Moving St Patrick’s Day from March 17th
While America more than most countries is prone to the disease of moving celebrated days to weekends because it’s more convenient, the Catholic Church is not above moving feast days like this year’s St Patrick’s Day.
Because St Patrick’s Day is an actual Saint’s day, a celebrated holy day, it can’t be celebrated during holy week - which thank heavens above, literally - March 17th falls on, as the holy week of Easter takes precedence over all other days.
So technically speaking St Patrick’s Day is on March 15th in 2008 thereby matching up with so many events all over the world that through reasons of laziness, I mean convenience, celebrate it on the nearest Saturday anyway.
So the godless and the god-fearing, and all those who just drink, are in happy sync this year. In Dublin it doesn’t really matter as the day has long been extended to a multi-day festival so both days fall within the 5 days of saintly happiness.
Fox 4 in Kansas City has the KC take on it, and quotes John McClain of Brownes Irish Market & Deli:
I think God wants us all to get together and have a good time. He’s all for it. I don’t feel the least bit bad about it
And it claims the former Bishop Boland says he’s not against Catholics having a green beer during Holy Week -that the key is moderation. He’s wrong of course. Catholics and heathen alike shouldn’t touch green beer during Holy Week or any other week. The key is common sense and dignity.
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
This post should be copied (not moved) to the left - too many people will miss it. Is dual posting/tagging possible?
Yes, I’m being greedy - any sarcastic comments about St. Plastic Paddy’s Day I make on this side may go unnoticed.
Primal - I designed it so that the KC posts are published in the center by way of not being the more general and personal posts that appear in the left hand side so it’s effectively an either or situation which rules out dual tagging.
Dual posting is possible but that does take me into a duplicate content situation as it would literally be another page with the exact same content, which God, I mean Google, frowns upon. This is one of those problematic posts that really falls in the grey area between two stools but I don’t want to go down the double-posting route as I’d then have to get inventinve to prevent splitting comment threads (even if there isn’t really one on this post).
That said I’ll keep an eye on this and ponder changing my mind, thanks. I wouldn’t want anyone to miss your comments either.