The feast day of our patron saint is upon us. Unholy Modern Ireland will mark it in the usual fashion, with abundant alcohol and tasteless outfits presenting the worst caricature of Irishness imaginable.
Government ministers on foreign travels will use the religious festival to talk about everything except the religion St. Patrick converted their ancestors to.
Compared to the misfortunate St. Brigid, Naomh Pádraig has had a lucky escape. It has not yet been suggested that he never actually existed, or that the Christian missionary was in actual fact a pre-Christian Celtic god, Podge.
By writing his own spiritual memoir, the ‘Confession,’ the wise saint has protected himself from this fate.
Today’s politicians merely engage in a cynical game of claiming that Patrick is a justification for mass immigration.
In Enda Kenny’s much-heralded speech in the White House in 2017, he said that Patrick was not just Ireland’s patron saint, but “also a symbol of, indeed, the patron of immigrants.” (As an aside, the Church actually has a patroness of immigrants, Mother Cabrini, and Enda Kenny has no right to rob her of her title, or to pretend that he as a layman can make such declarations).
Leo Varadkar went further when Stateside in 2024, saying that St. Patrick was not just a migrant but “a single, male, undocumented one.”
All of this is irritating, but understandable. For a cultural establishment which rejects Catholicism completely, there is nothing else that can be said about the cleric who did more than anyone else to convert the Irish people to Catholicism.
But St. Patrick – the real flesh and blood man, who walked upon our country’s soil as a slave and a missionary – remains as relevant today as he always was.
Many Christians (and even secular observers) feel that we are living in an era of civilisational collapse. In the course of one lifetime, an older Irish Catholic will have seen their religion being rejected and reviled by a large swathe of the population.
They have seen their history rewritten and have watched the mass slaughter of the unborn being celebrated publicly. We have repaganised, returning to a pre-Patrician state in some ways.
On the international stage, massive societal transformations are underway, and there is every reason to believe that some of the great European nations will not last much longer in their current forms.
Patrick also knew what it was to live in a world that was collapsing before his eyes.
He was a Roman, born around 385 AD when the greatest of empires still remained strong. His father was both a deacon in the Church and also a member of the city council.
Patrick had every reason to believe that the Roman order would endure throughout his lifetime and beyond, and that he could look forward to the relatively high standard of living which his forebears enjoyed.
Yet when he was in his twenties, that world effectively ended. Rome was sacked by the Visigoths, and its legions departed Britain’s shores.
In the religious sphere, he also lived through a period of noticeable secularisation, which occurred not long after Christianity had become the dominant religion throughout the empire.
Writing in the ‘Confession,’ Patrick reveals that he was that most modern of things: a teenage atheist.
“[W]e had turned away from God, and had not kept his commandments, and were disobedient to our priests,” he proclaims in the first chapter, later adding that his Catholicism had been nominal at best: “from my childhood, I was not a believer in the true God, but continued in death and unbelief until I was severely chastened.” Many of today’s youth can surely relate.
That chastening took the form of violent enslavement in a foreign country. He only hints at what that process entailed, but we can imagine: a bloody confrontation in his homestead, a hellish journey in an open boat across the Irish Sea, a long march through the Irish countryside with his hands tied behind his back.
Faith came to Patrick the hard way. Tending sheep in the fields, he began to pray, and then gradually began to do so more often until he was praying 100 times a day, even getting up before dawn to pray before a hard day’s work.
By the time God spoke to him in a dream to call him home, Patrick had the strength of faith to obey in spite of all the risks, just as he had the strength of faith to heed the later call to return to the country which had enslaved him.
Irish politicians are not entirely wrong to focus on the migration point, because Patrick does transcend national divisions.
The British language he spoke would eventually evolve into what is now Welsh. As both modern and ancient Welsh and Irish are mutually unintelligible, he would not have understood his captors.
Patrick would have come to know the Irish language just as he came to know the Irish people, slowly, and probably with much struggle along the way during those first six years here.
