The Real St Patrick

In our modern times, religion continues to be systematically stripped from our governments, schools, and even our history. To many, Christmas is all about Santa Claus and Easter about bunny rabbits and eggs. Likewise, St Patrick’s Day, celebrated annually on March 17, is now about wearing green and gold, shamrocks, the luck of the Irish, leprechauns, and finding the nearest Irish pub. While it’s a fun celebration, particularly for Irish nationals and Irish immigrants worldwide, its true meaning and origin has been minimized or even completely forgotten by many. One of the largest St Patrick’s Day sites on the web devotes almost its entire front page to the various secular festivities. It offers three vanilla sentences to St Patrick himself, with a link for more information (this is still better than the official Dublin Site, which, along with many others, don’t even mention the saint at all). Finally, the last sentence on the page reads “Being a religious holiday as well, many Irish attend mass, where March 17th is the traditional day for offering prayers for missionaries worldwide before the serious celebrating begins”. So, the true meaning of the holiday has been reduced to an afterthought, an “as well” to be dispensed of quickly so that the serious celebration can begin.

Of course, the holiday wasn’t always thought of in this way. St Patrick’s Day began solely as a Christian holiday to pay tribute the patron saint and missionary to Ireland, marked by prayers for spiritual renewal and international missionaries. It became a saint’s official feast day in the early seventeenth century, but like most other religious holidays, it gradually became more secularized. The first St Patrick’s Day parade was organized by the Irish Society of Boston in 1737, with the first Ireland parade held in Dublin in 1931.

In the 1990’s the Irish government created the St Patrick’s Festival, a marketing group charged with using the holiday to promote Ireland and its culture. The first festival was held on March 17, 1996, then expanding each year. In 2009, the festival had grown to five days with an attendance of almost 700,000 people.

Read the entire The Real St Patrick article, including a short bio of the patron saint, and how his work lives on today.