John Cashel Hoey

The Birthplace of Saint Patrick John Cashel Hoey

Excerpt: The question of the birthplace of St. Patrick-a question which has been debated with considerable learning and acrimony for several centuries-has always seemed to me to have an interest far beyond the rival claims of clans and the jealous litigation of the antiquary. It is interesting not merely because it is in reality a curious archaeological problem, but also because it may in some measure afford a clue to the character of one of the greatest saints and greatest men of his own age or of any other-a saint who was the apostle of a nation which he found all heathen and left all Christian; who succeeded in planting the Catholic faith without a single act of martyrdom, but planted it so firmly that it has never failed for now 1,400 years, though tried in what various processes of martyrdom God and man too well know; a saint whose apostolate was the mainspring of an endless succession of missionary enterprises, prosecuted with the same untiring zeal in the nineteenth century as in the fifth, wherever the vanguard of Christendom may happen to be found, whether in Austria, in Gaul, in Switzerland, or in Iceland, as now at the furthest confines of America and of Australasia. Add to these ordinary evidences of the supernatural efficacy of St. Patrick's mission the testimony which is derived from the peculiar spiritual character of the people that he converted. The Irish nation retains the impress which it received from the hands of St. Patrick in a way that I believe no other Christian nation has preserved the mould of its apostle.