It is not wise to insert modern conceptions of nationhood into the experiences of pre-modern figures like Patrick, and we often think of his life in an overly simplistic manner: the Briton who came to Ireland and escaped back home.
This is most likely an inaccurate reading of his life as he told it, however.
In the ‘Confession,’ Patrick writes of the boat trip from Ireland lasting three days. This seems too long to have been a simple trip across the Irish Sea. More importantly, the subsequent story of a 28 day journey across a barren “desert” landscape makes little sense if he was indeed in Britain at this point.
Many historians who have examined the life of Patrick maintain that he was in fact in what is now France, where it has been well documented that barbarian invasions laid waste to much of the Gallic landscape from around 408 AD onwards, i.e., just before Patrick escaped Ireland.
He made it home to Britain, surely, but he may have spent a long time in Gaul and undergone some of his religious training there.
In the ‘Confession,’ he writes that his devotion to preaching Christ’s message to the Irish meant that he could not go home to Britain as he wished, while also adding that he yearned “to go as far as Gaul to visit my brethren, and to see the faces of the Lord’s saints.”
Given the context, it is hard to believe that he thought he would be seeing those Gallic brethren for the first time.
Patrick’s life makes clear that he was above all else a Roman Catholic who served a Church which recognises no moral divisions between its followers.
Centuries of Irish Catholic emigration has made St. Patrick’s Day well-known across much of the world, where so many churches bear his name.
While St. Patrick is not the patron saint of immigrants, he is the patron saint of Nigeria, due to the huge influence Irish Catholic priests and religious had in creating an incredibly vibrant Nigerian Church.
Patrick’s lesser-known written work was his ‘Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus,’ in which he castigated a band of Britons for the crimes of murder and enslavement perpetrated against Irish Christians who had recently converted.
The tone in the letter is one of outrage, not least due to the fact that Coroticus and his men were like Patrick, Romans.
He insisted that he must condemn the outrage, regardless of the consequences, while giving an indication of the passionate devotion he felt for his adopted homeland: “I do it for the love of my neighbours here in Ireland and for my spiritual children. I have traded in my homeland, my family, and my very life for them – even if it means my death.”
Patrick dedicated himself to the Irish completely, in spite of being brought here a slave. Throughout his life, he remained exceptionally humble.
The first words of ‘Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus’ are “I am Patrick the ignorant sinner…”
The first words of the ‘Confession’ are “I am Patrick – a sinner – the most unsophisticated and unworthy among all the faithful of God. Indeed, to many I am the most despised.”
Captivity disrupted the education which was expected of a noble Roman youth, and early in his memoir he writes of his hesitations in writing his account, both due to what he felt was an insufficient command of Scripture and also his difficulties in expressing himself adequately in Latin.
Others possessed greater education or literary flair, he felt, and perhaps they did.
Patrick was not the first Christian missionary to come here after all, and he was not even our first bishop. Yet his role in expanding the Church was enormous.
For this reason, his earliest biographers felt the need to present him less as a man and more as a legend.
Details of his ministry which form no part of the ‘Confession’ began to be added. In the 7th century, Muirchú described Patrick winning a sort of magical duel against a king’s druid. A few centuries later, the ‘The Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick’ went further, depicting Patrick wrestling with an angel.
Meanwhile, Patrick’s admissions of human failings were edited out of the version of the ‘Confession’ which appears in the 9th century Book of Armagh.
The same attitude exists in the Church today as well, and it probably always will.
Some part of us prefers saints to be other worldly or superhuman, to be entirely different from the people we see around us. We want them to be so unlike us that we have an excuse to not even try to be like them.
We do not want saints to be ordinary people who overcame their weaknesses and chose to answer God’s call, no matter how difficult the task before them appeared to be.
One man did just that though, 1,600 years ago, and Ireland was never the same again.
Hail Glorious Saint Patrick indeed.