St. Patrick’s message “often gets drowned out by the parades, the plastic shamrocks and the green-dyed beer,” says Brother Colmán Ó Clabaigh, OSB, in The Catholic Spirit of the St. Paul & Minneapolis archdiocese. Bold words, verified by reality.
He wrote two letters in the fifth century as a missionary to Ireland, in which (a) he condemns a chieftain for enslaving converts and (b) tells about himself and his work.
He’d been captured himself from his posh family villa in Britain and ended on a hillside herding sheep. In desperation he turned to God and Jesus. Escaping, he made it back to Britain and became a priest. Could have enjoyed life as a pastor but decided to go whole-hog and return to Ireland to see what he could do for and with his erstwhile captors.
Altruistic, to be sure, but he had a skeleton in his closet, some crime committed when he was 15 that might have disqualified him for the ordination. He admitted it to a friend, who betrayed his trust. Patrick was attacked by “men of letters, sitting on your estates.” He defended himself in his “Confession.”
He made an unlikely bishop, he admitted, “rustic, exiled, unlearned” as he was, “like a stone lying in deep mud.” But “he that is mighty” had picked him up and made him part of a wall of the sort that lined the Irish countryside.
Bishop material or not, he recognized “the Gospel’s power to transform, transfigure and uplift,” Brother Ó Clabaigh, of Glenstal Abbey in Ireland, concludes. Recognizing this was the secret of his success, “and this is as true for us in the 21st century as it was for him in the fifth.”
End of St. Patrick thought for the day.
Blithe Spirit 