The Mass culminates with stealing the St. Patrick statue from the church at 3 p.m. It's blessed and then carried along a short parade route through the streets of Mt. Adams, accompanied by men wearing kilts and carrying bagpipes.

Stealing the statue has its roots in the fact that, historically, German and Irish Catholic congregants were often at odds in Cincinnati. On Mt. Adams, where Irish and German working-class families lived, there were two Catholic churches, the Church of the Holy Cross for the Irish and Immaculata Church for the Germans.

Holy Cross parish was established in 1873 to serve the Irish immigrants on the hill. Immaculata was dedicated in 1860, fulfilling a promise made to God by a fearful and distraught Archbishop John Baptist Purcell when he crossed the Atlantic on stormy, tossing seas. With a German congregation, Immaculata was part of Purcell's adroit handling of the ethnic differences in the 19th-century Cincinnati archdiocese. Read more

The hue — St Patrick's blue, a lighter shade — can still be seen on ancient Irish flags.

But the use of green on St. Patrick's Day began during the 1798 Irish Rebellion when the clover became a symbol of nationalism Read more

But as a medieval historian, I suggest that we also pause to remember another of Ireland's patron saints, the nurturing, compassionate St Brigid.

This year, following a three-year campaign by a feminist organization, herstory i.e. the Irish government finally acknowledged Brigid's importance by declaring a new national holiday on her feast day of Feb. 1.

Until now, Ireland counted her among their official three patrons, along with St Patrick and St Columcille, or Columba, but gave workers a day off only on St Patrick's Day.

So who is St Brigid?

Unlike Patrick, who came from Britain, Brigid was born in Ireland, sometime around A.D. 450, the child of a slave and a king in the province of Leinster.

Unfortunately, Brigid left no historical record of her missionary work.

Patrick wrote two letters that still exist: one a defence of his missionary career and the other a rebuke to a slave-raiding British king.

All information about Brigid comes from biographies of saints written long after she lived.

A churchman named Cogitosus was the first to write about Brigid, in about A.D. 650, or approximately 200 years after her birth.

Cogitosus recounted Brigid's many purported miracles: As a girl, she gave away the household's butter and bacon to hungry beggars and dogs, then miraculously replaced the food for her family.

Later in life, she turned a wooden column into a living tree with one touch and hung her cloak on a sunbeam.

After she founded her monastic community at Kildare and became its abbess, she also travelled, preached and was said to have cured Christians of serious debilities such as blindness and muteness, all in imitation of Christ.

While many early female saints have miracles attributed to them, few of them actively proselytized.

Cogitosus tells us that Brigid worked some other unique marvels.

She miraculously ended the unwanted pregnancy of one of her fellow sisters, "causing the foetus to disappear without coming to birth and without pain," as Cogitosus put it.

She tamed both domestic and wild animals, which was handy when her cows went astray.

She could also, according to Cogitosus, manipulate the landscape.

Once when her kinsmen were building a plank trackway through the bogs, Brigid moved a river to make it easier for them.

Instead of battling wrongdoers, she found peaceful resolutions to violent situations. Once, for example, she deterred a band of bloodthirsty murderers by making it appear as if they had committed a killing that never even happened.

Even after her death, miracles supposedly continued to occur at her shrine.

In fact, Brigid's intervention from beyond the grave helped builders gather materials to build a new and magnificent shrine for her at Kildare, or so wrote Cogitosus.

She guided an immovable boulder down a hill to her community for their new millstone.

She caused a problematic door to hang correctly.

These were minor but useful miracles - typical, I would argue, of the sensible saint.

Royal patronage for Patrick

By comparison, Patrick's earliest hagiographers, writing only decades after Cogitosus, depicted their saint in constant conflict with the "heathens" he tried to convert to Christianity.

When Patrick arrived in Ireland in the mid-fifth century, he seems to have bullied Ireland's most powerful king into baptism, but only after duelling and then miraculously killing the king's chief druids.

In hagiography, druids were the Irish and British versions of pagan wizards.

After watching the druids perish, King Loegaire Mac Néill decided "It is better to believe than die," wrote Patrick's hagiographer, Muirchú around A.D. 700.

Also according to Muirchú, Patrick routinely cursed unbelievers.

When one evildoer tried to lure Patrick into an ambush by pretending to be ill, Patrick supposedly caused the patient to drop dead.

Patrick was always larger than life in these early accounts, baptizing hundreds of souls at a time.

Around the same time that these hagiographers worked, Brigid's cult centre at Kildare became one of the wealthiest and most powerful religious communities in Ireland.

Cogitosus wrote that Kildare was "the head of virtually all the Irish churches and occupies the first place, excelling all the monasteries of the Irish.

Its jurisdiction extends over the whole land of Ireland from sea to sea."

Throughout the Middle Ages, Leinster elites continued to donate land and goods to Kildare.

They vied to place their female kinfolk as abbess of Kildare until the community closed during the 16th-century dissolution when the occupying English Protestant government of Ireland shut down all monasteries.

Kildare, however, could never match the status of Armagh, Patrick's chief church, which had the advantage of even greater royal patronage and grander donations by mightier kings.

Similarly, within the church hierarchy of medieval Europe, as in Catholicism today, Brigid could never outrank Patrick, because she was not a priest.

Only priests could baptize, ordain, perform the sacrament of the Eucharist and give last rites.

Women were not, and still are not, allowed to become ordained priests in Roman Catholicism.

