Every year I feel compelled to write something on St. Patrick’s Day, and every year I struggle to find something different to say about St. Patrick. If you read the previous entry, you’ll notice it kind of repeats the “regular stuff” that most of us already know about St. Patrick. So I figured that I owed it to both my readers, and myself, to come up with some new material. Here’s what some serious extensive research has uncovered.
Saint Patrick is well known both in Ireland and throughout the world, but few know that he is believed to have transformed the Welsh King Vereticus into a wolf.
According to legend, St. Patrick once punished the Welsh King Vereticus by transforming him into a wolf. While St. Patrick was in Ireland he became so disgusted with the wickedness of certain tribes that would howl like wolves when he tried to preach Christianity to them, he cursed them and condemned them to become werewolves. The spell fell on the poor tribesmen and caused them to turn into werewolves every seven years. They would stay in wolf form for seven years, then once the years passed they would turn back into humans, but only for another seven years, then it was back to wolf all over again. It was a horrible vicious cycle. Seven years as a wolf, seven as a human, seven as a wolf, seven as a human… until they died.
But during their seven years as a werewolf they weren’t denied the sacraments of the Church. In 1191 a man named Giraidus Cambrensis recorded the testimony of a priest that swore he once gave Holy Communion to a werewolf. Throughout the years, travelers to Ireland insisted that they had met entire families of werewolves and that they had even seen some people transform into wolves. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, Ireland was known as Wolfland.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
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