What is St Patrick’s Day?

What is St Patrick’s Day? What is the meaning of St Patrick’s Day?
St. Patrick’s Day started as a Christian holiday and changed into a feast day in the 1600s, thereafter becoming a secular holiday celebration of Ireland and Irish culture.
St Patrick’s Day didn’t become a celebration of Irish culture until the last two centuries. Historians contend St Patrick’s Day was initially a break from 40 days of fasting for Lent, a one day break allowing for alcohol and feast.
Reportedly “Saint Patrick’s feast day was finally placed on the universal liturgical calendar in the Catholic Church due to the influence of the 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.”
But it became a secular, public holiday in Ireland in 1903 due to the Money Bank Act. Last that century, in the :mid-1990s that the Irish government began a campaign to use Saint Patrick’s Day to showcase Ireland and its culture.”
The Festival was established to:
” — Offer a national festival that ranks amongst all of the greatest celebrations in the world and promote excitement throughout Ireland via innovation, creativity, grassroots involvement, and marketing activity.
— Provide the opportunity and motivation for people of Irish descent, (and those who sometimes wish they were Irish) to attend and join in the imaginative and expressive celebrations.
— Project, internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country with wide appeal, as we approach the new millennium.”
For more on St Patrick’s Day 2010 on LALATE, click here: http://news.lalate.com/category/holidays.
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