A Brief History of St. Patrick's Day

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Order now in the app for pickup or delivery. Chipotle, for real. This is our American Stories, and being that it's that time of the year, St. Patrick's Day, we figured we'd give you the story behind the story, which is what we love to do here on Our American Stories. Here's Greg Hengler with the story of St. Patrick. R. P. C. Hansen wrote in his book about St. Patrick that the tragedy with all the myths and legends, such as Patrick driving all the snakes out of Ireland, his association with using shamrock to explain the Trinity, and the preconception that he's Irish, is that these actually hide the truth. What we are about to do is get rid of the myths and the legends and go to the primary source, the words of Patrick himself. In fact, his fifth century writings and letters, known as the confession, are one of the earliest surviving documents in Irish history. Here's Dr. Tim Campbell, director of the St. Patrick's Center in Downpatrick, Ireland.

Ego patricius peccator recicismus. I, Patrick, a sinner, least faithful of many. Those are the words that begin the history of Ireland. Patrick was born into a well-off family and lived in a country estate on the western coast of what was Roman-occupied Britain in the very last days of the Roman Empire.

As Roman legions abandoned Britain in order to protect themselves and other regions of the Roman Empire, order and authority fell into disarray and Britain's west coast became vulnerable to frequent plundering by Irish slave raiders. Patrick was a teenager living a very comfortable life as the son of a government official and church cleric, though he himself had very little interest in anything pertaining to his father's faith. One day Irish raiders captured the 16-year-old Patrick along with several thousand men, women and children from the surrounding countryside, packed them tightly into holds of waiting ships and took them to Ireland, a wild and savage place beyond the Roman reach. Patrick was sold as a slave and was made a shepherd for a very harsh master. Patrick hated the Irish and this hatred fueled his will to live. He vowed one day to repay them for their cruelty.

Here's Dr. Campbell, Elva Johnston, professor of history at University College Dublin, Patrick's biographer Thomas O'Loughlin and father Billy Swann. Celtic people did not work with slaves the same way that the Romans did. They traded their slaves pretty badly like cattle and would have worked you until you died. Particularly as a non-Irish slave, he would have been at an even greater disadvantage because he wouldn't have been recognized almost as a person.

Presumably it is a sort of meant to be slavery for life. He begins to conclude that this has happened because I deserved it basically and this happened to shake me out of my complacency and to shake me out of a way of life I was living. In which God didn't matter for me.

Here are the words of Patrick. I tended sheep every day and I prayed frequently during the day and more and more the love of God and the fear of him grew in me and my faith was increased and my spirit was quickened so that in a day I prayed up to a hundred times and almost as many in the night. Indeed I even remained in the wood and on the mountain to pray. And come hail rain or snow I was up before dawn to pray. The spirit was fervent in me.

Something new is happening, something that hadn't happened before. That personal relationship, that dimension of a personal relationship with God. Patrick's bitterness and loneliness began to melt away as he came to realize God was with him. He tried to recall sermons from church and stories from the bible. He chided himself for his boyhood lack of interest in God. Although Patrick knew of Jesus Christ, he never cared. But now as a slave in a strange green distant land, the little he had learned as a boy came flooding back to him.

He didn't have a bible but he could pray. And as his love for God grew, his hatred for the Irish died. Patrick was held as a slave for six years as he continued to pray every day. Here's the words of Patrick and Patrick's biographer Thomas O'Loughlin. It was there indeed that one night I heard a voice.

Patrick, well have you fasted. Very soon you are to travel to your homeland. Behold, your ship is prepared. I took flight, leaving the man I had been bound to for six years. But the ship was not nearby, but maybe 200 miles away where I had never been and where I knew nobody.

The biggest danger is someone says you're a slave. I'll find out where you come from and I'll take you back and I'll pay him a reward. It took him days to walk 200 miles before reaching the seaport and there right before him was a ship getting ready to depart.

But the captain, seeing he was a slave, refused to give him passage. Patrick turned to leave and as he did, he prayed for guidance. Before he ended his prayer, one of the sailors in the back of the ship said, come hurry we shall take you on. Patrick was then asked to pledge himself to the crew through a Celtic tradition that included sucking on their chests. These days we would shake hands and in those days that was a way of bonding with each other to show that you would be loyal to them. He didn't want to do that because he was Christian.

