I wasn’t planning to write about St. Patrick’s Day or St. Patrick himself. But then this grand day of being Irish is coming up tomorrow, and it is celebrated in over a dozen countries around the world. After all, everyone loves a good party and St. Patrick’s Day has come to mean parades, funny green hats and lots of green beer. The original national holiday was established in Ireland in 1903. Of course, way before that it was a religious holiday, a feast day within the Catholic Church, and an acknowledgement of St. Patrick as the patron saint of Ireland.

You may be surprised to know that Boston and other colonial cities with sizable Irish immigrant populations had St. Patrick’s Day parades way before the War of Independence. Most Americans think of the Irish as coming to the U.S. and Canada during the Famines around the time of the Civil War, not knowing that Irish and Scottish emigrants and their descendants made up an estimated one-third of colonists at the time of the War of Independence.

Most Americans also equate the Irish, Irish-Americans and particularly St. Patrick with Catholicism. When in fact, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin is only one example of Patrick as a saint within the Church of Ireland (Protestant) as well. A neighbor of mine recently tells the story of meeting a female priest in the Limerick Cathedral and questioning her about how long women were given the right to priesthood. She came back to tell her Catholic friends that The Church now allowed women to be priests. When I clarified that the Church of Ireland was not the Catholic Church she was mortified and rushed to correct her err to her friends.

You may not be surprised to know that for many years the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City was the largest St. Patrick’s celebration in the world. The Irish, however, have seen how it brings visitors to their land. Combined with the rising pride of the Celtic Tiger in the 1990s, Dublin has taken back the record of biggest of the parades and celebrations. Update on 2020’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade

So wherever you are and whatever your ethnic and religious affiliation, come celebrate the story of a man, first prisoner and then immigrant to a land that now celebrates him and those who for centuries now have paraded to remind themselves to be proud of their roots.

Slainte.