As if one Saint Patrick's Day per year were not enough, the calendrical quirk, according to which this year the anniversary of the saint's death falls on a Sunday, gives us two additional Saint Patrick's Days - the religious one on Monday, March 18, and the civic one, highlighted by the famous 5th-Avenue parade today.
Other than the fact that he never saw, let alone ate, a potato, we don't know as much as we might wish about Saint Patrick. We do know that he was the son of a deacon and the grandson of a priest, who was born into a well-to-do family of landed gentry in the Roman province of Britain. At 16, his comfortable life suddenly ceased when he was captured and enslaved by Irish raiders. During 6 years as a slave herdsman in what is now County Mayo, Ireland, Patrick’s conventional Christianity was transformed into an ardent, fervent faith. After a successful escape and return to Britain, he felt a call to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity. Ordained a bishop, he returned to Ireland and remained there until his death on March 17, 461.
Unlike Patrick’s home island of Britain, Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire. It was beyond the borders of what then constituted civilization. Saint Patrick stands out as one of the first in Western Christian history to feel the imperative to evangelize beyond the borders of the Empire, to take literally the the Gospel’s mandate to teach all nations. In his Confession, Patrick described his sense of mission. “I want to spend myself in that country, even in death, if the Lord should grant me this favor. I am deeply in his debt, for he gave me the great grace that through me many peoples should be reborn in God, and then made perfect by confirmation and everywhere among them clergy ordained for a people so recently coming to believe, one people gathered by the Lord from the ends of the earth. ... It is among that people that I want to wait for the promise made by him, who assuredly never tells a lie. ... This is our faith: believers are to come from the whole world.”
An altar in honor of the great missionary Saint Patrick is found at the east end of the north aisle of the mother church of the Paulist Fathers in New York, the city of which Saint Patrick is also patron. It was designed by the same John LaFarge who also directed the original design of the church's nave, painted the circular mural The Angel of the Moon on the south wall of the sanctuary, and did the two blue end windows above the sanctuary and the five lancet windows above the main door. The altarpiece (photo) was painted by William Laurel Harris, who also painted the large mural The Crucifixion over the main door. It portrays St. Patrick, flanked by Saints Columba and Bridget, driving out paganism, while, above, St. Patrick preaches to an Irish chieftan.
In this particularly challenging period in the Church's life, when so much ecclesial energy is focused internally and Catholic elites are increasingly polarized about issues of internal church organization and polity, it is good to be reminded of the Church's missionary mandate. It may also serve as a bittersweet reminder that the mandate is never fully fulfilled, that many places once seemingly converted to Christ and his Church have since followed other paths and require re-evangelization, which may prove to be the contemporary Church's most pressing - and neglected - task.
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