Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop & Apostle to the Irish
March 17 · d. 461
also known as Patrick, Pádraig, Patricius
Patrick was a fifth-century Romano-British Christian, carried off as a teenager by Irish raiders, who escaped, returned years later as a missionary bishop, and brought the gospel to his former captors. Two short letters in his own hand survive, somewhat unique among western saints of the period where few primary sources from the actual saints survive. Through them his voice still reaches the church he helped to plant directly. His mission established the Irish church so firmly that within a generation Irish monasticism became one of the most dynamic forces in early-medieval Europe.
When Patrick was about sixteen, raiders from across the Irish Sea descended on his father's estate in Roman Britain. They took him with the cattle. For six years he kept sheep on a cold hillside in the west of Ireland, hungry and afraid, and there, by his own later account in the ConfessioConfessio — in Thomas O'Loughlin, Discovering Saint Patrick (Paulist Press, 2005), God woke him up. He began to pray, he says, a hundred prayers in the day and almost as many in the night. One night a voice told him his ship was ready. He walked two hundred miles to a coast he had never seen, talked his way onto a trading vessel, and came home.
Years later, after he had returned to his family in Britain, another dream came. He saw a man named Victoricus carrying letters out of Ireland. One letter was called The Voice of the Irish, and as he opened it he heard the voices of the people of the wood of Foclut, near the western sea, crying out together as it were with one voice. In Pádraig McCarthy's translation of the Confessio, what they said was, "We beg you, holy boy, to come and walk again among us." He could not finish the letter for the weeping in his heart. He woke, and he knew. He went back. That is the astonishment of his life: he returned, by his own choice and under the call of God, to the country that had enslaved him.
He went not as a Roman avenging Roman injury but as a bishop to a people his own world considered barbarians at the edge of the inhabited earth. He baptized, he ordained, he confronted local kings, he refused the gifts they pressed on him so no one could say he had come for money. When the warband of a British chieftain named Coroticus raided one of his newly baptized communities and carried Christian women into slavery, Patrick wrote an open letter, the Letter to the Soldiers of CoroticusEpistola ad Milites Corotici (Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus) — in Thomas O'Loughlin, Discovering Saint Patrick (Paulist Press, 2005), and excommunicated the raiders by name.
The stories the Irish church has told about him since are stories of God's strong hand at work through a man. On the eve of Easter the high king Lóegaire had decreed that no fire could be lit anywhere in his kingdom until the great fire blazed at his royal hall of Tara. Patrick climbed the Hill of Slane in the next valley and kindled the Paschal fire there in defiance. The druids saw it and warned the king that unless that fire were put out that night, it would never be put out in this land, and the king sent his men to seize Patrick, and the men could not lay hands on him. At Tara before the assembled court Patrick contested with the druids face to face, and the contest was not even. The king rose from his throne and granted Patrick leave to preach the gospel through the whole of Ireland. He took the shamrock from beneath his feet and held it up to teach the people the Trinity: three leaves, one stem, three Persons, one God. The serpents that had once infested the island he drove into the sea, and the Irish have not had snakes since. He prayed each day the prayer the church has prayed in his name ever since, the Lorica, or Deer's Cry.
When death came for him he asked to be carried back to the church of Saul where his ministry in Ireland had begun, and there he received the sacrament from the hands of his fellow bishop Tassach and gave up his soul to God on the seventeenth of March. For twelve nights, the church remembered, the angels kept watch over his body, and the sky over that place did not grow dark, but shone with the light of heaven.
