St. Patrick

Patrick was born in Roman Britain to a family of some standing, and by his own account was not religious as a boy. At about sixteen he was taken by Irish raiders and sold, and spent six years herding sheep in Ireland, alone and hungry. He says that this is where he began to pray.

He escaped, travelled by his own account some two hundred miles to a ship, and got home. Then he went back, which is the fact everything else rests on. He returned to the country that had enslaved him, as a bishop, and spent the rest of his life there.

He is one of very few figures from that century whose own voice survives. The Confessio is a defence of himself written in awkward, unliterary Latin he apologises for; the Letter to Coroticus is a furious excommunication of the soldiers of a British ruler who had killed and enslaved his converts. Both are unmistakably a real man writing, and neither is what a legend would have produced.

Most of what people know about him is not in either document. The shamrock explaining the Trinity first appears in writing in 1726. There were no snakes in Ireland to drive out. March 17 is the day tradition gives for his death, and even the year of it is contested.

He was never formally canonised, because his cult predates the papal process for it entirely.

He is patron of Ireland first, and the standard patronage lists add Nigeria and engineers, along with places as far apart as the Archdiocese of New York, the city of Boston and the Archdiocese of Melbourne.

The Letter to Coroticus is worth reading in a century that talks a great deal about who counts. It is a bishop with no institutional power publicly excommunicating the men who killed and sold his newly baptised converts, and it is not diplomatic.

The Breastplate, the long prayer of protection traditionally attributed to him, is almost certainly later than he is. It is still the best-known thing carrying his name and one of the great protection prayers in the Western tradition, and holding both facts at once is the honest position.

What makes him unusual among patron saints is that we have his own account of being frightened, unqualified and ashamed of his Latin, and he went anyway.

This is the closing section of the Lorica, the Breastplate of St. Patrick, and it is the part most people know. It is prayed in the morning, before a journey, or before anything that has to be walked into.

On attribution: the Breastplate is traditionally his and is probably several centuries later than he is. That does not make it a lesser prayer. It makes it a prayer of the tradition he founded rather than a text from his hand, and the two writings we do have from his hand are prose rather than poetry.

A novena to St. Patrick is prayed from March 8 to March 16, closing on the eve of his feast. It is less common than the novenas to Jude or Therese, and in Ireland the feast itself carries most of the devotional weight.

Almost everything reliable about Patrick comes from two short Latin texts he wrote himself. They survive in eight manuscripts, the oldest in the Book of Armagh, copied in the early ninth century and kept today at Trinity College Dublin. The quotations below are from the English translation by Pádraig McCarthy, published beside the Latin by the Royal Irish Academy’s St Patrick’s Confessio Hypertext Stack (confessio.ie). Section numbers follow Ludwig Bieler’s edition.

The Confessio is not a confession of sins in the modern sense. It is a defence of his mission, written late in life, and an act of thanks to God. It opens with the line every biography quotes: “My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers” (§1). He names his father, Calpornius, a deacon, and his grandfather, Potitus, a priest. He was taken from near their home at a place he calls Bannavem Taburniae, “about sixteen at the time.”

In captivity, herding sheep, he began to pray, until “in one day I would pray up to one hundred times” (§16). A voice in his sleep told him his ship was ready, and he ran from his master of six years. Back in Britain, a dream called him back: a man named Victoricus brought letters from Ireland, and he heard the people by the wood of Voclut cry, “We beg you, holy boy, to come and walk again among us” (§23). He ends by saying that whatever he achieved was “a gift of God” (§62).

The Letter to Coroticus is shorter and angrier. Soldiers of a British ruler named Coroticus had fallen on a group of his newly baptised converts, still in their white baptismal robes, killing some and carrying the rest off to be sold. They were attacked, he writes, while “the anointing was still to be seen clearly on their foreheads” (§3). He excommunicates the soldiers publicly and asks Christians not to eat or drink with them until they free the captives (§7). One line explains why they thought they could get away with it: “For them, it is a disgrace that we are from Ireland” (§16).

He went back to Ireland as a bishop and spent the rest of his life there, preaching, baptising and ordaining clergy, in a country outside the Roman world. His own summary is modest and specific. He baptised “so many thousands of people” (Confessio §50), ordained clergy everywhere he went, and saw the sons and daughters of Irish chieftains become monks and consecrated virgins (§41). He refused the small gifts converts left on the altar, so no one could say he preached for money (§49). He was seized more than once, and once held in irons for fourteen days before being released (§52).

He did not bring Christianity to an island without it. Prosper of Aquitaine records that in 431 Pope Celestine I sent a bishop named Palladius to the Irish who already believed in Christ, so there were Christians there before him. What Patrick did, by his own account, was go “to the furthest parts where nobody lived beyond,” taking literally Christ’s command: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Tradition credits him with founding the church at Armagh, still the seat of the Catholic primate of Ireland, though the details of that come from writers two centuries later.

Honestly: nobody knows, and anyone who gives two exact years is choosing between sources. Patrick never dates anything in his own writings. What we have are the Irish annals, compiled at the earliest in the mid-sixth century, and they disagree with themselves.

