Saint Patrick's Day was made an official Christian feast day in the early 17th century and is observed by the Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion (especially the Church of Ireland), the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Lutheran Church.
The day commemorates Saint Patrick and the arrival of Christianity in Ireland, as well as celebrating the heritage and culture of the Irish in general. Celebrations generally involve public parades and festivals, céilithe, and the wearing of green attire or shamrocks. Christians also attend church services and the Lenten restrictions on eating and drinking alcohol are lifted for the day, which has encouraged and propagated the holiday's tradition of alcohol consumption.
Saint Patrick's Day is a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the British Overseas Territory of Montserrat. It is also widely celebrated by the Irish diaspora around the world, especially in Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand.
Much of what is known about Saint
Patrick comes from the Declaration, which was allegedly written by
Patrick himself. It is believed that he was born in Roman Britain in
the fourth century, into a wealthy Romano-British family. His father
was a deacon and his grandfather was a priest in the Christian
church.
According to the Declaration, at the
age of sixteen, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and taken as a
slave to Gaelic Ireland. It says that he spent six years there
working as a shepherd and that during this time he "found God".
The Declaration says that God told Patrick to flee to the coast,
where a ship would be waiting to take him home. After making his way
home, Patrick went on to become a priest.
According to tradition, Patrick
returned to Ireland to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity. The
Declaration says that he spent many years evangelizing in the
northern half of Ireland and converted "thousands".
Tradition holds that he died on 17 March and was buried at
Downpatrick. Over the following centuries, many legends grew up
around Patrick and he became Ireland's foremost saint.
In pagan Ireland, three was a significant number and the Irish had many triple deities, a fact that may have aided St Patrick in his evangelizating efforts when he "held up a shamrock and discoursed on the Christian Trinity".
Patricia Monaghan holds that shamrocks were not significant in any way to the Irish before the arrival of Saint Patrick, although Jack Santino speculates that they may have represented the regenerative powers of nature; nevertheless he states that shamrocks today have their " meaning in a Christian context", as icons of St Patrick often depict the saint "with a cross in one hand and a sprig of shamrocks in the other".
The colour green has been associated with Ireland since at least the 1640s, when the green harp flag was used by the Irish Catholic Confederation. Green ribbons and shamrocks have been worn on St Patrick's Day since at least the 1680s. The Friendly Brothers of St Patrick, an Irish fraternity founded in about 1750, adopted green as its color.
However, when the Order of St. Patrick—an Anglo-Irish chivalric order—was founded in 1783 it adopted blue as its color, which led to blue being associated with St Patrick. During the 1790s, green would become associated with Irish nationalism, due to its use by the United Irishmen. This was a republican organization—led mostly by Protestants but with many Catholic members—who launched a rebellion in 1798 against British rule.
The phrase "wearing of the green" comes from a song of the same name, which laments United Irishmen supporters being persecuted for wearing green. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the color green and its association with St Patrick's Day grew.
Saint Patrick's feast day, as a kind of national day, was already being celebrated by the Irish in Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries. In later times, he became more and more widely known as the patron of Ireland. Saint Patrick's feast day was finally placed on the universal liturgical calendar in the Catholic Church due to the influence of Waterford-born Franciscan scholar Luke Wadding in the early 1600s.
Saint Patrick's Day thus became a holy day of obligation for Roman Catholics in Ireland. It is also a feast day in the Church of Ireland. The church calendar avoids the observance of saints' feasts during certain solemnities, moving the saint's day to a time outside those periods. St Patrick's Day is occasionally affected by this requirement, when 17 March falls during Holy Week.
This happened in 1940, when Saint Patrick's Day was observed on 3 April to avoid it coinciding with Palm Sunday, and again in 2008, where it was officially observed on 14 March. St Patrick's Day will not fall within Holy Week again until 2160.
However, the secular celebration is always held on 17 March.
In 1903, St Patrick's Day became an official public holiday in Ireland. This was thanks to the Bank Holiday (Ireland) Act 1903, an act of the United Kingdom Parliament introduced by Irish Member of Parliament James O'Mara.
O'Mara later introduced the law that required that pubs and bars be closed on 17 March after drinking got out of hand, a provision that was repealed in the 1970s. The first St Patrick's Day parade held in the Irish Free State was held in Dublin in 1931 and was reviewed by the then Minister of Defense Desmond Fitzgerald.
In the mid-1990s the government of the Republic of Ireland began a campaign to use St Patrick's Day to showcase Ireland and its culture. The government set up a group called St Patrick's Festival, with the aims:
The first St Patrick's Festival was held on 17 March 1996. In 1997, it became a three-day event, and by 2000 it was a four-day event. By 2006, the festival was five days long; more than 675,000 people attended the 2009 parade.
Overall 2009's five-day festival saw close to 1million visitors, who took part in festivities that included concerts, outdoor theater performances, and fireworks.[30] Skyfest forms the centerpiece of the festival.
The topic of the 2004 St Patrick's Symposium was "Talking Irish", during which the nature of Irish identity, economic success, and the future were discussed. Since 1996, there has been a greater emphasis on celebrating and projecting a fluid and inclusive notion of "Irishness" rather than an identity based around traditional religious or ethnic allegiance.
The week around St Patrick's Day usually involves Irish language speakers using more Irish during Seachtain na Gaeilge ("Irish Language Week").
Christian leaders in Ireland have expressed concern about the secularization of St Patrick's Day. In The Word magazine's March 2007 issue, Fr. Vincent Twomey wrote, "It is time to reclaim St Patrick's Day as a church festival." He questioned the need for "mindless alcohol-fueled revelry" and concluded that "it is time to bring the piety and the fun together."
As well as Dublin, many other cities, towns, and villages in Ireland hold their own parades and festivals, including Cork, Belfast, Derry, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick, and Waterford.
The biggest celebrations outside Dublin are in Downpatrick, County Down, where Saint Patrick is rumored to be buried. In 2004, according to Down District Council, the week-long St Patrick's Festival had more than 2,000 participants and 82 floats, bands, and performers and was watched by more than 30,000 people.
The shortest St Patrick's Day parade in the world takes place in Dripsey, Cork. The parade lasts just 100 yards and travels between the village's two pubs.
I'll Drink To That...
No comments:
Post a Comment