Patrick is the rare fifth-century western Christian who left an authentic written record in his own hand: two short Latin letters, the Confessio and the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, preserved across about a dozen medieval manuscripts and edited critically in the twentieth century by Ludwig Bieler. The Confessio opens with a self-portrait few writers of the period would have offered. In Pádraig McCarthy's translation, hosted by the Royal Irish Academy at confessio.ie, Patrick begins: "My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers." The principal hagiographies, Muirchú's Vita Sancti Patricii and Tírechán's Collectanea, were written about two hundred years after Patrick's death in the service of an emerging primacy at Armagh, and they are preserved together in the ninth-century Book of ArmaghVita Sancti Patricii (Muirchú) + Collectanea de Sancto Patricio (Tírechán) — Book of Armagh — facsimile and translation edition. The watershed 1968 study by R.P.C. HansonSaint Patrick: His Origins and Career — R.P.C. Hanson (Oxford University Press) taught the field to read Patrick's own letters first and the seventh-century vitae second, and the field has read him that way since.
Patrick was born somewhere in late-Roman Britain, at a place he calls Bannaventa Berniae that no modern scholar has identified with certainty, to a deacon father named Calpornius and a grandfather, Potitus, who was a priest. His Latin is the rough Latin of a man whose schooling was interrupted at the age his captivity began, which is itself a kind of testimony. Of the years he spent tending sheep in Ireland he later wrote, again in McCarthy's translation, "After I arrived in Ireland, I tended sheep every day, and I prayed frequently during the day. More and more the love of God increased, and my sense of awe before God." He was a bishop; he worked in Ireland; he died on March 17 of a year between 457 and 493, with most modern scholarship clustering near 461. He was not the first Christian missionary to Ireland: Palladius, sent by Pope Celestine in 431, preceded him. But it was Patrick's mission that took root in the Irish imagination as foundational, and it is Patrick whom the Irish church and the wider church have remembered as their apostle.
The famous , , is almost certainly later, perhaps eighth-century Irish, but the church has prayed it under his name for more than a thousand years, and the attribution honors something true about the spirituality his mission shaped. The medieval by Muirchú and Tírechán preserve the stories Story tells (the Paschal fire at Slane, the contest at Tara, the shamrock, the snakes) in the form the Irish church received them; they are valuable as the witness of that church to what it had been given, and a reader who wants Patrick's own voice should read the first and the alongside.
March 17 has been observed as Patrick's feast since at least the seventh century. Wearing of the shamrock is attested from the seventeenth century and is bound up with the popular memory of his Trinitarian preaching; the colour green displaced the older Patrician blue in nineteenth-century iconography. Patrick is patron of Ireland and of Nigeria, of engineers, and of those falsely accused. In iconography he is most often shown vested as a bishop, mitred, holding a crozier and trampling or banishing serpents.
Hymnody. The hymn I bind unto myself today (the Lorica, or Saint Patrick's Breastplate) is widely sung at his feast and at ordinations in the Anglican tradition. Its present English form is Cecil Frances Alexander's 1889 versification of an older Irish text traditionally attributed to Patrick himself, an extended hymn that opens and closes by binding the singer to the Trinity. The most-prayed of its stanzas, and the one that gives the Breastplate its memory in modern Anglican use, is this:
Christ be with me, Christ within me,Christ behind me, Christ before me,Christ beside me, Christ to win me,Christ to comfort and restore me,Christ beneath me, Christ above me,Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,Christ in hearts of all that love me,Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
The hymn closes by returning to its opening invocation:
I bind unto myself the Name,The strong Name of the Trinity;By invocation of the same,The Three in One, and One in Three.Of Whom all nature hath creation;Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:Praise to the Lord of my salvation,Salvation is of Christ the Lord.
Liturgical observance. In Anglican use the day is observed as a commemoration; in the Roman calendar of Ireland itself it is a solemnity. Patrick's mission shaped a church whose monastic discipline, peregrinatio, and learning would within a generation become one of the most dynamic forces in early-medieval Europe: Columba's mission to Iona, Aidan and Cuthbert in Northumbria, Columbanus to Bobbio, Gall to St Gallen. His feast carries that inheritance forward.
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Confessio(Latin, c. 460)
Recommended: in Thomas O'Loughlin, Discovering Saint Patrick (Paulist Press, 2005)
O'Loughlin's introduction and notes are the most accessible modern presentation; the translation is paired with the Epistola in the same slim volume.
