The Life
Patrick was born around 387 in Roman Britain to a Christian family — his father was a deacon, his grandfather a priest. At sixteen Irish raiders captured him and sold him into slavery in Ireland. He spent six years tending sheep on the cold Irish mountains. The loneliness drove him to deep prayer, and he came at last to know the Lord he had been baptized into but had never followed. After six years a vision told him to flee. He escaped, sailed back to Britain, was reunited with his family. He had another vision, of the Irish people calling him to come back to them. He studied for many years under Saint Germanus of Auxerre in Gaul, was eventually consecrated bishop, and returned to Ireland around 432 as a missionary. He lit the first Paschal fire on Slane Hill in 433 in defiance of the High King’s druids. He established his episcopal see at Armagh in 444. He spent thirty years tireless missionary work, converting the entire island. He reposed March 17, 461.
Patrick was sixteen years old when Irish marauders raided his family’s villa in Roman Britain. They captured him along with many other young people and sold them into slavery across the Irish Sea. Patrick was bought by a pagan Irish chieftain and set to tend sheep on the cold mountainsides of western Ireland. He was utterly alone — separated from his family, his Christian community, his home country, the Romano-British world he had grown up in. He spent the next six years in slavery on the Irish hills, often hungry, often cold, often utterly alone with the sheep and the wind and the rain.
Patrick had been baptized as a child but had cared little for his Faith in his early years. The loneliness of slavery on the Irish mountains transformed his soul. He records in his Confession: “After I came to Ireland — every day I had to tend sheep, and many times a day I prayed — the love of God and his fear came to me more and more, and my faith was strengthened. And my spirit was so moved that in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and almost as many at night, and this even when I was staying in the woods and on the mountain; and I would rise for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and I felt no harm.” He spent six years in this practice of unceasing prayer.
After six years of slavery Patrick received a vision in his sleep. A voice told him: “You do well to fast; soon you will go to your own country.” Shortly afterward another vision said: “Your ship is ready.” He fled his master, traveled some two hundred miles across unfamiliar Irish territory to a coastal port, and convinced a ship’s captain to take him aboard. After a difficult voyage and further adventures he eventually returned home to his family in Britain. His family begged him never to leave them again. But Patrick had a second vision: a man named Victoricus came from Ireland with countless letters, and as Patrick read the first one, he heard the voices of the Irish people crying out: “We beg you, holy youth, to come and walk among us once again!” He understood the vision as a call from the Lord to return to Ireland as a missionary.
In the spring of 433, on Holy Saturday, Patrick lit a great Paschal fire on the summit of Slane Hill near the Tara Valley. This was a direct defiance of the pagan Irish ordinance: no fire was permitted to be lit on that night until the High King’s druids had lit their own great fire at Tara, the political and religious heart of pagan Ireland. The High King Loegaire saw the unauthorized fire blazing across the valley and sent his druids to extinguish it. The druids attempted to do so by their incantations and were unable. Patrick stood his ground. He preached the Gospel to the High King and his court. He converted some of the king’s household, including the king’s daughters Ethne and Fedelm. The High King himself, while not converting, granted Patrick freedom to preach throughout Ireland. The Paschal fire on Slane Hill became the symbolic founding moment of Christian Ireland.
Patrick spent the next thirty years (433–461) in tireless missionary travel across the entire island of Ireland. He preached to high kings and slaves alike. He baptized many thousands. He founded hundreds of churches and monasteries from Connaught to Ulster to Munster to Leinster. He confronted and overcame the druidic pagan religion that had dominated Ireland for centuries. He famously used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the Trinity. He denounced pagan idolatry, sun-worship, and the Irish slave trade. He records in his Confession that his life was in danger twelve times during his missionary work. He established his episcopal see at Armagh in 444. By the time he reposed around 461, the Christian Faith was established in every corner of Ireland that had been pagan when he arrived.
Near the end of his life, around 460, Patrick wrote his Confession (Confessio), one of the great early Western Christian autobiographies. He wrote partly to defend his apostolic work against the slanders of his enemies, partly to give thanks to God for the mercies of his life, partly to provide spiritual instruction for the Irish Christians who would come after him. He calls himself “a sinner, the most ignorant and of least account, despised by many.” He writes movingly of his slavery, his prayer on the Irish mountains, his vision of return, his thirty years of apostolic work, his constant gratitude to the God who had used such an unlikely instrument for such great purposes. The Confession remains the personal voice of one of the great early Christian apostles speaking directly to us across sixteen centuries.
The Lord called Abraham out of his homeland, sent him into a foreign land, and through him began the long providential work of the salvation of the world. He called Patrick into a similar pattern. Patrick was carried out of his homeland by force into the foreign land of Ireland; the Lord used the captivity to form him in deep prayer; then the Lord sent him back to that same foreign land as an apostle who would be its enlightener. Patrick’s entire life was a variation on the Abrahamic pattern — the Lord taking a person out of his ordinary native life into a strange land, in order to use the person’s displacement as the foundation of an entire apostolic vocation. The lesson is that the Lord can use even our deepest displacements for purposes that we cannot trace at the time.
In 444, twelve years into his missionary work, Patrick established his episcopal see at Armagh in the north of Ireland (the modern city of Armagh in Northern Ireland). The site was chosen for its proximity to the ancient royal seat of Emain Macha and for the cultural prestige it carried in Irish tradition. He founded a great cathedral and monastic complex there. Armagh became the spiritual capital of Christian Ireland and has remained so to the present day — the seat of the Primate of All Ireland in both the Catholic and Anglican traditions. From his see at Armagh, Patrick organized the ecclesial structure of the Irish Church, ordained additional bishops to assist him, formed the native Irish clergy, founded additional monasteries, and laid the institutional foundations of Christian Ireland.
Patrick gives the Christian Church a particular gift: the proof that the Lord can use even the deepest sufferings of our lives — even our captivity and slavery to the powers of this world — to prepare us for the apostolic work he has been preparing for us from before the foundation of the world. He was carried into Irish slavery at sixteen against his will. He spent six lonely years on the cold mountains. The Lord used those years to teach him deep prayer. He returned home, and the Lord called him back to Ireland as a missionary bishop. He spent the next thirty years converting the very nation that had enslaved him. He never tired of giving thanks to God for the strange providential pattern of his life. We may not be carried into slavery. But we will all face sufferings that seem at the time to be meaningless. Patrick reminds us that the Lord wastes nothing.