St. Patrick did not banish the snakes from Ireland. After the last Ice Age, snakes never returned to the Emerald Isle.
Neither is there proof that Patrick used the three-leaf shamrock to impart the doctrine of the Trinity to the fifth-century pagan Irish. The first such reference is from a botanical catalogue published in 1726. Neither is there evidence that it was Patrick who combined pagan and Christian imagery into the Celtic cross.
Patrick was not actually Irish. Nor was he canonized by a Pope. Nor was his real name Patrick. None of it matters. The true story is better than the myth.
Captured by raiders as a 16-year-old in northern Britain, Patrick was taken across the Irish Sea by pirates and sold into slavery. Escaping from six years of bondage after receiving a spiritual vision, Patrick returned to Ireland decades later, armed only with a mystic’s faith, to convert the island to Christianity, abolishing slavery and human sacrifice in the process.
“Patrick was really a first—the first missionary to barbarians beyond the reach of Roman law,” Thomas Cahill writes in How the Irish Saved Civilization. “The step he took was in its way as bold as Columbus’s, and a thousand times more humane.”
Patrick returned to Ireland against the wishes of his family. His mission, baptizing the Irish pagans, ordaining priests, and building churches and monasteries, would last the final 30 years of his life in Ireland.
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