St. Patrick, Worshipper of False Gods

[c. 390–c. 461] FEAST DAY: March 17

It didn’t occur to the Catholic bishops of fourth-century Europe to send missionaries to such far-off lands as Ireland or Scandinavia. With so much of Europe still firmly heathen, there was more than enough work for missionaries close to home.

Ireland was off the radar in more ways than one. First, viewed from the cozy perspective of the Mediterranean, Ireland stood at the edge of the known world. Second, it was a country that had never been a province of the Roman Empire, and very little was known about the people and their customs. Third, it was an entirely pagan country, so missionaries would be immersed in hostile territory from the moment they set foot on Irish soil.

Of course, Providence does not conform itself to the agendas of bishops. Ireland became a bulwark of the Church thanks to one man who first entered the country as a slave, then returned as an apostle. It is interesting to note that this was not the first time a slave had introduced Christianity to a remote land. Christianity came to Ethiopia with St. Frumentius, a onetime slave to the king of Ethiopia, while St. Nino, a slave woman, was the mother of the Church in what is today the Republic of Georgia.

St. Patrick was born in a Roman settlement called Bannaventa on the British side of the Irish Sea. His mother, Concessa, and his father, Calpornius, were devout Christians who brought him up in the faith and taught their son the scriptures (Calpornius was a deacon). In spite of his parents’ best efforts, Christianity made no discernible impact on Patrick. Late in life when he wrote his autobiography, the Confession, he admitted candidly, “I did not believe in the living God.”

Patrick went on to acknowledge that when he was fifteen he did something so wicked that years later, when he was about to be ordained a deacon, he worried that perhaps his sin barred him from ordination. He disclosed the secret to his closest friend, who reassured him there was no impediment to receiving holy orders, and promised most solemnly never to repeat what Patrick had told him.

What had Patrick done? That question has tantalized historians and hagiographers for 1,600 years. Patrick himself doesn’t give us much of a hint. He says it was something he “had done in my boyhood one day, nay, in one hour, because I was not yet strong.” The traditional interpretation has been that Patrick had some kind of sexual encounter. Certainly, that is a possibility. But it is the reaction of Patrick’s fellow bishops when his old friend went public with Patrick’s secret that leads one to believe the sin was much more than some adolescent roll in the hay. Patrick says the bishops “attacked” him, that they started proceedings against him to strip him of the rank of bishop. “Not slight,” Patrick says, “was the shame and blame that fell upon me.”

Recently students of St. Patrick have suggested that the great sin of his youth was serious indeed. The current consensus is that Patrick, although technically a Christian, took part in a pagan ceremony. Such an offense truly would be bad enough that an old friend might feel obliged to reveal it, and members of the hierarchy might call for Patrick’s removal from office.

The apostles had forbidden the first Christians to have anything to do with pagan rites; their prohibition even extended to eating part of any food that had been offered as a sacrifice to false gods. Where Patrick lived in Britain the old pagan rites were ubiquitous, while Christianity was the strange, new religion. In the eyes of the Church, joining a dance around an oak tree or attending a sacrifice to a British god would count as participation in idolatry.

How then did an unbelieving, quasi-pagan youth become the great Apostle of Ireland and one of the Church’s most renowned saints? When Patrick was sixteen a band of Irish raiders landed on the western coast of Britain near Bannaventa. They looted Calpornius and Concessa’s villa and took Patrick himself captive.

In Ireland Patrick was sold into slavery and put to work watching sheep. Forced to live outdoors, exposed to heat and rain and cold, underclothed, underfed, far from home and with no hope of ever escaping from an island he described as “the utmost part of the earth,” the boy was on the point of despair. Yet in that dark time Patrick at last remembered God. “The Lord opened the sense of my unbelief,” he recalled, “that I might at last remember my sins and be converted with all my heart to the Lord my God.” Perhaps for the first time since he was a child, Patrick began to pray, and with such fervor that as long as he was in conversation with God he was oblivious to frost and snow and rain. He says that he found the consolations of prayer so sweet he would offer one hundred prayers during the day, and another hundred during the night.

After six years in slavery, Patrick heard a voice say, “See, your ship is ready.” At once, Patrick left the sheep and ran off to find the ship that would carry him home. When he arrived at the coast there was a ship preparing to leave, but the captain refused to take him aboard. As Patrick walked away, he prayed. He had not even finished the prayer before one of the crew called him back. “We will take you on,” he said. “Make friends with us.”

After a long, roundabout journey Patrick made his way back to his family in Bannaventa. Nor did he remain at home long. One night he had a dream in which a man gave him a letter that bore the inscription “The Voice of the Irish.” When he opened it he heard a multitude crying, “We beg you, holy youth, come and walk among us once more.” Certain of his vocation, Patrick left his home for Gaul to study for the priesthood in preparation for his return to Ireland as a missionary.

By the time Patrick was ordained there were a few Christians in Ireland, probably near present-day Wicklow. The size of this enclave was small, but sufficient to prompt the pope to send them a bishop named Palladius. He visited the Christians of Ireland, then sailed off to see the Christians of southwest Scotland. Before he could return to the Christian Irish, before a single mission had been sent to the pagan Irish, Palladius died.

In the 430s, or perhaps as late as the 450s, Patrick was ready to bring the faith to Ireland. He sold his patrimony to fund his mission and sailed across the Irish Sea, most likely coming ashore in Ulster (in his Confession, Patrick is maddeningly imprecise about places). He traveled extensively in Ulster, Leinster, and Munster; he may have gotten to Connaught on the west coast of Ireland, but that is uncertain. Yet everywhere he went he was astonished by the fervor with which the Irish responded to the gospel. In imagery that recalls St. Peter the fisherman, Patrick said, “[we] spread our nets so a great multitude and throng might be caught for God.” Even more marvelous to him were the numbers of young men and women, many from the leading families of the country, who not only asked for baptism but begged to be permitted to take vows as monks and nuns.

If anything reveals the depth of Patrick’s attachment to his converts it is the blistering letter he wrote to Coroticus, a Christian British prince who raided a Christian Irish community, killing many and carrying off the survivors to sell as slaves. Patrick denounced Coroticus and his men as “fellow citizens of the demons…. Dripping with blood, [you] welter in the blood of innocent Christians whom I have begotten into number for God and confirmed in Christ.” In another passage it is obvious that the memories of his own years as a slave are still raw in Patrick’s mind. “You…sell [Christians] to a foreign nation that has no knowledge of God. You betray the members of Christ as it were into a brothel.”

There is no record that Coroticus ever released his captives, or that Patrick ever saw those beloved converts again.

We know that Patrick died on March 17, but we are not certain of the year: based on the surviving records, 461 is the best guess. He died justly proud of how far he managed to carry the faith among the Irish. In the centuries since Patrick’s day, the Irish have carried that faith to every corner of the globe—to the United States and Canada, certainly, but also to Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and Asia, even back to England and Scotland. And wherever there are communities of Irish, invariably they build a church and name it after St. Patrick.