Happy St Patrick's Day.....

Well, so says the Roman Catholic Church. According to church rules, no saints days can be celebrated during Holy Week, between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. Because Easter is so early this year, St Patrick's traditional celebration day, 17 March, falls the day after Palm Sunday, therefore the Bishop of Rome has decided that St Patrick's Day will fall on 14 March this year.

The Irish Government has chosen to ignore this and the country's traditional public holiday and celebrations will still take place on 17 March. Most people in Ireland don't seem to be taking much notice either.

The decision seems to have caused more rows on the other side of the Atlantic, where Bishops in the US and Canada have been urging people to move their celebrations away from Holy Week.

In Savannah, Georgia, the Bishop has persuaded the organisers of the annual parade to move it to the 14th. In Ohio, the parade organisers told their Bishop where to go and insisted on holding the parade on 17 March. As a result, the local Order of Hibernians is boycotting the parade and holding its own celebration today.

Parades in Philadelphia and Milwaukee have also been shifted but those in most other US cities are sticking to the traditional date.

St Patrick's Day may be an official celebration of the Welshman who brought Christianity to Ireland but it has become more of a folk festival and a celebration of Irish culture, albeit a cliched stereotypical version. Like many church celebrations, it probably began as a pagan rite of spring anyway. Whatever its origins, it seems that the Catholic Church no longer has sole ownership of the St Patrick's Day festival.

I doubt that the Oirish theme pubs in the UK will shift their St Patrick's Day celebrations to this evening. They can get enough idiots in to drink overpriced watery Guinness on any Friday night but Monday will be a bonus.

Update: Seems I was wrong about Ireland ignoring Papa Ratzi's instructions. According to Mark at Slugger O'Toole, some Catholic schools in West Belfast are insisting that pupils attend class on the 17th, as they don't recognise the day as being St Patrick's Day, despite it being a public holiday in Northern Ireland. 

Comments

[GZ Expat]

Fair enough...how about I start now and I won't stop until the 17th.

Cheers!

[GZ Expat]

Hey...guess what...you aren't blocked in China anymore. You are not nearly as subversive as you used to be.

[Steve]

Bugger!

I need to start flogging those anti Olympcs t-shirts.

[Laban Tall]

Notice that the Cheltenham Festival, always timed to coincide with St Paddys because of the huge number of Irish visitors, followed Il Papa and was held this week. Gold Cup day and St Pad's coincided.

It's St Joseph's tomorrow, btw. Moved from Weds 19th.

[Monty]

I attended an Catholic school in England, and we still had school on St Pat's day. But at the start of school we would all have our shamrock pinned on by the teacher, and then we were all taken to Mass. All the statuary in the church was draped in purple shrouds throughout Lent, and there were no flowers.

Of course, come Easter Sunday, we went to the other extreme....