Since St. Patrick's Day has such cultural importance in the United States, it seems appropriate to focus on that saint today, even though we can only commemorate him on this Lenten weekday. We mostly have to celebrate the Mass of the Lenten weekday. We were just able to use the prayer for him.
He was probably born about 385, and he gives us some biographical details about himself in the confession that he left as a legacy to his Church. His father, Calpurnius, was a landowner and a member of the local council or senate. Calpurnius was also a deacon. He was the son of Potitus, a priest. Both of them probably entered the clergy late in life. At the time, it was a way of avoiding taxes, and it's men who owned a lot of land, or well, owned some land. Some land, anyway, you know, taxes were a burden on them.
If, on the other hand, they were truly motivated by the love of God in entering the clergy, it did not rub off on Patrick, who says that he grew up not knowing the living God. He may have been nominally Christian, but he was only interested in enjoying life. Although his family could have paid for an education for him, he never got an education. In his teenage years, perhaps when he was 15, he committed some grave sin. Weak against temptation, he did in an hour, something that he would regret for the rest of his life. He was now a slave of the devil, and soon he would be the slave of a man.
When he was 16, he was walking on some land that belonged to his father when he was abducted by raiders. He writes, "I was taken into captivity to Ireland with many thousands of people, and deservedly so, because we turned away from God and did not keep His commandments and did not obey our priests, who used to remind us of our salvation." Like Daniel in the first reading, he confesses his sins in the sins of his people.
St. Patrick's earliest biographers, who wrote two centuries after his death, say that the saint was the slave of a druid near Slemish in Northern Ireland. He spent the next six years herding sheep, living out of doors, and suffering from hunger and inadequate clothing. As the Jews captive in Babylon turned to God and became faithful, so did St. Patrick in the land of his captivity. Need made him turn to God in prayer, and his life as a shepherd gave him much time to pray. He would say as many as a hundred prayers a day.
He writes, “I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and I felt no harm, and there was no sloth in me, as I now see because the spirit in me was then fervent.
When the time of his purification was coming to an end, he heard a voice in his sleep telling him to fast, for soon he would be leaving. Not long after this, a voice said to him, “See, your ship is ready.” So he fled. 
He was guided by God on a journey of about 200 miles, from the far north of Ireland to the far south, through places that he had never been before. And when he arrived, the ship had been set afloat to prepare it for departure. Given the distance, he must have gone to somewhere around Wexford or Waterford, a logical place to launch a ship making its way to the continent. He said he would pay for his passage, evidently trusting in providence or perhaps in his family's money.
At first, the captain didn't want to take this stranger, but the crew changed his mind. They were pagans, but St. Patrick hoped that he would be able to lead them to Christ somehow. The ship was carrying Irish racehounds to the continent. The crossing to Gaul took three days, and when they arrived, they had to travel through deserted lands for weeks without seeing anyone.
It was probably around 407. In that year, Gaul was first devastated by the Vandals, a Germanic people. And then suffered from the soldiers of the usurper Constantine III. So when they got there, they didn't find the inhabited villages like they expected, but they found a devastated countryside. It was hard to find food. When they were overcome with hunger, the captain said, "Tell me, Christian, you say that your God is great and all-powerful. Why then do you not pray for us?" St. Patrick replied, "Be truly converted with all your heart, to the Lord my God, because nothing is impossible for Him, that this day He may send you food on your way until you be satisfied." They accepted and soon found a herd of pigs on the road.
They stopped for two days, eating until they had recovered their strength and also feeding the hounds, which had gotten quite thin. They traveled after that ten more days, supplied by providence with food, fire, and dry weather, until they finally met people on the 28th night after they had landed. 
A few years later, St. Patrick finally returned home. His parents welcomed him with joy and asked him to never leave them again. 
But he was now a servant of God, as St. Paul had a vision in the night of a man from Macedonia asking him to come over and help them. So St. Patrick had a vision in the night of an Irishman who brought letters asking him to come help them. Other mystical experiences followed, and eventually, St. Patrick obeyed the call over the objections of his relatives, who didn't want him to endanger himself. 
Before he could teach the faith, he had to study it, and so he went back to Gaul. He was formed in the Church or Auxerre under the bishop St. Germanus. There he was ordained a deacon. In 429, St. Palladius, a native of Gaul, who was Pope Saint Celestine the First's archdeacon, recommended to the Pope to send St. Germanus to Britain, because Pelagianism was reviving there, and something had to be done about this. When St. Germanus carried out this mission, he found that there were scattered Christian communities in Ireland, that having no clergy of their own looked to the clergy of Britain. And it would be better for them to have a bishop of their own. And so St. Germanus proposed St. Patrick be given this position, but he was passed over due to his poor education and to that sin that he had committed as a teenager, whatever it was.
So in 431, the Pope instead consecrated St. Palladius Bishop and sent him to Ireland, where he's said to have established three churches in the south. St. Patrick and a priest set out for Ireland the following year, but during the journey, they learned that St. Palladius had already died, so they went back to Auxerre. St. Patrick was then consecrated bishop and went to Ireland. There he spent about 30 years evangelizing the isle. He concentrated his efforts on the princes, knowing that if they converted, their subjects would follow their example. He paid strong resistance from the Druids, who didn't want to lose the power that they had from magic, from paganism, and also faced opposition from some members of the ruling class, particularly the older members. 
He knew that his mission could end in martyrdom, but he was not afraid to give his life. In 439, he was given three other bishops to assist him. As the years passed, he increasingly relied on native clergy, mostly recruited from among the local nobility. He seems to have begun in the north, where he'd been enslaved. Here we see true Christian love of enemies, which works for their salvation. Then he spread the gospel to the west, the southwest, and finally the southeast, where there had already been Christian communities before St. Palladius. It was in the north that he eventually fixed his primatial see at Armagh.
St. Patrick transmitted his own love of monasticism to the Irish, so he writes that not only did they become a people of the Lord, a wondrous work of the grace of God, but also sons and daughters of the kings of the Irish are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ. Speaking of virgins, he adds, "not that their fathers agree with them. No, they often even suffer persecution and undeserved reproaches from their parents, and yet their number is ever increasing." According to a 7th-century tradition, St. Patrick died at Saul in Ulster on March 17, 461.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.