The sailors gave him a pass and led him on board the ship. They traveled for three days before landing on an unknown desolate port. They traveled on foot for 28 days searching for food as the haggard half-starved men grew weak. The captain fixed his fiery eyes on Patrick and said, tell me Christian, you say that your God is great and all-powerful. Why then do you not pray for us? We are suffering from hunger.

It is unlikely that we shall ever see a human being again. Patrick smiled. Be truly converted with all your heart to the Lord my God because nothing is impossible for him. When the men turned around, a herd of pigs crossed the path in front of them. They would feast on him for days. Patrick writes that after this they thanked God mightily and he became honorable in their eyes. But just days after this miracle, Patrick was once again taken captive and made a slave. On the very first night he was with his captors, he received a divine message telling him he would remain with them for two months.

This is exactly what happened. Patrick wrote, the Lord freed me from their hands. Two years passed before Patrick finally made it home to his family in Britain.

The Patrick that returned was a very different person from the one who left. He was someone who had encountered God in the darkest part of his day and who had as a result of encountering God in a real and living way become much more comfortable with the idea that God was active and alive and to be taken taken seriously. Then one night a voice returned to him. I saw in the night the vision of a man whose name was Victor coming as it were from Ireland with countless letters and he gave me one of them and I read the opening words of the letter which were the voice of the Irish and they cried out as with one voice. We ask you holy boy come and walk among us once again. And you've been listening to the story of Saint Patrick and of course obviously we're telling this story because so many Irish Americans call this country home.

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Order now in the app for pickup or delivery. Chipotle for real. And we continue with our American stories and the story of Saint Patrick. Let's return to Greg Hengler and the rest of this remarkable story. After several years in the monasteries of France Patrick was ordained a bishop. Patrick told his church, family, and friends he would be returning to Ireland and they were shocked. Don't you know what they do with slaves who run away? Surely God would not require this from one who has suffered so much already. Settle down here in peace. The church leaders argued he was wasting his time.

Those brutal barbarians have no interest in God. Patrick told them God snatched me from my homeland and parents so that I might know and love him. It is in Ireland that I wish to serve until I die if the Lord would grant it to me. So Patrick who was still a fugitive in Ireland set his feet to walk and heart to share the gospel message to the Irish everywhere beginning in the year 432. The pre-Christian druids were a powerful force in 5th century Ireland.

These Celtic religious leaders were part of a pagan priesthood and would be rivals to Patrick's ministry. The druids hated him for leading people away from their idols. They robbed, beat, imprisoned, and tortured him. He was enslaved a third time.

Twelve times his enemies nearly killed him, but always the Lord rescued him. He sells his nobility, which I take to be a reference to him selling essentially his inheritance. It's almost like a form of seed funding which will enable him to get to Ireland. I imagine that Patrick's parents had fully expected him to take on the role as maybe the heir of the family.

He would have been opting out of any responsibility for running estates, etc. Here's Patrick, Alan Harper, Chris Seaton, co-author of New Celts, and four other toppings including the British Parliament. Here's Patrick, Alan Harper, Chris Seaton, co-author of New Celts, and Father Neil Carlin. It was not my grace, but God who conquered in me and who resisted them all. That I might come to the Irish Nations to preach the gospel.

In terms of the challenge of it, it was just awesome. He didn't know what he faced, possible death and persecution, more slavery, imprisonment. He established his great stone church on the hilltop. The site is strategically located on one of the main transportation routes in Inland Ireland. That makes this an extremely significant and important place from which to conduct your mission. And you're conducting your mission in territory which has not been exposed to Christianity before. Patrick's approach seemed to be very much about confronting the spirituality of paganism, but not condemning the culture in which it bred. He used what was sacred to the people, but gave it a new context, a fuller, richer context, which they were able both to accommodate within their own understanding and see a continuity of what had been dimly perceived in the past through the coming of God into human experience. Patrick did break the mould of the church at that time, being in that sense quite radical and an outsider.

I think that, to me, is an authentic pattern that resonates with the New Testament. Think of John the Baptist, think of Jesus. They were not comfortable within the institutional structures of the church.

