You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Hello, and welcome to Catholic Saints.

Today we are talking to Dr. Elizabeth Klein.

Thank you for being here, Dr. Klein.

Thanks for having me.

Yes, and today we were talking about St. Patrick.

He is a beloved saint of many people.

What do we need to know about him?

Well, St. Patrick is a patristic saint.

So he falls into my favorite time period, which is one reason I wanted to talk about him.

Tell us, what is the patristic period, please?

So the patristic period means you will debate when it ends, but basically it's somewhere

from like the year 200 to the year six or 700, depending on how you decide to break it out.

When someone says early church father, that's the area.

Yeah, that's the period they're talking about.

St. Patrick, early church father.

He's an early church father.

Okay.

And there's a lot of sort of legendary material surrounding St. Patrick and lots of famous

stories, but I thought it would be really awesome to talk about kind of the historical

Patrick and the material that St. Patrick left us because St. Patrick actually left us a couple pieces of writing,

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