Last year, I was working at a public school in an after school program with “kids at risk” run by the YMCA near my home. When March rolled around, I told the kids I wanted to do something with them for St. Patrick’s Day. A few days later when we were cutting out shamrocks one boy asked me, “Miss Katie? Who is Patrick and why do we celebrate Patrick’s Day?”
“Can anybody else answer his question?” I asked, “Does anyone know who St. Patrick is or what St. Patrick’s day is all about?”
A couple of kids tried to answer, but it struck me that every single one referred to “Patrick.” The word “Saint” did not pass through a single pair of lips other than mine.
I had been told before not to bring up religion with any of the kids. If they asked (which they did as I often wore a Rosary around my wrist) I was to deflect their questions, saying something like, “Well this is what I believe, but you should ask your parents what they think.”
With these constraints, I found myself floundering trying to explain who “Patrick” was with no mention of religion. “Well Patrick was a man who came to Ireland many years ago to, uh . . .” Evangelize! Spread the gospel! Teach the Irish about Christ! “We associate him with shamrocks because, well . . . he used to use them as a symbol
. . .” Of the Trinity!
March 15th, 2013 | 1:24 pm
Sadly, the same is true in Ireland, where it is generally referred to as “Patrick’s Day” now as well. It has also sadly become a day in Ireland to ring in to work sick and then spend the day drinking, much like in the US. The Irish brewer Guinness have created a new holiday, “Arthur’s Day,” named after the paterfamilias of the Guinness family that is celebrated in September, exactly half a year after “Patrick’s Day.” God Save Ireland.
March 15th, 2013 | 1:39 pm
And this is precisely why we will always be despised by a dominant culture committed to avoiding any sort of judgement, discussion of good or evil, right or wrong. What St. Patrick did has no point if the culture he found in Ireland was answering the cries from the depths of the human heart. In 21st century America, we are not supposed to proclaim Jesus as The Way. Better if we behave as if there is NO Way. Yet He tells us we MUST proclaim it if we love our neighbors. There it is. What do we do? In most cultures, women lead the way in insisting on discussions of right and wrong, true or false, proper or improper. In America they are zealous in avoiding “judging”. How did we get here? This last question must go first.
March 15th, 2013 | 3:33 pm
Most people also usually say “Valentine’s Day” instead of “St. Valentine’s Day”. I don’t.
March 15th, 2013 | 5:23 pm
I have to say that I can’t recall ever having heard anyone call the day anything other than “St. Patrick’s Day.” Or to be precise, I have occasionally heard “St. Paddy’s Day,” but always with the “St.” as part of it. Valentine’s Day is different, since little is really known about the saint himself and stories associating him with love or marriage were made up after the fact to explain an association of mysterious origin. In my experience, St. Patrick’s Day is still known to be the feast of a specific person, although likely few could give any details of the saint’s life.
March 15th, 2013 | 6:06 pm
After my class in Economics this afternoon at Boston College one of my students, a Muslim from Jordan, asked me who this Patrick was that he was hearing so much about on campus. I explained he was the patron saint of Ireland, Boston, and Boston College; that he had been brought to Ireland as a captive slave boy; that he later escaped; and as an adult returned as priest and bishop and brought Christianity to the pagan Irish. I directed him to Gasson Hall on campus where he could view a large stained glass window depicting Saint Patrick on the Hill of Tara. I showed him a shamrock and told him the story that Patrick had used this common three leafed plant to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity to the High King of Ireland. I explained the doctrine of the Trinity to him, and sang a few lines of the hymn “All praise to Saint Patrick who brought to the mountains the gift of God’s faith, the sweet light of his love.” Finally, I told him he might not have received this reply if he had asked someone else on campus.
March 15th, 2013 | 7:00 pm
For what it’s worth, I googled “Patrick’s Day” and all the results on the first ten pages (after which I gave up) called it “St. Patrick’s Day” or the unabbreviated “Saint Patrick’s Day.” (In contrast, when I googled “Valentine’s Day,” almost every result on the first page did not mention the saint.)
March 15th, 2013 | 9:25 pm
I think the difference with Valentine’s is that people don’t associate it with a person named Valentine anymore, they associate it with the thing you give your sweetheart that we call a “valentine.” The average person probably doesn’t even realize that there’s an actual person named Valentine, or if they do, they don’t think much about it.
But there’s nothing called a “Patrick” that we do on St. Patrick’s Day, so people more intuitively know it’s about a person, and that person was St. Patrick.
March 16th, 2013 | 9:29 am
Well, the public schools in the Northeast solved this problem a few years ago. Instead of St. Patrick’s Day, they celebrate Shamrock Day! It’s simply explained that Ireland is filled with shamrocks, it is their”national flower” or something silly like that, and we honor all the Irish who came to the U.S. during the potato famine. I’m glad we homeschool.
March 16th, 2013 | 5:31 pm
FWIW, if (again) Google is any indication of the state of our culture, almost every result for “Shamrock Day,” in the first 20 pages of Google results” mentioned St. Patrick prominently. There were a few Pinterest pages that did not, and there was also this from Disney Junior that failed to include St. Patrick’s title in a prominent place.
March 18th, 2013 | 1:43 pm
So how did this story end? Did you just change the subject or did you go ahead and explain St Patrick’s Day despite the injunction not to mention anything of religion?
March 18th, 2013 | 2:21 pm
Yes, I did go on to explain who St. Patrick was with the required qualification that “this is what Catholics believe.” I additionally pointed out, as 49 out of the 50 kids in the program came from Mexican families, that Catholicism was deeply rooted in the Mexican culture, “but you should go home and ask your parents what they think.”
Also, to respond to some other comments, I realize that it is still quite normal to refer to the holiday as St. Patrick’s Day. My concern is that this norm may not be carrying over to the next generation. We have to be careful that the tide of extreme political correctness does not wash our kids away with it.
March 18th, 2013 | 4:48 pm
Perhaps a wise constraint: I am not aware of any evidence that St. Patrick used the shamrock to explain the Trinity. The first associations between St. Patrick and a shamrock appear on coins from 1675. The first explanation of this association, from 1681, suggests that eating a shamrock promotes fresh breath. The first documentation relating the shamrock to the Trinity does not appear until 1726.
In short, it seems that the relationship between St. Patrick and the shamrock is a folktale, no different than the story about driving snakes from Ireland.
March 20th, 2013 | 2:30 pm
To Katherine Infantine:
Sounds like a happy ending to this story then.
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