St. Patrick

1. Slave to Bishop

Patrick was born in Roman Britain, into a family that was both Christian and part of the local governing class. He names his father Calpornius, a deacon and a town councillor, and his grandfather Potitus, a priest. He gives his birthplace as Bannavem Taburniae, a settlement nobody has since been able to locate. By his own account he was a nominal believer as a boy and knew almost nothing of God.

Irish raiders took him at about sixteen, along with thousands of others, and sold him into slavery in Ireland. He herded animals for six years in the open, and it was there that he began to pray. He writes that he would say a hundred prayers in the day and nearly as many at night, in the woods and on the mountain, before dawn, in snow and frost and rain. A voice in his sleep told him his ship was ready. He walked about two hundred miles to the coast, talked his way onto a boat, and eventually reached his family in Britain.

Then came the part that makes the story worth telling. Safe at home, he dreamed that a man brought him letters from Ireland, and as he read he heard the voice of the people who lived by the wood of Voclut near the western sea, crying out with one voice, asking him to come and walk once more among them. He went back. Later tradition says he trained for the priesthood in Gaul, and his own writings do not say where. He returned to Ireland as a bishop, and he baptised, ordained clergy, and consecrated men and women to a life of continence, in a country outside the Roman Empire where no organised Church had existed.

2. The Shamrock

The story everyone knows is that Patrick picked a three-leaved shamrock and used it to explain the Trinity, three persons in one God, to an Irish king. It is a good teaching image and it is almost certainly not his.

Here is the evidence. Patrick's own Confession opens with a statement of Trinitarian faith and never mentions a plant. The two earliest lives of him, written by Muirchú and Tírechán in the late seventh century, roughly two hundred years after his death, do not mention a shamrock either. Descriptions of Irish people wearing shamrock on his feast day begin to appear in writing in the seventeenth century, and an eighteenth-century Dublin botanist recorded the custom together with the tradition that Patrick had used the plant to teach the Trinity. The explanation, in other words, is attached to a much older habit of wearing the plant, and the written trail starts more than a thousand years after Patrick died.

There is a second reason to hold the image loosely. Every visual analogy for the Trinity leaks. A shamrock has three parts of one leaf, which suggests that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three thirds of God, and the Church teaches that each divine person is wholly God, one in being, distinguished by their relations to one another. Our page on the Trinity sets out what the doctrine actually claims and why the analogies all fall short. Use the shamrock as a memory hook and take the doctrine from the Creed.

3. Driving Out Snakes

Ireland has no native snakes, and it has not had any since the last Ice Age. The island was cut off by rising sea levels before snakes could recolonise it from continental Europe, which is the same reason it has no native moles. Nothing needed driving out.

The legend is not in Patrick's writings, and it is not in the seventh-century lives. It develops in medieval hagiography, and it appears in a fully worked form in the life written by Jocelin of Furness towards the end of the twelfth century, seven hundred years after Patrick. Medieval writers commonly gave saints victories over serpents, because Genesis 3 and Revelation 12 make the serpent the standard image of the devil.

Read that way, the story is a picture of something real. Patrick arrived in a country with an established religious system and a warrior aristocracy, and Christian communities existed there afterwards. Muirchú's life dramatises this as a contest at Tara, where Patrick lights the paschal fire on the hill of Slane in defiance of King Lóegaire before the king's own fire could be lit, and the druids are defeated in a trial of power. That scene is a work of the late seventh century written to establish the standing of the church of Armagh, and it should be read as such rather than as reportage.

What Patrick himself claims is quieter and more credible. He says he baptised thousands, that sons and daughters of Irish nobility became monks and consecrated virgins, that he paid protection money to local kings and legal experts so his clergy could travel, that he was robbed, and that he was once put in irons for a fortnight and expected to be killed.

4. What Patrick Wrote in His Own Words

Two short Latin texts are accepted by scholars as genuinely his. Both are worth reading in full, and both take under an hour.

The Confession

The Confession is an old man's defence of his ministry, written because church authorities in Britain had raised objections against him. Part of the attack used a sin he had committed at about fifteen, before his baptismal life had begun in earnest, which he had confessed privately to a close friend before being ordained deacon. That friend later disclosed it. Patrick does not say what the sin was. He writes about the betrayal with real pain and answers by pointing to what God has done through him rather than to his own credentials.

He also apologises for his Latin. His schooling ended the day he was captured, and he knows that educated readers find his prose rough. He calls himself unlearned repeatedly. The awkwardness of the Latin is one of the reasons scholars accept the text as his: a later forger writing in Patrick's name would have written better.

The Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus

Soldiers of a British ruler named Coroticus raided a group of Patrick's converts, killed some of them on the day after their baptism while they were still in their white garments with the oil of chrism on their foreheads, and sold the rest into slavery. Patrick's letter is a public excommunication. He denies the raiders the name of Christian, forbids the faithful to eat with them or accept their gifts, and demands the captives be freed.

