St. Patrick

Who they were

Patrick is one of the few figures of his era who left a document in his own voice. His Confessio survives, and it is short, defensive, and unmistakably personal. It was written to answer accusations from other clergy, and it is why we know anything about him at all.

He was born in Roman Britain to a family of some standing, his father a deacon and a local official. At about sixteen he was seized by raiders and taken to Ireland as a slave, where he spent six years working as a herdsman. He describes that time as when his faith, which he had not taken seriously, became real to him. He escaped, walked some two hundred miles to a ship, and eventually got home.

Then he went back. He was ordained and returned to the country where he had been enslaved, to the people who had taken him, and spent the rest of his life there. The Confessio is honest about the fear involved, about being robbed, threatened, and held, and about his own poor Latin, which his critics apparently used against him.

The snakes are a later legend, and Ireland had none. The shamrock as a teaching device is also later tradition rather than anything he records.

The second surviving document in his own voice is a letter to the soldiers of Coroticus, a British warlord whose men had killed and enslaved some of Patrick's newly baptised converts. It is furious. He excommunicates them, demands the captives back, and writes as a man who knows exactly what he is describing because it happened to him at sixteen. It is one of the earliest surviving Christian denunciations of slavery.

What became of the day is worth separating from the man. The parades, the colour green, and the drinking are largely a diaspora invention, developed in American cities by Irish immigrants who needed a public claim to respectability. Patrick's own writing is a defensive, anxious, and rather humble document by a man who thought of himself as poorly educated and unqualified.

Why people turn to St. Patrick

The invocation against fear comes from the Breastplate, the prayer traditionally attributed to him, which is a long declaration of Christ present at every point of the compass and every part of the body. Whether he composed it is doubted, and the surviving text is later. What is not doubted is the pattern of his actual life: a man returning voluntarily to the place of his captivity. People asking him about fear are usually asking about going back toward something rather than away from it.

How to ask their intercession

Ask him for the thing you are afraid of, especially if the fear is about a place or a person you have to face again. The central lines of the Breastplate are worth saying slowly, and they are a statement of fact before they are a request.

A prayer to St. Patrick

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me. Amen.

From "St. Patrick's Breastplate" (the Lorica), traditional Irish prayer of uncertain authorship; this section from Cecil Frances Alexander's 1889 English rendering. Public domain.