Public domain: confessio.ie — parallel Latin/English (Royal Irish Academy), Thomas Olden translation (1853), Bieler critical Latin text
Epistola ad Milites Corotici (Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus)(Latin, c. 450s)
Recommended: in Thomas O'Loughlin, Discovering Saint Patrick (Paulist Press, 2005)
Always published alongside the Confessio; the two letters together are the entire authentic corpus of Patrick's own words.
Public domain: confessio.ie — parallel Latin/English, CCEL — older English translation
Vita Sancti Patricii (Muirchú) + Collectanea de Sancto Patricio (Tírechán)(Latin, late 7th century)
Recommended: Book of Armagh — facsimile and translation edition
The two principal seventh-century Irish hagiographies of Patrick, transmitted in the ninth-century Book of Armagh. They postdate Patrick by about two hundred years and were written with the political interests of the see of Armagh in view; read them after, not before, Patrick's own letters.
Other translations: Ludwig Bieler, The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1979) — the classic critical edition + English translation; out of print
Saint Patrick: His Origins and Career(English, 1968)
Recommended: R.P.C. Hanson (Oxford University Press)
The watershed 1968 study that taught the field to read Patrick's own letters first and the seventh-century vitae second. If you read one academic book on Patrick, this is it.
St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography(English, 2004)
Recommended: Philip Freeman (Simon & Schuster)
A believing-register popular biography by a classicist; includes Freeman's own readable translation of both of Patrick's letters as an appendix. A strong starting point for readers who want a narrative life of Patrick that takes the saint seriously.
Further reading. E.A. Thompson, Who Was Saint Patrick? (Boydell, 1985), is a useful bridge between Hanson's 1968 reframing and the later academic literature; shorter and more accessible than Hanson himself. The Internet Archive scan of the 1985 hardcover is borrowable free of charge. Ludwig Bieler, The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1979), is the classic critical Latin edition of Muirchú and Tírechán with facing English translation; out of print, but worldcat.org will find a copy in a university library.
Online resources. confessio.ie is the Royal Irish Academy's scholarly digital edition of both letters, with parallel Latin and English, audio of the Latin, and high-resolution images of the manuscripts. CCEL: Patrick carries Bieler's critical Latin text and older English translations, free.
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Patrick is as much to say as knowledge, for by the will of God he knew many of the secrets of heaven and of the joys there, and also he saw a part of the pains of hell.
Of S. Patrick.
S. Patrick was born in Britain, which is called England, and was learned at Rome and there flourished in virtues; and after departed out of the parts of Italy, where he had long dwelled, and came home into his country in Wales named Pendyac, and entered into a fair and joyous country called the valley Rosine. To whom the angel of God appeared and said: O Patrick, this see ne bishopric God has not provided to you, but unto one not yet born, but shall thirty years hereafter be born, and so he left that country and sailed over into Ireland. And as Higden says in Polycronicon the fourth book, the twenty-fourth chapter, that S. Patrick's father was named Caprum, which was a priest and a deacon's son which was called Fodum. And S. Patrick's mother was named Conchessa, Martin's sister of France. In his baptism he was named Sucate, and S. Germain called him Magonius, and Celestinus the pope named him Patrick. That is as much to say as father of the citizens.
S. Patrick on a day as he preached a sermon of the patience and sufferance of the passion of our Lord Jesu Christ to the king of the country, he leaned upon his crook or cross, and it happed by adventure that he set the end of the crook, or his staff, upon the king's foot, and pierced his foot with the pike, which was sharp beneath. The king had supposed that S. Patrick had done it wittingly, for to move him the sooner to patience and to the faith of God, but when S. Patrick perceived it he was much abashed, and by his prayers he healed the king. And furthermore he impetred and gat grace of our Lord that no venomous beast might live in all the country, and yet unto this day is no venomous beast in all Ireland.