In the 19th century, when Irish nationalists sought a symbol of their Catholicism and country in the budding fight for independence, they chose the missionary bishop and founder of Armagh.

A national holiday was declared in 1903 to honour St Patrick.

In the meantime, Brigid's church at Kildare had fallen into ruin. It was only in 1875 that it was rebuilt by the Protestant Church of Ireland.

Brigid's devotees resigned themselves to Kildare's secondary status as "one of the two pillars of the Kingdom, along with Patrick the pre-eminent," as one medieval hymnist put it.

This is despite a tale, circulated by a ninth-century hagiographer, that Brigid was accidentally ordained as a bishop — apparently, Bishop Mel was so "intoxicated with the grace of God" as he prepared to veil Brigid that he read the wrong prayers over her.

"This virgin alone in Ireland … will hold the episcopal ordination," Mel declared, and a column of fire shot from the saint's head. Unfortunately, other clerics refused to take the story seriously.

Brigid was venerated as "Mary of the Gael," a saint for women, shepherds, beggars, refugees and those in childbirth.

Her feast day, Feb. 1, is the same day as Imbolc, an ancient holiday celebrating the start of spring, season of fertility.

Indeed, her associations with Imbolc have long raised suspicions about the possible pre-Christian origins of her cult at Kildare.

Today, some people keep St Brigid's Day by weaving a special reed cross or visiting a holy well whose waters, blessed by Brigid, are believed to heal illness.

The Brigidine Sisters of Kildare attend their ever-burning flame for Brigid, as nuns did in the Middle Ages.

These seem like modest observances compared with the massive parades that flood the main streets of towns around the globe in the annual celebration of Patrick.

Next year on March 17, when you're wearing the green and singing "Dirty Ol' Town," take a moment to whisper thanks to St Brigid, the compassionate, sensible, native-born patron saint of Ireland, and ask if Ireland's premier patron saint should be a woman.

• Lisa Bitel is a professor of history and religion and USC's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
• First published in RNS.

Catholic tradition has it that St. Patrick drove them all off a cliff in the 5th century. Read more

He reminded those celebrating St Patrick's feast day last Friday to remember the plight of migrants.

"As Irish people, we cannot think of Patrick without acknowledging the enormous humanitarian and pastoral challenges facing growing numbers of people who find themselves displaced and without status in our world", he said. Read more.

But who was Patrick? Did he really drive the snakes out of Ireland or use the shamrock to explain the Trinity? Why should this fifth-century priest be remembered on this day?

Q: Was St. Patrick a real guy, and would he approve of green beer?

A: Yes, Patrick was a real person, but not much is known of his life. He was born in the late 300s when the Roman Empire extended to England, so he was not "really" Irish — like the vast majority of people who celebrate his day.

In his "Confessio," one of only two surviving documents attributed to him, Patrick wrote that while his father was a Christian deacon, he was not devout. At age 16, Patrick was captured by Irish marauders, carried across the Irish Sea and enslaved.

Patrick spent six years alone in the wilderness tending his master's sheep, praying constantly. "It was among foreigners that it was seen how little I was," he wrote. He began to have visions and hear voices that told him: "Look, your ship is ready."

So Patrick left his first flock and walked 200 miles to the coast. It's a pretty safe bet he would have loved a beer, green or otherwise, as he stepped into a boat bound for England.

Q: If Patrick was really British, how did he become so closely associated with the Irish?

A: Back in England, Patrick had a dream in which he heard the voice of the Irish he left behind say, "We beg you to come and walk among us once more."

Patrick took this as a sign and set out for a monastery in Gaul — that's France today — where he began his religious education. He became a priest, a deacon and finally a bishop and returned to Ireland by his mid-40s.

He created convents, monasteries and bishoprics all over Ireland, confronted tyrannical kings and converted hundreds of thousands of people.

He was so popular that when he died on March 17 the late 400's - scholars aren't sure exactly when - his followers waged a war for custody of his body. Continue reading

Sources

• Huffington Post
• Image: Holy Family Parish, Brooklyn

His feast day is commemorated with supermarket meat sales, green rivers, green beer, and (my favourite) parades.

But who was the real St Patrick?

Most people know that the missionary Patrick (Patricius or Pádraig) helped to bring Christianity to Ireland in the 5^th Century. Some may remember how his first visit to the island was as a slave.

Sadly, only a few may remember Patrick's opposition to structural injustice and his prophetic defense of victims of violence and human trafficking.

As with so many of our saints, Patrick's radical application of the Gospel has been domesticated and stripped of its challenging message.

Rather than witnessing to the prophetic and loving call of the God's mission, Patrick has been turned into a caricature to decorate commercial marketing schemes and Hallmark cards. Continue reading.

Kevin Glauber Ahern, PhD is an assistant professor of religious studies at Manhattan College. He served as the President of the International Movement of Catholic Students (IMCS-Pax Romana) and is Vice-President of the ICMICA-Pax Romana.

Source: Daily Theology

Image: Author's own

Bands from Britain, the United States and Russia joined thousands of Irish volunteers on Saturday's two-hour procession down Dublin's major boulevard, O'Connell Street, across the River Liffey, past Trinity College and concluding outside St. Patrick's Cathedral.

In his St. Patrick's Day message, Catholic Cardinal Sean Brady offered prayers to the estimated 50,000 citizens who have emigrated in the past year to escape Ireland's weak economy.