Article content The Catholic calendar is rife with saints, but there is one whom everybody knows, because heâs the only saint to make it into the secular Western calendar. Every year on March 17, people all around the world fete the fifth-century bishop Patrick, or Padraig in Gaelic, with green beer. His story is also well-known, possibly the best-known next to that of Saint Nicholas. Patrick was born in 373 in either Scotland or England, to an upper-class Romano-British Christian family. His father was a deacon, and his grandfather a priest. (The requirement that clergy be unmarried only happened later in the history of the Catholic church, and wasnât actually enforced until the twelfth century.) He was kidnapped by pirates when he was about 16 and sold into slavery in Ireland, where he tended sheep for his master. He felt the humiliation of his position keenly, but it was during his slavery that he came to believe deeply in Christianity. He once said that during his captivity he prayed sometimes a hundred times a day.