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March 17

Our Father Among the Saints Patrick, the Enlightener of Ireland.

Saint Patrick, the Apostle of the Irish, was seized from his native Britain by Irish marauders when he was sixteen years old. Though the son of a deacon and grandson of a priest, it was not until his captivity that he sought out the Lord with his whole heart. In his Confession, the testament he wrote towards the end of his life, he says, “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.” After six years of slavery in Ireland, he was guided by God to make his escape, and afterwards struggled in the monastic life at Auxerre in Gaul, under the guidance of the holy Bishop Germanus. Many years later he was ordained bishop and sent to Ireland once again, about the year 432, to convert the Irish to Christ. His arduous labors bore so much fruit that within seven years, three bishops were sent from Gaul to help him shepherd his flock, “my brethren and sons whom I have baptized in the Lord – so many thousands of people,” he says in his Confession. His apostolic work was not accomplished without much “weariness and painfulness,” long journeys through difficult country, and many perils; he says his very life was in danger twelve times. When he came to Ireland as its enlightener, it was a pagan country; when he ended his earthly life some thirty years later, about 461, the Faith of Christ was established in every corner.

The above account is taken from the Great Horologion,
Copyright © 1997, Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Brookline, MA, all rights reserved.
All reproduction of texts or icons on this website in any form
without prior written permission is forbidden.

A fascinating scholarly reconstruction of the life of Saint Patrick derived from what he says of himself in his Confession and his Letter to Coroticus, and from the lives written of him no earlier than two centuries after his death, was serialized in issues 24 to 26 of the True Vine in 1996. This Life of Saint Patrick by Eoin MacNeill was written with genuine reverence and we recommend it to all. We quote from the introductory remarks to it in True Vine Issue #24, page 45:

The earliest biographies of him, by Muirchu moccu Machtene and by the Bishop Tirechan, were written at least two centuries after his death in 461, and contain much that is historically unreliable. But from the hand of the Saint himself we have two writings, his Confession and Epistle to Coroticus, which are universally accepted as genuine. It is to these that Eoin (John) MacNeill, Member of the Royal Irish Academy, Correspondant de l’Institut de France, and Professor of Early and Medieval Irish History, University College, Dublin from 1909 to 1942, brings a lifetime of research and experience in his Life of Saint Patrick. Dr. MacNeill takes Saint Patrick’s own words and constructs nothing less than a life of the Saint, showing, in the light of the larger historical context, the significance of seemingly chance phrases, and making a living person of a great Saint whose historicity, precisely because of his greatness, has been obscured by the accretion of legendary elements.

Unfortunately the original book is out of print and hard to find. We reprinted it with the publisher’s permission, and it is available from our diocese here.

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