We’re a few days away from Saint Patrick’s Day, and it will be a day of grown men marching in funny green hats, drinking way too much green beer & inviting anyone to kiss them because, for today, they are Irish. Like many of our Saints’ Days, the celebration has taken over, and it has become much less than the actual person we are celebrating.
Contrary to popular belief, Saint Patrick looks nothing like the guy on the front of Frosted Lucky Charms cereal! Patrick was born in Roman Briton in 387. At the age of 16 he was captured by Irish raiders and sold into slavery in Ireland. In slavery, he embraced the Christian faith he was born into. Through dreams and visions from God, Patrick was able to escape back to his family.
He was trained as a priest and, through dreams from God, he was called back to Ireland to be an apostle to his former captors. Patrick was an amazing evangelist: in his lifetime, Ireland was converted to Christianity.
Patrick preached a holistic faith that encompassed every area of life. Thomas Cahill says in How the Irish Saved Civilization; ”Patrick is the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery. Nor would any voice as strong as his be heard again till the seventeenth century.” By Patrick’s death, slavery was completely abolished as a practice in Ireland – way better than driving out the snakes!
We have two writings from Patrick that have survived into our time. One is his “Confession,” which is a brief autobiography; the other is his letter to Coroticus. This public letter to Coroticus is a powerful statement against slavery.
As the Romans pulled out of Briton, the Romanized Britons had very few ways to support themselves so some of them took to piracy, raiding the neighbouring counties for booty and slaves.
Contrary to popular belief, Saint Patrick looks nothing like the guy on the front of Frosted Lucky Charms cereal! Patrick was born in Roman Briton in 387. At the age of 16 he was captured by Irish raiders and sold into slavery in Ireland. In slavery, he embraced the Christian faith he was born into. Through dreams and visions from God, Patrick was able to escape back to his family.
He was trained as a priest and, through dreams from God, he was called back to Ireland to be an apostle to his former captors. Patrick was an amazing evangelist: in his lifetime, Ireland was converted to Christianity.
Patrick preached a holistic faith that encompassed every area of life. Thomas Cahill says in How the Irish Saved Civilization; ”Patrick is the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery. Nor would any voice as strong as his be heard again till the seventeenth century.” By Patrick’s death, slavery was completely abolished as a practice in Ireland – way better than driving out the snakes!
We have two writings from Patrick that have survived into our time. One is his “Confession,” which is a brief autobiography; the other is his letter to Coroticus. This public letter to Coroticus is a powerful statement against slavery.
As the Romans pulled out of Briton, the Romanized Britons had very few ways to support themselves so some of them took to piracy, raiding the neighbouring counties for booty and slaves.
You can imagine how horrified Patrick was to hear of the tables turning and British Christian raiders coming to make slaves of the Irish. One of the raiders was named Coroticus. Patrick describes how he had just baptized and confirmed a large group of young men and women, when on the very next day, the chrism “still gleaming upon their foreheads, they were cruelly cut down and killed.” Those that resisted faced instant death; the remainder were taken prisoner – the men into slavery, the women to endure a lifetime of sexual abuse at the hands of the pagan Picts.
Patrick writes a hasty letter and sends a delegation of priests after Coroticus and his men to call them back from their wicked ways and return their Christian brothers and sisters to their homes. The priests were rebuffed and laughed at. So Patrick wrote a second open letter; a great rebuke, calling Coroticus and his men to repentance. If they do not repent, the letter calls all other Christians to excommunicate them and have nothing to do with their company or their wicked ways. In the letter he derides Coroticus and his men as “dogs and sorcerers and murderers, and liars and false swearers… who distribute baptized girls for a price, and that for the sake of a miserable temporal kingdom which truly passes away in a moment like a cloud or smoke that
is scattered by the wind.”
Today, slavery is as great an issue as it ever was in Patrick’s day. In fact, there are more slaves today than there were at the height of the African slave trade or any other time in human history! This March 17, you can honour Saint Patrick by doing something to end slavery in our generation. You can become part of advocacy organizations like Not For Sale, rescue organizations like International Justice Mission, and after-care organizations like Ratanak International. And pray for the 30 million people enslaved today, that they would see justice and freedom in our time.
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