After it happed on a time that a man of that country stole a sheep, which belonged to his neighbour, whereupon S. Patrick admonested the people that whomsoever had taken it should deliver it again within seven days. When all the people were assembled within the church, and the man which had stolen it made no semblant to render ne deliver again this sheep, then S. Patrick commanded, by the virtue of God, that the sheep should bleat and cry in the belly of him that had eaten it, and so happed it that, in the presence of all the people, the sheep cried and bleated in the belly of him that had stolen it. And the man that was culpable repented him of his trespass, and the others from then forthon kept them from stealing of sheep from any other man.
Also S. Patrick was wont for to worship and do reverence unto all the crosses devoutly that he might see, but on a time tofore the sepulchre of a paynim stood a fair cross, which he passed and went forth by as he had not seen it, and he was demanded of his fellows why he saw not that cross. And then he prayed to God he said for to know whose it was, and he said he heard a voice under the earth saying: You saw it not because I am a paynim that am buried here, and am unworthy that the sign of the cross should stand there, wherefore he made the sign of the cross to be taken thence. On a time as S. Patrick preached in Ireland the faith of Jesu Christ, and did but little profit by his predication, for he could not convert the evil, rude and wild people, he prayed to our Lord Jesu Christ that he would show them some sign openly, fearful and ghastful, by which they might be converted and be repentant of their sins. Then, by the commandment of God, S. Patrick made in the earth a great circle with his staff, and anon the earth after the quantity of the circle opened and there appeared a great pit and a deep, and S. Patrick by the revelation of God understood that there was a place of purgatory, in to which whomsoever entered therein he should never have other penance ne feel none other pain, and there was showed to him that many should enter which should never return ne come again. And they that should return should abide but from one morn to another, and no more, and many entered that came not again. As touching this pit or hole which is named S. Patrick's purgatory, some hold opinion that the second Patrick, which was an abbot and no bishop, that God showed to him this place of purgatory; but certainly such a place there is in Ireland wherein many men have been, and yet daily go in and come again, and some have had there marvellous visions and seen grisly and horrible pains, of whom there be books made as of Tundale and others. Then this holy man S. Patrick, the bishop, lived till he was one hundred and twenty-two years old, and was the first that was bishop in Ireland, and died in Aurelius Ambrose's time that was king of Britain. In his time was the Abbot Columba, otherwise named Colinkillus, and S. Bride whom S. Patrick professed and veiled, and she over-lived him forty years. All these three holy saints were buried in Ulster, in the city of Dunence, as it were in a cave with three chambers. Their bodies were found at the first coming of King John, King Harry the second's son, into Ireland. Upon whose tombs these verses following were written: Hic jacent in Duno qui tumulo tumulantur in uno, Brigida, Patricius atque Columba plus, which is for to say in English: In Duno these three be buried all in one sepulchre: Bride, Patrick, and Columba the mild.
Men say that this holy bishop, S. Patrick, did three great things. One is that he drove with his staff all the venomous beasts out of Ireland. The second, that he had grant of our Lord God that none Irish man shall abide the coming of Antichrist. The third wonder is read of his purgatory, which is more referred to the less S. Patrick, the Abbot. And this holy abbot, because he found the people of that land rebel, he went out of Ireland and came in to England in the Abbey of Glastonbury, where he died on a S. Bartholomew's day. He flourished about the year of our Lord eight hundred and fifty, and the holy bishop died the year of our Lord four hundred and ninety in the one hundred and twentysecond year of his age, to whom pray we that he pray for us.
Of S.
British (Received Pronunciation): Columbanus /ˌkɒləmˈbeɪnəs/; Pádraig /ˈpɑː.drɪɡ/; Tírechán /ˈtɪərəxɑːn/; Coroticus /kəˈrɒtɪkəs/; Calpornius /kælˈpɔːrniəs/; peregrinatio /ˌpɛrɪɡrɪˈnɑːtioʊ/
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Patrick of Ireland to preach the Gospel to the people of Ireland: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.