Who Was St. Patrick?

Shouting cheerfully, green-clad revelers outside a bar jostle into a line that stretches round the block. They will begin celebrations here at 8 a.m., drinking and dancing until they pour out to stand at the riverside’s iron railings to watch as 40 pounds of dye snakes through the Chicago River until it is entirely, shockingly green. 

Who Was St. Patrick? In Anglican and other liturgical churches, Christians will remember St. Patrick as the expat evangelist to Ireland.

Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day is a strange amalgamation of the holy, as we honor Patrick’s loving evangelism to his former enemies, and the hedonist, as we pursue our national obsession with excess. 

The glad joy of the day will turn darker as the party continues long past midnight. Drunk-driving accidents will double. Muggings and beatings will escalate throughout the city. The later you’re out this holiday, the worse the sexual ethic becomes.

It is an odd way to celebrate a monk. Part depraved, part divine.

Such is the Christian life anywhere. Believers have always sought to live well in our particular context — with mixed success. Sometimes we carve out a holy, humble resistance to the cruelties, idolatries, and sins of our specific time and place. Other times, we compromise.

It can be hard to tell which is which. Understanding the lives of exiles, from the fifth-century missionary to the 19th-century Irish to today’s newest arrivals, can help. There’s no better moment in the liturgical calendar for this than St. Patrick’s Day.

Saint Patrick’s Story: The Foreigner Meets the Father

In helpless rage, the priest Patrick shouted and pleaded with his countrymen as they wreaked havoc. Marauding Britons from across the Irish sea, led by one Coroticus in 458 A.D., cut down his newly baptized converts, their white robes still wet with holy water. Coroticus killed some. Others he dragged to boats and forced into slave labor in Roman Britannica.

For the priest, it was sickeningly familiar. He remembered all too well when, as a teenager, his family estate was set upon by Irish raiders. They killed the servants, ripped Patrick from his home along with thousands of others, and carried them into slavery in neighboring Ireland.

Yet for all the horror and injustice of Patrick’s first stint in Ireland, it’s where he met the Lord. Though Patrick had grown up in a Christian family, it was not until the cold nights he spent herding sheep on an Irish hillside that Patrick truly drew near to God. 

“It was among foreigners that it was seen how little I was,” Patrick writes in his Confessions. “After I arrived in Ireland, I tended sheep every day, and I prayed frequently during the day. More and more the love of God increased, and my sense of awe before God. … I realize now, the spirit was burning in me.” 

That same Spirit directed Patrick not only to (miraculously) escape Ireland, but to return a few years later as a missionary to the Celts.

It is not surprising that Patrick met God far from home. God is noticeably near to the lonely. The Bible is full of examples of immigrants and expats caught up in shifting regime changes, like David, Joseph, Daniel, and Esther, and outsiders brought into the fold, like Ruth, Rahab, the Magi, Samaritans, and the Ethiopian eunuch.

In the Old Testament, God commands his people to take care of outcasts. “When a foreigner resides with you in your land, you must not oppress him. You must treat the foreigner living among you as native-born and love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” (Lev 19:33–34). 

Paul picks up this thread in the New Testament, refusing to allow the early church to segregate into comfortable ethnic or socioeconomic groups. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).

From Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden to Jesus’ family flight from bloody governmental persecution, it’s astonishing how many stories of displacement have shaped us spiritually.

If God makes a habit of drawing close to the homesick, we have much to learn from those far from home, both throughout history, and in our backyards.

An Exile on Account of the Love of God

In the aftermath of Coroticus’s raid, Patrick writes a letter in a desperate attempt to rescue the kidnapped converts. We can hear his pen trembling with anger.

“I cannot say that they are my fellow-citizens,” Patrick rails against Coroticus and his soldiers, “nor fellow-citizens of the saints of Rome, but fellow-citizens of demons, because of their evil works.” 

To Patrick, citizenship is defined not by birth nor by legal process but by our actions — if we act like God’s people, we are citizens of his kingdom.

Patrick threw his lot entirely in with his adopted people. “By God’s will I serve the people who once enslaved me. … I live as an alien among non-Roman peoples, an exile on account of the love of God.” As a foreigner in Ireland with no blood ties, Patrick was considered a cú glas: a stranger, fair game for abuse. 

“For love of neighbors and children: for these, I have given up my homeland and my parents, and my very life to death. … Every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved — whatever may come my way,” he writes. 

Already poor, Patrick decided not to accept gifts from converts. It was a countercultural policy for a Roman Christian. Corruption was already becoming an issue in the wealthy and powerful church of Rome. But Patrick was no longer ruled by the usual qualities of a Roman Briton — nationalism, a love of pleasure, or even basic self-preservation.

