It was preserved in a few places, including the Book of Armagh.
Patrick, his letter seeking the release of slaves was not widely circulated. A 2014 report from the organization Walk Free estimated that almost 36 million people worldwide suffer some form of slavery, with 61,000 people held in slave conditions in the United States.Īs for St. In December 2014 major religious leaders including Pope Francis signed a joint declaration at the Vatican urging the eradication of modern slavery. Patrick is a patron saint, the militant Islamist group Boko Haram became infamous for the April 2014 abductions of several hundred girls from a school in the country’s northeast. Patrick must have felt “the tragedy of seeing these people newly saved from damnation by baptism, and (then) taken away into slavery.” In his letter he wrote that Irish raiders once took him captive and slaughtered the men and women servants of his father’s household.
The plea is all the more poignant because St. Patrick said he did not know what grieved him more: those who were slain, those who were captured, or the enslavers themselves – “those whom the devil so deeply ensnared.” Patrick intended to shame the fifth-century general whose raiding soldiers the saint declared to be “blood-stained with the blood of innocent Christians, whose numbers I have given birth to in God and confirmed in Christ.” He denounced those who “divide out defenseless baptized women like prizes.” In his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, St. However, he also spent several years as a slave, and once issued a heartfelt plea on behalf of girls and boys abducted into slavery. Among the most popular saints today, Saint Patrick was a bishop and missionary to Ireland.
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