It is one of the earliest surviving Christian texts to attack slave raiding head on, and it was written by a man who had been a slave himself. Patrick's anger in it is undisguised, and it is the closest thing we have to hearing him speak.

5. When Did Patrick Live?

The fifth century is certain. The precise years are not, and honest sources say so.

The one firm date in the period comes from a different man. Prosper of Aquitaine, writing as a contemporary, records that in 431 Pope Celestine sent a bishop named Palladius to the Irish who believed in Christ. That single line establishes two things: there were already Christians in Ireland before Patrick's mission was under way, and Palladius, rather than Patrick, was the first bishop sent to them.

For Patrick, the Irish annals give a death in 461 and also a death in 493. Both cannot be right. Some historians place his mission in the middle of the fifth century, others push it later, into the second half of the century. In 1942 the scholar T. F. O'Rahilly proposed the "two Patricks" theory, arguing that the tradition had merged Palladius and Patrick into a single figure and stretched his career to cover both. The theory has never been settled either way. What is not in doubt is that the author of the Confession was a real bishop working in fifth-century Ireland.

Later tradition names Armagh as the church he founded and made his principal see, and it remains the primatial see of Ireland. Tradition places his burial at Downpatrick in County Down. Both claims come from sources written well after his death.

6. Feast Day, Patronage and Devotion

The feast falls inside Lent, which is why the Irish bishops occasionally move it when 17 March lands in Holy Week. The patronage of Ireland is the oldest and the most obvious. The patronage in places such as Nigeria comes from the Irish missionaries who carried his name with them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Where devotion is practised

Two Irish pilgrimages keep the harder side of Patrick alive. Pilgrims climb Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, traditionally on the last Sunday of July, some of them barefoot, in memory of the forty days he is said to have fasted on the summit. At Lough Derg in County Donegal, the site known as St Patrick's Purgatory keeps a three-day pilgrimage of fasting, vigil and barefoot prayer that has run for centuries. Our guide to pilgrimage sites in Ireland and Britain covers both.

The Breastplate

The prayer known as St Patrick's Breastplate, which begins by binding oneself to the strong name of the Trinity and asks Christ to be before, behind, beside and within, is traditionally ascribed to him. The language of the Old Irish original dates it to around the eighth century, so Patrick did not write it. It is a genuine early Irish prayer, and it is thoroughly Trinitarian, which is why the ascription stuck.

7. What a Reader Can Take From Patrick

Go back to the place that hurt you

Patrick's mission was to the nation that had enslaved him. He was free, safe, at home with his family, and he returned. Forgiveness in his case took the form of a lifetime of work among the people who had taken six years of his life. Whatever the equivalent is in your case, it is probably specific and probably uncomfortable.

Pray before you understand

He learned to pray as a slave who by his own account knew nothing about God. The praying came first and the theology followed. Anyone waiting to understand the faith before praying it has the order backwards.

Say plainly what is true and what is legend

Patrick's real story survived because he wrote it down and told the truth about his own failures, his poor education and the accusation against him. The shamrock and the snakes are ornaments. A faith that needs ornaments is weaker than his was.

8. Frequently Asked Questions

Was St. Patrick Irish?

No. Patrick was born in Roman Britain to a Christian family, and he was brought to Ireland as a captive at about sixteen. He returned voluntarily years later as a missionary bishop. He describes himself in the Confession as a Briton, and he had to argue with British church authorities about his ministry in Ireland.

Did St. Patrick really drive the snakes out of Ireland?

Ireland has had no native snakes since the last Ice Age, so there were none to drive out. The story does not appear in Patrick's own writings or in the earliest lives of him, and it develops in medieval hagiography, reaching a full form in a life written around the end of the twelfth century. The serpent was the standard medieval image for the devil, and the story is best read as a picture of the mission rather than as an event.

Did St. Patrick use the shamrock to explain the Trinity?

There is no evidence that he did. His own Confession and the earliest lives say nothing about a shamrock. Written accounts of the custom of wearing shamrock on his feast appear from the seventeenth century, with the Trinity explanation recorded later still. The image is a useful memory aid and it is a late tradition rather than a fact about Patrick.

When is St. Patrick's Day and why is it 17 March?

St. Patrick's Day is 17 March, which tradition holds as the day of his death. It is a solemnity in Ireland and a holy day there, and it falls inside Lent, so it is occasionally transferred when it collides with Holy Week.

What did St. Patrick actually write?

Two short Latin works are accepted as his: the Confession, an autobiographical defence of his ministry written in old age, and the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, a public excommunication of a British warlord's men who killed and enslaved newly baptised Irish Christians. Everything else attributed to him, including St Patrick's Breastplate, was written later.

Was Patrick the first Christian missionary to Ireland?

No. Prosper of Aquitaine records that Pope Celestine sent Palladius as bishop to the Irish already believing in Christ in 431, which shows Christians were present before Patrick's mission was established. Patrick became the figure the Irish Church organised its memory around, and Armagh, his traditional see, is still the primatial see of Ireland.