Who Was Saint Patrick?

March 2, 2010 przez Kingsway
Zapisano pod Dyskusja

przez “Danny Boy”

During the month of March, Saint Patrick’s Day is observed and celebrated in much of the Christian world and especially in nearly all Roman Catholic diocese. Ale, why? What do we know about this venerated man? Here is a short biography, seasoned with quotes from one of his letters and some of the legend associated with him.

St. Patrick’s bio

Saint Patrick (Latin: Patricius) (c. 387 -- 493) (Irish: Naomh Pádraig) was a Romano-Briton and Christian (Catholic) missionary, who is the most generally recognized patron saint of Ireland (although Brigid of Kildare and Columba are also formally patron saints).

Patrick was born in Roman Britain at Banna Venta Berniae, a location otherwise unknown. Calpornius, his father, was a deacon, his grandfather, Potitus, a priest. When he was about 16 he was captured from Britain by Irish raiders and taken as a slave to Ireland, Patrick worked as a herdsman. He writes that his faith grew in captivity, and that he prayed daily. After six years he heard a voice telling him that he would soon go home, and then that his ship was ready. Fleeing his master, he traveled to a port, two hundred miles away he says, where he found a ship and, after various adventures, returned home to his family, now in his early twenties.

Patrick recounts that he had a vision a few years after returning home:

“I saw a man coming, as it were from Ireland. His name was Victoricus, and he carried many letters, and he gave me one of them. I read the heading: “The Voice of the Irish”. As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood of Foclut, which is beside the western sea—and they cried out, as with one voice: “We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.”

After entering the Catholic Church, he returned to Ireland as an ordained bishop in the north and west of the island, but little is known about the places where he worked and there is no contemporary evidence for any link between Patrick and any known church building.

Something can be seen of Patrick’s mission – he writes that he “baptized thousands of people”. He ordained priests to lead the new Christian communities. He converted wealthy women, some of whom became nuns in the face of family opposition. He also dealt with the sons of kings, converting them, too.

Patrick’s position as a foreigner in Ireland was not an easy one. His refusal to accept gifts from kings placed him outside the normal ties of kinship, fosterage and affinity. Legally he was without protection, and he says that he was on one occasion beaten, robbed of all he had, and put in chains, perhaps awaiting execution.

By the eighth century he had come to be revered as the patron saint of Ireland. The Irish monastery system evolved after the time of Patrick and the Irish Church did not develop the diocesan model that Patrick and the other early missionaries had tried to establish.

St. Patrick legend

Pious legend credits Patrick with banishing snakes from the island, though all evidence suggests that post-glacial Ireland never had snakes;one suggestion is that snakes referred to the serpent symbolism of the Druids of that time and place, as shown for instance on coins minted in Gaul (see Carnutes), or that it could have referred to beliefs such as Pelagianism, symbolized as “serpents”. Legend also credits Patrick with teaching the Irish about the concept of the Trinity by showing people the shamrock, a 3-leaved clover, using it to highlight the Christian belief of ‘three divine persons in the one God’ (as opposed to the Arian belief that was popular in Patrick’s time).

During his evangelizing journey back to Ireland from his parent’s home at Birdoswald, he is understood to have carried with him an ash wood walking stick or staff. He thrust this stick into the ground wherever he was evangelizing and at the place now known as Aspatria (ash of Patrick) the message of the dogma took so long to get through to the people there that the stick had taken root by the time he was ready to move on.