Today, we celebrate the great fifth century "Apostle of Ireland", Saint Patrick —a saint who is revered not only in the country to which he brought the Catholic Faith, but also in those many countries throughout the world which were in turn, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, evangelized in large part by Irish emigrants and missionaries.

In the Gospel for his feast we are told how Jesus “appointed seventy-two others whom he sent ahead of him in pairs to every town and place he intended to visit” (Lk 10:1). In some ways it is ironic that this is the passage selected for the feast day of a saint who, almost uniquely among the great missionary saints, single-handedly converted a whole nation from paganism to the Catholic Faith. He first came to Ireland as a captive teenage slave from Roman Britain, and he came very much alone; some years later, following priestly and episcopal ordination, he returned to the people that had enslaved him, deeply desiring to capture them for Christ, and once again he came completely alone.

Again it might appear ironic that today's Gospel contains Jesus' words: “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few” (Lk 10:2) as if there could be no harvesting without many laborers, as if the evangelization of the world were a “numbers' game”. But perhaps by the “fewness” of the laborers Jesus may also be referring to a personal lack of sanctity: Christ doesn't require multitudes to convert the world, he requires saints. Even one saint can convert a whole nation as we witness today. Pope Francis has reminded us that it is those men and women whose hearts are filled with the fire of the Holy Spirit —as Patrick's was— who will begin a “new chapter of evangelization full of fervor, joy, generosity, courage, boundless love and attraction!”