Neither did he ignore the cultural context he dropped into. Folk memory tells of Patrick striding into sacred pagan spaces to claim them for God. He and the Celtic church after him seem to have appropriated existing pagan festivals, redirecting them into Christian holidays. 

Perhaps this invited syncretism. It is always difficult for believers to know which of our cultural practices reflect God’s truth, and which deny it. 

Korean believers during the holiday of Chuseok, for example, must discern how to honor deceased family members without slipping into ancestor worship. Burmese Christians need wisdom to either redeem the Festival of Thingyan, with its focus on sin-cleansing waters, for God, or disregard it altogether. During Christmas, American Christians might participate in Christ’s joyful abundance, while eschewing Michigan Avenue’s pernicious glut.

Despite the dangers of syncretism, there were stark differences between the existing religion and the one Patrick preached.

Unlike the druids, Patrick told of a God who did not demand human sacrifice but sacrificed Himself for the good of His enemies. He undertook a dangerous mission for a countercultural message. Druids had the upper hand, religiously and often politically, in 5th century Ireland. When Patrick stepped on their turf, bringing supernatural power and a scandalous Christ, they prepared for battle. 

“They did very much want to kill me,” Patrick writes simply, “but the time had not yet come.”

How the Irish Came to Chicago

Fourteen hundred years after Patrick, Irish men and women flooded out of the country fleeing starvation and British oppression. In the mid-1800’s nearly a quarter of Ireland’s population left for distant shores.

No small number of them ended up in Chicago.

Generally, the first Irish immigrants in the Midwest were single, poor, and looking for work. They came for jobs. Chicago wanted expansion; Irish workers provided the cheap labor to make it happen. 

Immigrants set to work digging canals, building hotels, and laying railroad tracks, often in appallingly dangerous conditions.

Letters from a thousand Patricks, Johnnies, and Jamies wrote from the South Side back home to Counties Cork and Kerry tell of friends who died on the job, bitterly cold winters, and “dirty Yankee tricks” that defrauded new arrivals of their precious cash. The women’s letters speak of tables waited, townhomes scrubbed, babies minded, and dinners cooked for the Wards, Sears, and Pullmans of Chicago’s elite. 

Like today’s migrants, the Irish did the dullest and most dangerous work. Slaveholders refused to risk their “property” in the deadly construction industry. But who would miss a fallen Irishmen? The letters home are full of fatalities. “Johnnie died today, will you let his ma know,” “Mitch hasn’t been seen for a while and I fear he’s come to a bad end.”

Poor working conditions was not the only danger the Irish faced in their new home. Mammon, the love of money, posed a threat as well.

“Liberty seems to have degenerated into licentiousness and licentiousness into corruption,” writes transplanted Irishman Michael Doheny to a friend in 1858. “It is more owing, I think, to the spirit of the age and its money.” Regarding possible Irish independence, Doheny writes, “If I really thought that an Irish Republic would result in the degeneracy of the people to the extent they have degenerated here, I would prefer that Ireland should remain as she is.” 

Better the Irish be slaves to England outwardly, he says, than slaves to American greed inwardly. Nations, governments, even circumstances, can touch only the outside of a person, if the inner loyalty remains God’s.

The Irish were quietly used and largely ignored, until the political winds began to shift. Like the Israelites in Egypt, or Patrick on druid turf, the Irish began to be seen as a threat. Their light skin and English fluency allowed a quicker upward mobility than most of Chicago’s foreign-born residents. Their Catholicism stuck in the craw of a majority Protestant America. And they were gaining economic ground. They were up and coming politicians and union organizers. 

Suddenly the Irish-American was not a charity case, but a charity board member.

Chicago pushed back. Members of a business league banded together swearing never to employ a Catholic. The Tribune began trumpeting headlines about the “Dead Rabbit” gang, with cartoons of an ape-like Irishman in shabby clothes and a brick clutched in his hand. Employment ads ended, “Irish need not apply.” 

Headlines about Irish violence were not 100 percent racist hysteria. Some Irish-Americans, indeed, coalesced into brutal crime families or corrupt political machines. Yet others established hospitals and schools for the poor, built breathtaking cathedrals, founded universities like Loyola, and worked diligently to improve their neighborhoods. And of course, the Irish brought St. Patrick’s Day to Chicago, with parades, music, and dancing. 

In other words, like all Americans, the Chicago Irish were a mixed bag.

No group of outsiders is perfect. (If they were, they’d have trouble assimilating in America.) No immigration policy can be built upon morally flawless immigrants. But in the 1850’s, and again in the 1930’s, and again in the 1950’s, white Protestant Americans made a scapegoat of the predominantly Catholic Irish. 

