Patrick’s Mission to Ireland

Almost everything that can be known about Patrick comes from two short Latin texts he wrote himself: a Confession composed in old age (Patrick, Confession 10) and an open letter to the soldiers of a ruler called Coroticus (Patrick, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus 1–3).

He was a Briton: he writes of his parents and his home country in Britain (Patrick, Confession 23) (Patrick, Confession 43). He was the son of a deacon named Calpornius and grandson of a priest, from a village he calls Bannavem Taburniae; his father also held the civic rank of decurion (Patrick, Confession 1) (Patrick, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus 10). At about sixteen he was carried off to Ireland as a captive, with thousands of others (Patrick, Confession 1). For six years he herded animals, and he writes that in those years he began to pray, by day and by night. A voice in his sleep told him that a ship was ready; he walked some two hundred miles to find it and got away (Patrick, Confession 16–19).

Some years later, at home in Britain, he saw in a dream a man called Victoricus carrying letters from Ireland. As he read one he seemed to hear the people who lived beside the wood of Voclut, near the western sea, calling him to come and walk among them again (Patrick, Confession 23). He went back as a bishop (Patrick, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus 1–3). He writes that he baptised thousands, ordained clergy, travelled to places where no one had yet come to baptise, gave gifts to kings and judges, and was once robbed and held in irons for fourteen days (Patrick, Confession 50–53). Sons and daughters of Irish rulers became monks and virgins of Christ, and so did women held in slavery, who suffered most for it (Patrick, Confession 41–42).

His mission had critics. At a hearing held in his absence his seniors brought up a sin of his boyhood, confessed before he was made deacon and disclosed by a close friend (Patrick, Confession 26–27, 32). The Confession is his answer. He wished to visit Britain and Gaul but believed himself bound to stay in Ireland for life (Patrick, Confession 43), and he calls the work a gift of God (Patrick, Confession 62). When the soldiers of Coroticus killed some of his newly baptised converts and carried off others, he told Christians not to eat or drink with them or take their alms until they did penance and freed the captives (Patrick, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus 1–3) (Patrick, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus 7).

Patrick was not the only bishop sent to Ireland. Bede and the Irish annals both record that Pope Celestine sent Palladius as first bishop to the Irish, and Bede’s notice speaks of Irish who already believed in Christ (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.13) (Annals of Ulster 431–432). Nor does Patrick name any church he founded. The link with Armagh is found some two centuries later, in the Life by Muirchú, where a local lord gives him the hill on which the church stands (Muirchú, Life of Patrick 1.24). In the sixth century Columba, a monk from Ireland, crossed to Britain to preach to the northern Picts (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 3.4) (Columba Founds Iona).