Brother John M.
Samaha, S.M.
What do we
really know about St. Patrick? His
background is shrouded in mystery. What
we have heard often mingles myth with reality.
To separate fact from fiction we need a closer look. We need to ask the real St. Patrick to please
stand up.
In the
fifth century A.D. an adolescent boy in Britain was kidnapped and enslaved by
marauders from a nearby country. The
youngster they captured eventually eluded his captors in Ireland, but several
years later returned as a priest with the conviction that God had chosen him to
convert that country to Christianity.
That young Briton named Patricius died an Irishman named Patrick. Ireland and Christianity have not been the
same since. Meet the authentic St.
Patrick.
Fact over Myth
His life
was clouded by legend, but peeling away the myth we discover that what is
factually known about St. Patrick is far more interesting. He never chased the snakes out of Ireland,
nor do we have any certainty that he used the shamrock to teach the Trinity to
his converts.
History
possesses no written records about Britain or Ireland from the fifth century
except those few about Patrick. Quite
simply Ireland had no written records prior to Patrick.
The
sequence of his life is not clear, and historians cannot identify when he was
born, ordained a bishop, or died. But
scholars agree that the two extant examples of his writing are clearly the work
of the same man we today call Patrick.
The two brief compositions of
Patrick, his Confession and his Letter to Coroticus, are the sources of
all we know for certain about the historical Patrick.
The Confession, not really a biography,
recounts his call to convert the Irish and aims to justify his mission to an
unsympathetic people in Britain.
The Letter to Coroticus, an Irish warlord
whom Patrick excommunicated, illustrates his power as a preacher, but yields
little biographical information.
His Life
In a
nutshell these are the biographical facts.
Patrick was born Patricius in Roman Britain to a Christian family of
some wealth. He was not religious in his
youth, and claims he was close to renouncing his family’s faith. Kidnapped and taken to Ireland as a slave for
a warlord, he worked as a shepherd for six years and then escaped. At home he began studies for the priesthood
with the intent to return as a missionary to his former captors. Clearly he had
committed his life to Ireland until death.
By the time he had written the Confession,
Patrick was recognized as bishop of Ireland by both the natives of Ireland and
by Church authorities on the continent.
His Character
Two traits
are patently evident in Patrick’s Confession:
his humility and his strength. These
characteristics are missing in early biographies and in the legends.
The
missionary Patrick who returned to Ireland was a strong and vigorous
personality. He was tough and
determined. He had to be to pursue the
vision that launched him in the evangelization of the pagan island. He was not the least bit reluctant to
undertake this mission despite the fact that in 400 years no one had taken the
Gospel beyond the bounds of Roman civilization.
As each obstacle was encountered, Patrick mustered the strength to overcome
it.
With
limited education -- he was chiefly self-educated -- but with the grace of the
experience of his enslaved exile, Patrick determined to do what no other had
done in the previous four centuries of Christian history. He decided to bring the Gospel to the ends of
the earth, and he planned wisely a way to do it. Unaided he figured out how to carry Christian
values to the barbarians who practiced human sacrifice, who constantly warred
with each other, and who were noted slave traders. That was neither simple nor easy to
attempt. Most likely he hazarded this
challenge of evangelization never before undertaken by the missionaries of the
Greco-Roman world because the Christians of the continent did not consider
barbarians to be human.
Patrick’s years as a slave had uniquely molded his
attitude to mount a heroic effort to reach the minds and hearts of these
untamed people. Patrick detested
slavery, and may have been the first Christian leader to speak out
unequivocally against it. The Church did
not formally condemn slavery as immoral until the late nineteenth century. Patrick had experienced this
