity. Legally he was without protection and he says that on one occasion he was beaten, robbed of all he had, and put in chains, perhaps waiting execution. But with his knowledge of Irish language and culture, he brought Christianity and monasticism to Ireland in the form of more than 300 churches and over 100,000 Irish baptized. 

There are many legends regarding Saint Patrick. One is that he used the shamrock as an illustrative parable in teaching the Irish about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the Christian teaching of three persons in one God. This story first appears in writing in 1726, although it may be older. The shamrock has since become a central symbol for St. Patrick’s Day

Another legend is that St. Patrick banished all the snakes from Ireland. However, all evidence suggests that post-glacial Ireland never had snakes, and so far no serpent has successfully migrated across the open ocean to a new home in Ireland. Naturalist Nigel Monaghan, keeper of natural history at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, who has searched extensively through Irish fossil collections and records, says “At no time has there ever been a suggestion of snakes in Ireland, so there was nothing for St. Patrick to banish.”

One thing I found interesting was that although St. Patrick’s Day is a feast day in the Catholic Church, he has never been formally canonized by a Pope; nevertheless, various Christian churches declare that he is a Saint in Heaven, and he’s in the List of Saints. He is still widely venerated in Ireland and elsewhere today. One of our country’s largest cathedrals is St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

Do you celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day?

How much of this information did you already know?