St. Patrick: Prepared by God for his Mission

Homily for March 17:  St. Patrick’s Day

by Fr. Tommy Lane

The real St. Patrick is a wonderful person, after we peel away all the folklore, fables, and myths that have grown up around him. The historical St. Patrick, beneath all those additions of time, is a very strong character who suffered a lot. I think we could say that Patrick, together with St. Augustine, are the two best known Christians of the fifth century. The best way of getting to know the real St. Patrick is to read his two brief writings. Together, they are only 83 paragraphs: 62 paragraphs in his Confession, which is an autobiographical declaration of his faith and response to critics, and 21 paragraphs in his Letter to Coroticus where we see Patrick enraged with Coroticus, a British prince who came and murdered some of Patrick’s converts and took others off into captivity. Patrick wrote these two documents in Latin, but English translations are widely available on the internet. Archaeology also helps to shed light on that time as well as various writings, annals, and chronicles.

Patrick grew up in a very well to do family in Britain. His father was a decurion, something like a member of a municipal council. (At that time, Britain was under the Roman Empire and if people failed to pay their correct tax to the empire, decurions had to pay the difference so only wealthy people became decurions.) From his well to do lifestyle as a teenager, Patrick was taken as a slave to work for Miliucc in Ireland as a shepherd. It must have been a huge shock and suffering for Patrick. He was not the only one to suffer this tragedy. Many others did also during the years AD 340-430 when they were taken by Irish kings from Britain. Patrick says in his Confession (§1) that he was taken into captivity along with many thousands of others.

During his six years here as a slave, he grew close to God like never before. He experienced the love of God amid his isolation. He became a man of deep prayer. What he did not know was that this dreadful experience was preparing him for his future ministry in Ireland. When he would return, he would already know the language of the Irish, Old Irish as we now call it. This painful preparation that Patrick received for his future mission reminds me of the painful preparation that others also received for their future missions. One example is Moses. He was rescued from the river Nile by the Pharaoh’s daughter and reared in the palace as if Pharaoh’s own grandson (Exod 2:1-10). Then, after he fled Pharaoh’s palace, he worked as a sheep farmer around Mount Sinai (Exod 2:12-3:1). So, when God called him later, he already knew all about Pharaoh and palace politics and how to survive in the desert around Mount Sinai. He could not have had a better preparation. I think we can see the same in the life of Patrick. His six years in Ireland as a shepherd gave him the preparation he needed to return later as missionary.

Then when Patrick escaped his slavery, he spent three days sailing in the ship, and arrived presumably in France (Confession §19). There he received some monastic education which prepared him for priesthood. Patrick felt the desire to return to Ireland as a missionary and there was talk of appointing Patrick as bishop for the mission. But he was rejected at first when the Pope sent Palladius from Rome as bishop in AD 431. During a return trip to Rome, Palladius died while passing through Britain, and Patrick was then ordained bishop for the mission in AD 432.

Ireland was then the land of the Celts who had gods and goddesses for all sorts of things such as the sea, rivers, streams, and mountains and they also worshipped trees. The Celts appear to have performed human sacrifice as part of their rituals, and bodies found preserved in bogs indicate that they were sacrificed ritually. There are signs that the Old Croghan Man, as he is called, who was found in a bog in Offaly in 2003, was sacrificed by the Druids. (Another example is the body found in the Lindow bog in Cheshire). In this current time of secularization, some say Ireland would have been better off if Patrick never came. On the contrary, thank God Patrick evangelized us. We are better off not performing ritual human sacrifices or worshipping nature.

Patrick had a highly successful ministry, baptizing thousands all over the country. His first convert was Benignus, not far north of Dublin and the same man became a bishop in Armagh. Even the son of Patrick’s old master, Guasacht, converted and later was also ordained a bishop. Patrick ordained 50-60 bishops for his mission: one bishop per tuath if the tuath were large. (A tuath was a geographical area since there were no large cities or towns in Ireland at that time.) He had the first stone church in Ireland built in Armagh in 445 (now the site of the Church of Ireland Cathedral) probably because he had the least interference there from local kings and princes.

I would like to leave the last word to St. Patrick himself. In this brief excerpt of his Confession, we see the depth of his faith and how much he was prepared to suffer to help the Irish come to know God:

And if I ever did anything worth doing for my God, whom I love, I beg of Him grace to shed my blood for these converts and captives for His name…though I should myself lack burial, though my wretched corpse should be torn limb from limb and scattered to dogs and wild beasts, or though birds of prey should devour it. Should this happen, I would be quite confident that I had saved both body and soul.
(Confession §59, translation in John Ryan, “St. Patrick Apostle of Ireland” in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 50 (1961) p150, where I also found some of the historical information (pages 113-151) mentioned in the above homily.)

© Fr. Tommy Lane 2021

This homily was delivered in a parish in Ireland.

More Homilies for March 17th - St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick, Patron of Ireland and what we learn of him from his own writings

St. Patrick was specially chosen by God to transform Ireland

St. Patrick - similar to biblical figures and a challenge to us 2006

Gospel: The Seventy(-two) 2010

Related: St. Patrick's Breastplate

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