• Arrival in Ireland: the annals say 432, a date probably chosen to follow straight after Palladius’s mission of 431.
• Death: the annals record “the elder Patrick” dying in 457, then “some record the repose of Patrick” in 461 or 462, then the death of “Patrick, the arch-apostle” on March 17 in 492 or 493, at the age of 120. Some historians accept a death around 460; many specialists in early Irish history prefer around 493.
• Birth: Vatican News gives “between 385 and 392”; the old Catholic Encyclopedia (1911) gave 387, and gave his death as 493 with the note that “some sources say 460 or 461.”

The safe statement is the one on this page: born in Roman Britain in the late fourth century, active in Ireland in the fifth, died on March 17 of a year that may be 461 or around 493.

Neither Irish nor Italian. Patrick was a Romano-Briton, a Christian Roman citizen of Britain, born before the Roman army left the island. He tells us his father was a decurion, a member of a Roman town council (Letter to Coroticus §10), as well as a deacon. He wrote in Latin because Latin was the language of the Church and of the Roman world he grew up in, not because he came from Italy. The idea that he was Italian is a confusion of “Roman” with “from Rome.”

Where was he born? At or near Bannavem Taburniae, a place no one has identified. It was near the sea, since Irish raiders reached it, and near a Roman town, since his father sat on its council. Western Britain is the usual guess: proposals range from the Roman fort at Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall to Kilpatrick near Dumbarton in Scotland, which the Catholic Encyclopedia named in 1911. When he writes of going back to Britain, he says it would be “as if to visit my home country” (Confessio §43).

The snakes. Ireland had no snakes to drive out. The island has had none since the last ice age, and the Roman writer Solinus remarked on their absence in the third century, long before Patrick. The story of Patrick banishing them first appears in writing in the late twelfth century, in the Life of Patrick by Jocelyn of Furness. Gerald of Wales repeated it a few decades later and said he doubted it. The naturalist Nigel Monaghan of the National Museum of Ireland, who searched the Irish fossil record, put it plainly: there was “nothing for St. Patrick to banish.” The story is often read as a picture of the old religion giving way to the new; that is a reading, not a record.

The shamrock. The story of Patrick holding up a three-leaved shamrock to explain the Trinity, one God in three persons, first appears in writing in 1726, in Caleb Threlkeld’s Synopsis Stirpium Hibernicarum, a book on Irish plants. Coins minted in the 1680s already show him holding one. That is more than twelve centuries after his death. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 tells it only as something he “is said to have” done. It remains a good way to teach the Trinity to a child. It is not history.

The other stories, such as the Easter fire he lit on the Hill of Slane in defiance of the king at Tara, or his forty-day fast on Croagh Patrick, come from Muirchú and Tírechán, who wrote in the late seventh century. Their Patrick is a wonder-worker who contends with druids and curses kings. The Patrick of the Confessio is a frightened, stubborn, grateful man who prays a hundred times a day. Both portraits are part of how Ireland remembered him. Only one of them wrote his own account.

St. Patrick’s Breastplate, also called the Lorica or the Deer’s Cry, is the most famous prayer carrying his name, and the lines printed at the top of this page, “Christ with me, Christ before me,” are its best-loved part. It is traditionally attributed to him, and probably later than he is.

The text survives in the Liber Hymnorum, an eleventh-century collection of Irish hymns, which gives it the Old Irish title Faeth Fiada and tells how Patrick sang it when the king’s men lay in ambush, and they saw only deer pass by. On the evidence of its language, scholars date the prayer to the early eighth century, two to three centuries after Patrick. His two authentic writings are in Latin prose; the Breastplate is Old Irish verse. The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia called it “universally accepted as genuine”; study of the language since has made that hard to hold.

March 17 is the day tradition gives for his death, and a saint’s feast is usually kept on the day of death, the day the Church calls a saint’s birthday into heaven. The Irish kept it as their national day for centuries. It entered the Church’s universal calendar in the early seventeenth century, through the Waterford-born Franciscan scholar Luke Wadding, who sat on the commission reforming the Breviary.

• In Ireland it is a solemnity and a holy day of obligation.
• On the general Roman calendar, and so in the United States, it is an optional memorial: “St. Patrick, Bishop.” There is no obligation to attend Mass, though many parishes celebrate it.
• It always falls in Lent. See Lent for the season’s days of fasting and abstinence.

Can Catholics eat meat on St. Patrick’s Day? On most days of Lent the question does not arise, because abstinence from meat binds only on Ash Wednesday and the Fridays. When March 17 falls on a Friday, it depends where you are. Canon law lifts Friday abstinence when a solemnity falls on a Friday (canon 1251), so in Ireland it does not bind. Elsewhere it is an optional memorial, and the Friday rule stands unless your bishop dispenses from it, which diocesan bishops may do (canon 1245). In 2023, when it fell on a Friday, dioceses including Washington, Arlington, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and Cleveland did so, many of them asking people to choose another penance instead. Check your own diocese.

For anyone asked to go back to a hard place: a job, a family, a conversation, a country. It asks God for the courage Patrick was given, and asks Patrick to pray for us, which is the right order. The Church teaches that the saints “do not cease to intercede with the Father for us” (CCC 956).

For March 17 itself, at Mass, at the table, or before the parade. It prays for Ireland and the Irish abroad, and, because of the Letter to Coroticus, for everyone who is still held and sold today.