Confessor Patrick

Patrick, commemorated in Western liturgical books as bishop and confessor, is the principal patron of Ireland. The only substantial contemporary evidence for his life is his own Latin Confessio and the shorter Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. In the Confessio he states that he was born in Roman Britain to Calpurnius, a deacon and minor local official, and that his grandfather Potitus had been a priest. As a youth of about sixteen he was seized in a raid and taken to Ireland, where he spent six years in slavery as a herdsman. He describes this captivity as the occasion of a profound conversion: he prayed night and day, and after a dream that promised him a ship he escaped, made his way home, and later received further visions calling him back to Ireland as a missionary.

After his return to Britain he prepared for ordained ministry, a period that later tradition associates with study on the Continent, especially under Germanus of Auxerre, though Patrick himself does not name his teachers. He was consecrated bishop and returned to Ireland, where he spent the remainder of his life preaching, baptizing, and organizing Christian communities among peoples who had previously had little or no contact with the Roman church. His Letter to Coroticus shows him confronting a British war-band that had enslaved newly baptized Irish Christians, and the Confessio defends his mission against critics who questioned his education and his authority. He presents himself as an unlearned exile who nevertheless claimed a divine commission to the Irish.

Medieval Irish and continental hagiography greatly enlarged this spare self-portrait. Lives from the seventh century onward credit him with confrontations at Tara, the expulsion of snakes from the island, and the use of the shamrock as a teaching device for the Trinity; none of these episodes appear in his own writings. Traditional dates for his death vary between the mid and late fifth century, most often 461 or 493, and the place of death is given as Saul in County Down, with burial at nearby Downpatrick. Because he died a natural death after a long episcopal career rather than by violence, the Latin West classed him as a confessor rather than a martyr.

His cult became central to Irish Christian identity and travelled with Irish monks and later with the Irish diaspora. Formal papal canonization in the later medieval sense was never applied to him; veneration was established by popular and episcopal acclaim well before the centralized processes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He remains the national apostle of Ireland and is invoked as patron of several Irish-founded dioceses overseas, of Nigeria (through Irish missionary work), of Montserrat, and of certain professional groups including engineers. His feast on 17 March is observed throughout the Catholic, Anglican, and some Orthodox calendars.