17 March 2017 - St Patrick - Matthew 21: 33-43, 44-46

     I remember being in a parish as a lay person when I heard a member complaining that she had gone to the daily mass on March 17 to celebrate St Patrick’s day.  She was very proud of St Patrick and very proud of her Irish-American heritage.  After the mass was over, she came up to me, very upset that the priest had not even mentioned St Patrick once in the mass.  In many ways, St Patrick’s Day has become a big part of our cultural landscape in the US, since there are so many Irish Americans, with many of their ancestors having come over to the US during the Irish potato famine. I grew up in Chicago.  That city, to celebrate its large Irish-American population, had a huge parade downtown on St Patrick’s Day, led by the Irish-American mayor - Mayor Richard Daily, with the Chicago River being dyed green on that day.  But who was St Patrick?  We might not know a lot of details about this saint, or we might just assume a lot of things about him.  He lived in the 4th and 5th century.  I always envisioned him as being more recent in Church history.  We might not even know that Patrick was born in England, not Ireland, having been kidnapped from his village in England to be taken to Ireland as a slave where he served a king there for six years.  Patrick escaped slavery and returned to England, firm and devout in his Catholic faith.  He went to Gaul (present day France), where he became a priest and bishop.  He returned to Ireland as a Bishop.  His missionary success in Ireland in converting the faithful there to Christianity is honored in his role as the patron saint of that country. Having been a slave in that country, he turned his humiliation and sufferings into a source of Irish pride today.  Bishop Kopacz honors the Irish American heritage of so many priests in our Diocese and the contributions of Irish Americans to the Catholic faith by giving the Catholics in our Diocese a dispensation to eat corned beef and cabbage on this day, even though it is a Friday day of abstinence during Lent.  Honoring a man today who was a slave and who returned as a missionary to convert and help the people who enslaved him, we hear in the Gospel of the servants and the son of a landowner who are killed and rejected by the tenants of that landowner.  We might think of the many ways we see the message of the Gospel rejected in our own society, of the many ways we reject the Gospel message in our own hearts, of the ways we need to be open to the Gospel message of conversion and renewal during these days of our Lenten journey.  As St Patrick’s Day is a day of celebration and joy in the midst of Lent, as we honor the contributions of Irish Americans to our country, let us not forget the values of the Gospel and the way they call out to us today.