The Know Nothings political party organized around xenophobia. Early Klan publications targeted the Irish, spouting, “Drop not your fiery cross but carry it over vale and hill till pagan Roman Catholicism is expelled from our fair and free American life forever.” One illustration pictured a thousand hooded figures with a burning cross driving St. Patrick out of America.

Conspiracy plots around Irish Catholicism multiplied. Rumors spread that the Pope was going to invade America, that nuns were abducted women held against their will, that the Irish were all violent and drunk, that foreigners had poured into the country for the purpose of changing America.

Congressman Henry Winter Davis claimed voter fraud, warning, “Foreign allies have decided the government of the country — men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election. … In the fierce struggle for supremacy, men have forgotten the ban which the Republic puts on the intrusion of religious influence on the political arena.”

Catholics, Davis said, had better not bring their religion to the polls. “These influences have brought vast multitudes of foreign-born citizens to the polls, ignorant of American interests, without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote on American affairs.” Davis refused to believe the Irish could ever be truly American.

Why St. Patrick Matters Today

If this all sounds like the last few elections, that’s because we’re pretty consistent as a nation. America is an oxymoron, a collection of foreigners who periodically distrust foreigners. 

We welcome immigrants when it suits us economically. We turn on immigrants when it suits us politically. Our doors opened for Chinese laborers to build railroads and work goldmines in 1850, then closed in 1880 with the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chicago handed the Irish shovels and mops in 1845, and handed them the Immigration Act in 1929. 

More recently, Americans employed underpaid, undocumented fruit pickers and construction workers, then called for religious bans and higher walls when it became politically expedient to target outsiders.

Given that we are all, bar the Native population, outsiders in the U.S., the standard generally boils down to how recently you’ve arrived. Descendents of Scotch-Irish colonials looked down upon Potato Famine émigrés. Today, second- and third-generation immigrants often support strict border enforcement policies and deportation of the undocumented.

In Miami, for example, Venezuelan-Americans by and large supported President Trump in the 2024 election. The first wave of Venezuelans, in the 80’s, tended to arrive by airplane equipped with college degrees and robust bankrolls. The latest arrivals have most often cut their way through the “green hell” of the Darien Gap, fleeing cartel kidnappings and a government rapidly disappearing its dissidents. 

Due to the horrific condition they left behind, many of today’s Venezuelans were given temporary protected status by the U.S. government and told to wait for their case to be heard.

Now, as Daniel saw happen in Babylon and the Irish diaspora saw in Chicago, the political winds have shifted. Immigrants who went through the prescribed process and paid the requisite fees are being deported. Others have been incarcerated, at an enormous profit for the private prisons contracting with ICE.

Others, refugees who came in through a rigid vetting process after waiting decades in camps, have been abruptly cut off from the aid they were promised. It’s a terrifying moment to be a non-citizen in the U.S. As Lara d’Entremont writes in Common Good of another displaced group, “In one move, their homes, lives, and rights had gone up in smoke.” Congolese refugee pastor Joseph encourages his countrymen, counseling patience and faith. “You do not need to envy others. … The way up is down.”

Realistically, though, in this political climate, the government will not be fulfilling its promises to refugees and legal immigrants. As it has done for millennia, the church will need to pick up the slack. 

And it already is. Here in Chicago — where one out of five residents were born outside the U.S. — I see the church in action. I think of friends like Amanda and Eric, who experience the wide family of God as they host newly arrived refugees with Christian resettlement agency World Relief. Neighbors volunteer their time to help migrant families navigate our school system. Burmese moms I’m friends with remind me God was with them in the camps, and he’ll be with them here too. Chicagoland pastors, bishops, and Christian aid workers advocate fiercely for justice to be done.

To The Father of the Foreigner

To whom can the desperate turn when their home country is in flames and their host country abandons them? To the Father of the foreigner.

We would do well to heed their fate.

For every Christian is an exile. We are the diaspora of God’s Kingdom, first and utterly loyal to him, then tending to the welfare of the various nation-states in which we find ourselves. Like Patrick’s, our primary citizenship is not with the land in which we were born. It is with the newly converted martyrs and the living family of Christ. It is with those in underground Chinese seminaries and bombed out Burmese churches; it is with Venezuelan brothers praying for safety and with Burmese sisters, despite all they have seen, choosing to trust God still. 

Perhaps your St. Patrick’s Day holds corned beef and Guinness, or leprechaun coloring pages and chocolate gold coins. As for me, I’ll be on an iron bridge somewhere, watching the Chicago River turn fluorescent green, then head home before the roads get too boozy.

Whatever the celebration, let’s remember St. Patrick’s example. Like him, may we listen to the Spirit’s voice. May we live simply in a land of excess, share the gospel despite cultural pushback, and fight for the vulnerable regardless of national or political affinity. May we measure mercy with the cup we wish used for ourselves, remembering that we too are exiles.