Confessio (The Confession of St. Patrick)

The Confessio (often titled The Confession of St. Patrick) is one of only two short writings that survive in Patrick’s own Latin, and it is the main source for what we actually know about his life. Written late in his career as a kind of defense and testimony, it is not a polished memoir but a heartfelt, sometimes defensive account of how a man he describes as a poorly educated sinner came to spend his life as a missionary bishop in Ireland.

Patrick tells how, around the age of sixteen, he was seized from his home in Roman Britain by Irish raiders and carried off into slavery in Ireland, where he herded animals in isolation for roughly six years. In that hardship he turned to constant prayer, and he writes that a voice in his dreams eventually told him his ship was ready. He escaped, traveled a great distance to a port, and made his way back to his family.

The arc of the Confessio is the return: years later, Patrick says he was called in a vision by the “voice of the Irish” begging him to come back, and he went, this time as a Christian missionary among the very people who had enslaved him. He defends his mission against critics, gives thanks for the thousands he baptized and ordained, and frames the whole story as the work of God’s grace rather than his own ability.

Our edition puts Newport J. D. White’s 1918 translation, set from the page images, into plain modern English, with Patrick’s Bible quotations in modern wording. White’s 1918 scan is free to read on Internet Archive, linked below.

This is our edition of the two writings that survive from Saint Patrick (fifth century): the Confession, his own account of his life, written near its end, and the Letter he sent to the soldiers of the British chieftain Coroticus after they killed and enslaved his newly baptized converts. Both are complete.

The English is set from Newport J. D. White’s translation, published by the SPCK in London in 1918 and now in the public domain, checked against the page images of that printing. We then modernized it sentence by sentence, in vocabulary and in word order, so that it reads as plain modern English: “I knew not the true God” becomes “I did not know the true God.” The meaning is White’s; nothing is added or cut, and the few words he supplied in square brackets are kept wherever modern English still needs them.

Patrick quotes the Bible on almost every page. Where he quotes a verse exactly, we give it in the wording of the World English Bible (Catholic edition), a public-domain modern translation, adapted only where Patrick’s wording differs. Where his Old Latin Bible matches no modern one, we modernize White’s rendering of what Patrick wrote. White’s section numbers are kept, his references are given as notes, and his short introduction is at the back.