You don’t necessarily have to be Catholic in order to have at least some familiarity with St. Patrick. Not everything you may have heard about his life can be taken as fact. What is certain is that St. Patrick was an actual person, (and not merely a legend). Here is a very brief look into St. Patrick’s family tree.
St. Patrick was born at Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton, in Scotland somewhere between the year 385 and 387. This means that the saint that is most closely identified with Ireland wasn’t actually Irish at all. He was Scottish.
Or, maybe he wasn’t really Scottish, either. His father was named Calpurnius, and his mother was named Conchessa. You might notice that these two names don’t sound particularly Scottish. The parents of St. Patrick were Roman citizens. His father, Calpurnius, was from a Roman family of high rank. He held the office of decurio in the part of Britain where St. Patrick was born, (which might have been called Gaul at the time).
His mother, Conchessa, was closely related to St. Martin of Tours, (before he was declared as saint by the Catholic Church). Martin decided to join the Catholic Church when he was ten years old. This act went against the wishes of his parents. Christianity was not the dominant religion in Rome at the time, so this is noteworthy. It is unclear as to how, exactly, Conchessa was related to Martin. However, since she and Martin are family, then that means that Martin is related to St. Patrick in some way.
It is worth noting that Conchessa and Calpurnius did not name their son “St. Patrick”. His real name was probably Maewyn Succat. The Romanized version of his name was Patricius. What were the parents of Patricius doing in Britain? The answer to this question lies in Calpurnius’s title. He held the office of decurio. There are two meanings of this word. One meaning is that Calpurnius was the man in charge of the local council or senate of the colonia where Patricius was born. This title was an honor. The other meaning had military applications.
In short, Calpurnius was the Roman official who was in charge of a Roman colony that was located in Britain. This means that Patricius started of in a very wealthy and somewhat powerful family.
Somewhere between when Patricius turned fourteen, and when he turned sixteen, he was kidnapped. A group of Irish raiders attacked his family’s estate. The Irish marauders sold Patricius as a slave to an Irish chieftan named Milchu. This took place somewhere around where the county of Antrim, in Ireland, is located today. Patricius’s name was changed to an Irish name, Patrick.
Patrick tended the flocks of his master’s sheep until he was around twenty years old. Then, he escaped, and returned to his family. Soon after, he began studying for the priesthood. The rest, is history, or myth, or a little bit of both. He never married, and he never had any children.
Patrick died on March 17, 461. This means that when we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day today, we are actually celebrating on the day that the man died. It has become the feast day for this saint.
Image by Andres Franz Borchert on Flickr