'The Confession of Saint Patrick' is an article from an Australian Catholic news magazine published in 1937. The anonymous author declares that 'There is no more affecting document in any literature than the “Confession of St. Patrick' and feels that its unpolished nature reveals the human Patrick in all his frailty. Just how rustic and unlearned Saint Patrick actually was is still the subject of scholarly debate. Some feel that despite his protestations, the writer and his work were rather more sophisticated than he would have us believe. But the writer of this article sees the literary shortcomings of the Confession as adding immeasurably to its appeal and to the humanity of its writer. He closes with a moving tribute to the faith of Saint Patrick, discovered on the 'desolate slopes of Slemish'.
THE CONFESSION OF ST. PATRICK.
“And this is my confession before I die!” It is not the great Thaumaturgus, looking back on a road made straight and smooth by miracles, but just a tired old man, worn out with age, and great labours, and great sorrows, and disappointments; this Patrick, who sits him down in the quiet hour before the darkness to defend his Mission, and, incidentally, to tell the story of his life. We feel we can come very close to the aged missioner, who has known so much of life’s troubles, whose successes have been achieved at the cost of so much toil, and sacrifice, and suffering, and who has had to endure the keenest pain of all — to be betrayed by his trusted friend, and to be misunderstood and unjustly charged by his superiors. Beautiful and majestic is the St. Patrick beloved by poets and artists, overcoming the Druids on Tara by the might of his miracle-working crozier. But this human Patrick of the “Confession” so simple, so direct, so conscious of his own failings and limitations—and at the same time so conscious of the “great things” wrought by the Spirit through his instrumentality — this is the Patrick who is dear to us, even as our own fathers!
There is no more affecting document in any literature than the “Confession of St. Patrick,” and the halting language in which it is written, the absence of all art, or literary craftsmanship, in its composition, the uncouth “rusticity” of its phrasing, add immeasurably to its appeal. We seem to see the old man “screwing himself up,” so to speak, to write it. He knows to what criticism his want of scholarship is going to expose him—especially from those learned brethren who have so often objected to an “unlettered man like him being left in charge of a Mission to such a cultured race as the Irish; “Behind my back they were speaking one with another and saying, ‘Why does this man put himself into danger amongst hostile people who know not God?’ This they did not put forward through malice, but it did not seem right to them on account of my being untutored, as, according to my own testimony, I have understood.” This want of education, which is the most serious of his opponents’ charges against his fitness for the post, is he not going to deliver the very proof of it in the document that presents his defence? He knows it: “For this reason I have long since thought of writing, but even until now I hesitate, for I feared I should incur the censure of the tongues of men; for I have not been educated as others have, who, accordingly, in an excellent manner, have imbibed both Law and Sacred Scripture alike, and have never changed their speech from childhood, but rather have ever been bringing it to perfection. For my speech and word has been translated into a foreign tongue, as may be easily proved from the flavour of my writing.” Not unskilful pleading this, for all its lack of the advocate’s gift of “form.” There emerges from it the first point of his defence—viz., that if he had not as much Latin as his critics, he had something more immediately useful to him for the purposes of his Mission: a good knowledge of Irish.
He, himself, seems conscious that better than long years of college has been the training he has got fop his Mission through the hard things that befell him in his youth. Scene after scene rises up before him out of the past, and he sees how God was following a plan with him all the time, moulding and shaping him for the work He had designed for him. He sees himself again—a merry, thoughtless boy in his father’s comfortable home.Idle and careless he may have been, not very fond of school —he remembers now ruefully the opportunities he missed fonder of passing his days on his father’s farm, near Bannavem Taberniae, than in the township school, where doubtless Calpurnius would have liked to see this high-spirited lad of his preparing himself, by serious study, to follow his own decorous footsteps in a prosperous official career. Perhaps, if he had been at school instead of out at the “villula” that terrible day of the Slave Raid he might have lived and died, like his father and grandfather before him, a smug “decurion” of a small provincial Roman township But he would never have grown into the St. Patrick whose God-given Mission it was to lead Eire “virgin to Christ.”
For that Mission’s accomplishment he had first to find Christ himself. Exquisite the passage of the “Confession” in which he tells us how he found Him—amid the solitude of the wintry hills, where, a poor slave boy, he tended his master’s flocks for six long years. Forgotten were cold, and hunger, and loneliness, and grief for the loss of home and kindred, in the warm glow of the Presence of which he had suddenly become conscious, on the desolate slopes of Slemish.
'SAINT PATRICK'.THE NEWCASTLE AND MAITLAND CATHOLIC SENTINEL, March 1, 1937, p.200.
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