The dates of Patricks life cannot be fixed with certainty. He was active as a missionary in Ireland. When he was about 16, he was captured from his home in Great Britain, and taken as a SLAVE to Ireland and worked as a shepherd, where he lived for six years before escaping and returning to his family. After a vision where the Irishmen said We ask thee, boy, come and walk among us once more,, he returned to northern and western Ireland. By the seventh century, he had already come to be revered as the patron saint of Ireland. Saint Patricks Day is observed on 17 March, the date of his death. It is celebrated inside and outside Ireland as a religious and cultural holiday. In the dioceses of Ireland, it is both a solemnity and a holy day of obligation; it is also a celebration of Ireland itself. There St. Patricks Day is considered a day of holy obligation. In fact, until the 1970s the bars in Dublin were closed on March 17th. St. Patrick uses shamrock in an illustrative parable Legend (dating to 1726, according to the OED) credits St. Patrick with teaching the Irish about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity by showing people the shamrock, a three-leafed plant, using it to illustrate the Christian teaching of three persons in one God. For this reason, shamrocks are a central symbol for St Patricks Day. St. Patricks British origins and the fact that the Celtic Christian church structure he founded in Ireland stayed beyond the control of Rome for centuries, puts him down as a staunch Protestant even before the Reformation.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 13:56:06 +0000
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