So much of church leadership was quite locked into an earthly security, a worldly security. Whereas what Patrick did was completely counter-intuitive to go to one of the more wild and unwelcoming places. Patrick needed an awful lot of conviction in his heart, but he needed a lot of fire in his blood to be able to do what he did, which was effectively change a nation. I think one of the things that most interests me about Patrick is that he came into what was a situation of social difficulties and a considerable conflict with a completely revolutionary message, which yes, he had to use local influence to spread, but which transcended, totally transcended the circumstances of the local divisions and disputes. He comes across from his writings as a very humble man, a man who knew his frailty, talking of himself as a great sinner, like all the saints seem to do.

And I often think it's like you come into the sun and you see the dust coming through a beautiful window in a building and you didn't see the dust before the sunlight shone through that light. I often think of the saints like that, because to you and I, they're not great sinners. But as they came close to the great light and are aware of the great God, they become more and more aware of their sin, and yet more and more aware of God's mercy. Patrick converted thousands to Christianity. He opposed slavers, Irish kings, druids, and most of all, hostility from his fellow Christians.

Here again is Dr. Tim Campbell. Patrick went AWOL, and we just don't know how that all panned out. He said that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in Ireland because that's what God demanded.

Therefore, we've got to guess that he never did go back. Patrick died of old age and was buried in Northern Ireland in the year 461 on March 17th, the day we celebrate St. Patrick's Day. Not long after Patrick's death, the Roman Empire fell, and Western Europe drifted into the Middle Ages. But Patrick's work was not in vain. As Christianity established itself, as it became more vibrant, it became known as the land of saints and scholars, and that led in turn to a whole proliferation of Christian missionaries leaving Ireland and flooding continental Europe. Patrick's story began a chain of events that is quite remarkable in the impact that it had. He wore out many more pairs of sandals in death than he did in life, and he's still going. People are still reading his confession and still being interested in Christianity because he wrote his message down.

Here again is Chris Seaton. The work of evangelism in Ireland and the establishing of those monastic houses contributed to a strong place of learning, of culture, and definitely, of course, a strong place of springboard for evangelism, which, down the line, spawned the re-evangelization of Britain and mainland Europe. To this day, Patrick's works offer hope for religious reconciliation in Ireland.

Here's Harry Smith from Belfast, director of the Christian Renewal Center. Patrick brought a Christianity that was pre-Roman in a sense, you know, therefore he predates everything that we would see in this land as being Catholic or Protestant, and therefore, in a sense, he's an anchor point for us whenever we're talking about reconciliation in this land of something of a commonality. In closing, let us hear Patrick's final words. I pray for those who believe in and have reverence for God. Some of them may come upon this writing, which Patrick, a sinner, wrote in Ireland. May none of them ever say that whatever little I did or made known to please God was done through ignorance.

Instead, you can judge and believe in all truth that it was a gift of God. This is my confession before I die. I'm Greg Hengler, and from all of us here at Our American Stories, have a great St. Patrick's Day. And great job, as always, to Greg Hengler, and again, a special thanks to CBN Films for allowing us to access their movie docudrama, I Am Patrick. We'd also like to thank the folks at Vision Video for giving us access to footage of their film Patrick.

Check out the full documentary and 1,900 other titles of uplifting, family-friendly videos at visionvideo.com. And my goodness, he was an entrepreneur of sorts going into a wild, untamed land with a message that caused him to meet enemies everywhere around him, converting thousands to his faith, but in the end, lots of enemies too. And those final words, my goodness, I pray for those who believe in and have reverence for God. May none of them ever say that what I did to please God was not done in ignorance, but to please him. Final words, a beautiful story, Patrick's story, St. Patrick's story, and by the way that he calls himself a sinner, is something we can all, all of us, believers or not, know that we're all flawed, and what a beautiful story and what grace he found through his God.

A great story, a great Irish story, a great human story, here on Our American Stories. Buying a home, Rocket Mortgage will cover one percent of your rate for the first year at no cost to you with Inflation Buster. That's more game days, more family gatherings. Plus, if rates drop within three years of your home purchase, you'll get exclusive savings when you refinance with rate drop advantage. Save when you buy today and refinance tomorrow.

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Place the darkness in the season two premiere of Yellow Jackets from Showtime. Crack open the history vault and dig into shows like America, The Story of Us. Then watch free picks from networks like Disney Story Central and more with the kids. Give your ears some love with Hit Nation Junior on iHeart Radio. Easily discover new free content each week across the best streaming apps. Stay free this week into your Xfinity voice remote.