Patrick's Mission to Ireland

The event

Patrick's own account, the Confessio, describes his capture as a teenager by Irish raiders, six years of enslavement tending sheep in Ireland, his escape, and a subsequent vision calling him back to Ireland to evangelize the people among whom he had been enslaved. After ecclesiastical training, he returned as a missionary bishop to a largely pagan, Celtic, tribal society.

Over the following decades — the precise chronology is uncertain and the traditional date of 432 for the start of his mission rests on later medieval Irish annals rather than Patrick's own writing — Patrick preached across Ireland, established churches, ordained clergy, and, according to his own defensive account in the Confessio, faced significant opposition both from pagan authorities and from fellow British churchmen who questioned his legitimacy and fitness for the role.

While the extensive body of Patrick legend that developed in the centuries after his death — driving snakes out of Ireland, using the shamrock to illustrate the Trinity, and lighting a defiant Paschal fire on the Hill of Slane — cannot be verified and reflects later hagiographic embellishment rather than history, Patrick's own authentic writing establishes him as a genuine and remarkably self-aware missionary bishop working at the edge of the former Roman world.

The Christianization of Ireland that followed Patrick's era, whatever its precise chronology, had outsized consequences for European Christianity: Irish monasteries became renowned centers of learning and manuscript preservation during the tumultuous early medieval centuries following Rome's collapse, and Irish missionary monks including Columba and Columbanus carried Christianity and Irish scholarship back onto the European continent in the following centuries.

Dating

Patrick's own writing gives no absolute dates. The traditional dates associated with his mission (arrival c. 432, death c. 461/493) derive from later medieval Irish annals compiled centuries after his life and are treated with caution by modern historians, some of whom place his active ministry later in the fifth century.

Other witnesses

• Patrick, Confessio
• Patrick, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 60: How the Irish Were Saved — free full issue
• St Patrick's Confessio (Royal Irish Academy) — primary source, Patrick's own account
• Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): St. Patrick