An Ode To Saint Patrick

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever. -- Sigmund Freud (about the Irish)

In Ireland, the inevitable never happens and the unexpected constantly occurs. -- Sir John Pentland Mahaffy

Ireland is a fruitful mother of genius, but a barren nurse. -- John Boyle O'Reilly

St. Patrick's Day is an enchanted time -- a day to begin transforming winter's dreams into summer's magic! -- Adrienne Cook

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Okay, so I didn’t really write an “ode”. If I had, that would mean that I possessed poetic talent, which certainly isn’t the case. I did write a really depressing poem once that was published in my high school paper, but I think the type of motivation I had at the time had little to do with talent and more to do with adolescent angst. So although not an “ode” to St. Patty, I have come up with some text in honor of this sprightly saint.

Is he really a saint? Well, yes. According to this web site, though, “he has nothing to do with green food or leprechauns.” Not only that, but he was not even Irish. In fact, he was born in Scotland, but wasn’t even a Scot. He was a Roman; a child of parents present in Scotland as part of a Roman colony. Naturally, when I read this I was a little disappointed. Read on:


When Patrick was sixteen years old, Irish warriors raided Scotland and carried captives back to Ireland to be slaves. Patrick was among them. His head was shaved and he was put to work as a shepherd for an Irish Druidic high priest named Milchu. He must have been very scared and lonely.


The website, obviously religious in nature, then goes over the nuts and bolts of St. Patrick’s pious life. Prayed hundreds of times a day, blah blah, God spoke to him, yadda yadda, he converted all of Ireland to Christianity, etc…. Wait a second. What got me at this point was the reference to the fact that he performed this major religious conversion to an entire country of people. A country that before, had practiced religion primarily as Druids.

Now, it is mentioned that St. Patrick performed numerous miracles. I guess that got the Druids attention. Maybe they were thinking “trees can’t do THAT”, and kind of went along with the whole package of goods. St. Patrick even catered to their love of nature worship by using a shamrock, with its three leaves, to explain the concept of the trinity (according to the above mentioned website). Hook line and sinker, Ireland was entirely Christian by the time St. Patrick died in 461 AD.

This research made me reconsider my subject. Maybe I should have just performed it on leprechauns or the origin of corned beef and cabbage. What about the whole “leading the snakes out of Ireland” thing?

Further internet delving has turned up the following from http://www.americancatholic.org/:

He didn't chase the snakes out of Ireland and he may never have plucked a shamrock to teach the mystery of the Trinity. Yet St. Patrick well deserves to be honored by the people of Ireland—and by downtrodden and excluded people everywhere.

Yeah, okay. Well to be honest with you, I consider those that are not given religious freedom and forced into conversion by shamrock trickery to be downtrodden, but whatever. Not only that, but this website dispels the whole snake thing and the shamrock deal.



Despite my best efforts to reject St. Patrick for being just another meddling reformer/missionary/goody-two-shoes, however, reading further about him reveals that he was one of the first proponents of anti-slavery sentiment. This is primarily due to the fact that he was a slave himself. Not even the papacy at that time found fault with slavery, and let us remember also that his stance on this issue took place before the Middle Ages. St. Patrick was progressive. How about that?

The slavery issue does not stand alone in the vein of progression with St. Patrick’s history. He was also a staunch believer in the strength of women. He admired the fairer sex for their courage and tenacity, even writing about it in depth much to the chagrin of his drinking buddies (okay, I made that up. The guy probably never touched a drop in his life. He was too busy trying to convert a bunch of pagans. The pagans were probably drunk, though. I bet much mead was imbibed during many a conversion in St. Pat’s heyday.).

So let’s get it all straight: St. Patrick never chased away snakes. Odds are, the shamrock has little to do with the trinity, but I could’ve told ya that. He didn’t minister to a mystical land of leprechauns, but instead to a bunch of tree huggers that liked to enslave foreigners. I’m guessing that his status as a saint didn’t come because he was a heavy drinker. What about the color green? Pinching someone for not wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day? Corned beef and cabbage?



Well, I am only left to accept the fact that like many saints that are celebrated – to include St. Nicholas and St. Valentine – St. Patrick’s life story has been modified to fit what we believe to be an appropriate celebration of his impact on history. I don’t know why the leprechauns come into play. I am not completely certain, either, about the color green, the copious beer drinking, or that pesky weed – the shamrock.

What I do know is that I have always adored St. Patrick’s Day. Since grade school, I have loved the color theme and the festive nature of all things Irish (as they were presented to me in the form of handouts made by my teachers depicting pots o’ gold and the like that we were supposed to color with reckless abandon – “HEY! Quite hoggin’ the green!”). No one ever gave me a St. Patrick handout to color. I wonder if he would have been depicted as a slave or as the bishop that he turned out to be. No matter, I never got one. And in any case, the leprechauns would have looked a little out of place in a picture of the saint himself administering “The Word” to the Druids.

So I am left with the current cultural significance of St. Patrick’s Day: the beer, the shillelagh, the shamrock, the pot o’ gold, the beer, the leprechauns, the color green, the beer, the corned beef and hash, the luck o’ the Irish, and the beer. Did I mention the beer?

Raise your glass this weekend and drink to the legend himself – despite his complete non-affiliation with this pagan holiday.