Today is St. Patrick’s Day and time for my annual St. Patrick’s Day blog. Obviously I’ll probably wind up repeating stuff from past years, because there’s only so much one can know, or not know, about a day that is celebrated annually. But if you’re like me and don’t remember what i wrote last year, it won’t matter….
I though this year we’d focus on some of the things that are not true about St. Patrick’s Day, such as….
St. Patrick wasn’t Irish — even though he’s the patron saint of Ireland, he was born in Scotland. His real name was Palladius. He was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Ireland when he was a teenager. Later he escaped, went back to Scotland and joined a monastery. He returned to Ireland as a missionary, where he lived for 40 years.
A saint’s feast day marks the day that they died — not their birthday. 2021 is the 1,560th anniversary of St. Patrick’s death.
Even though green is the color most associated with Ireland, it’s not St. Patrick’s color. Members of the Order of St. Patrick used blue as their symbolic color.
Many St. Patrick’s Day traditions that we assume are traditionally Irish actually originated in the United States. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade occurred in New York City in 1782 — it became an annual event in 1848. It wasn’t until 1931 that Ireland held an official St. Patrick’s Day parade. And the drinking… alcohol consumption was not a staple of the holiday in Ireland. In fact, until the 1960s, pubs in Ireland were closed on March 17, in observance of the religious holiday.
Legend has it that St. Patrick gave a rousing sermon that sent all of Ireland’s snakes slithering off into the ocean. Most historians think Ireland owes its lack of snakes to the Ice Age and geography, not St. Patrick. The slipping glaciers of the last Ice Age left Ireland surrounded by water, making it impossible for snakes to reach it. Before then, the land that would become Ireland was far too cold for the cold-blooded creatures to survive.
St. Patrick’s Day is a feast day for a Catholic saint — best known for converting native Irish people to Christianity. Until the 1700s, it was a day on the Catholic calendar in observance of a saint important to, and popular in Ireland — and not much anywhere else. In Ireland, Catholics honored St. Patrick with prayer and quiet reflection. St. Patrick’s Day, as we know it today, started in America in the late 19th and early 20th century, when the large numbers of newly arrived Irish immigrants began using the day as a way to celebrate their Irish heritage.
The process of officially canonizing saints didn’t become common practice in the Church until long after St. Patrick’s death. During his lifetime, “saint” was not an official title bestowed only on those whom the Pope deemed worthy. It was more of a general title that would be assigned to people who lived especially holy lives or performed acts of martyrdom.
Even though he gets credit for it, it’s unlikely that St. Patrick introduced Christianity to Ireland. In the fifth century AD, the Pope sent Palladius to Ireland with the mission of preaching to “the Irish believing in Christ.” So he didn’t introduce Christianity to Ireland — he really just helped it along. As far as St. Patrick using the shamrock as a symbol to demonstrate Christianity…. he may well have used it to represent the Holy Trinity, but the shamrock already had symbolic significance in pagan traditions. Green was an important color to paganism because it represented rebirth, and the number three was as much a staple of paganism as it is of Christianity — many pagan religions have three primary gods.
There is really no relationship between St. Patrick’s Day and leprechauns, except they’re both Irish. However, more people don red beards and green hats on St. Patrick’s Day than on any other day of the year. Leprechauns didn’t become a staple of Irish literature until many years after St. Patrick’s death. And even though many decorations around St. Patrick’s Day show female leprechauns, traditional leprechauns are only male.
But none of this “fake news” about the day detracts from the celebration…. my favorite Irish saying is still, “I’m Irish! When I feel well I feel better than anyone, when I am in pain, I yell at the top of my lungs, and when I am dead I shall be deader than anybody.”
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!
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