Happy St Patrick's Day
I was shaking my head last week when I heard that Guinness Beer is holding an online petition to make St. Patrick's Day an official holiday. Obviously a marketing gimmick, and someone must have given themselves a raise after coming up with the awfully clever "Proposition 317".
What's sad is that St. Patrick would undoubtedly be cringing each year on this day that "honors" his memory. I never thought too much about it until I recently heard a little snippet on the Catholic Channel (Sirius radio) about Saint Patrick, and how prayerful and holy the man was, and how he was blessed with the knowledge of Scripture and the Faith of the Trinity.
A quick read of the history of St. Patrick's Day in the US makes it easy to understand how people in the US forgot the Christian roots, and it became a day of drinking and leprechauns. The story of the 3-leaf clover representing the Trinity gets forgotten for wearing green.
The biggest irony of the online petition is that it fell during Holy Week, and very little discussion on how Good Friday is not a National Holiday despite America being a Christian country. In India and many other countries around the world Good Friday is a holiday ... but not in America :(
But, heck - we may get St Paddy's Day off. The luck of the Irish, I guess.
What's sad is that St. Patrick would undoubtedly be cringing each year on this day that "honors" his memory. I never thought too much about it until I recently heard a little snippet on the Catholic Channel (Sirius radio) about Saint Patrick, and how prayerful and holy the man was, and how he was blessed with the knowledge of Scripture and the Faith of the Trinity.
A quick read of the history of St. Patrick's Day in the US makes it easy to understand how people in the US forgot the Christian roots, and it became a day of drinking and leprechauns. The story of the 3-leaf clover representing the Trinity gets forgotten for wearing green.
The biggest irony of the online petition is that it fell during Holy Week, and very little discussion on how Good Friday is not a National Holiday despite America being a Christian country. In India and many other countries around the world Good Friday is a holiday ... but not in America :(
But, heck - we may get St Paddy's Day off. The luck of the Irish, I guess.
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