The feast day of March 17 has been designated for Saint Patrick, a real person and church leader who concentrated on converting 5th Century western Ireland to Christianity. Following his birth in Roman Britain, the 
young son of a church deacon was staying at his father's country estate in western Britain when he was kidnapped and forcibly enslaved for six years as a Irish shepherd. For the worldly youth that he had been, though a nominal Christian, captivity became a means of spiritual conversion. He escaped and went back into the priesthood in Europe, eventually rising to the second Bishop of Ireland as appointed by the pope, concentrating his roving conversion on western and northern Ireland.
A desire to preach the Christian faith to the Irish grew within him to the certainty of a vocation. Once in a dream he even heard the "voice of the Irish" calling him back. The Druids fought him bitterly. He set up the first monasteries in European Episcopal style in Ireland, and he also raged against British clergy, who wanted to continue selling the Irish priests into servitude. At one point, he fought with British Prince Coroticus, who during a retaliatory raid on Ireland had killed some of Patrick's converts and sold others into slavery. Patrick showed his identification with the Irish in his phrase "we are Irish." As the bishop of the Irish Christians, he defended them with every ounce of his spiritual power, even if it meant defying a powerful military leader of his own ethnic background. To his critics Patrick replied with his Confessio, written in his old age.
Hundreds of years after his death, Muirchu's account of Saint Patrick's life introduced apocryphal stories about New Testament apostles. Muirchu retold episodes from stories about Bartholemew, Peter, James (the brother of John) and Saint John the Evangelist with St. Patrick as their central character. The canonization of the real monk had begun. it is noteworthy that he draws attention to this activity as an important element of Patrick's impact on the Irish people. Stories like the Easter fire and banishing the snakes from Ireland begin to develop details never seen in Patrick's writings. Christianity began to develop Patrick into a legendary folk hero. Over time, Patrick became known as the greatest of Ireland's missionaries and its national apostle.
As the ideas, beliefs, and traditions of Christianity spread from one people to another, they are shaped--and reshaped--by the culture of each new group. Nowhere is this more true than of the legend that grew around Saint Patrick -- a Briton who was enslaved by the Irish, who escaped his captors, then returned to the Irish with a fervent mission to convert them. It was on the shores of a far-off land that Patrick truly became a symbol of community and continuity. By mid 18th century, Irish soldiers serving in the colonial British Army marched through the 
streets of New York City accompanied by Irish music. When a massive famine struck Ireland in the 19th century, and millions of Irish emigrated to a new world where they were subjected to discrimination, they remembered their patron saint as an ex-slave who broke down barriers, a story of purification and triumph after suffering.
By the early 20th century, St. Patrick's Day parades in major American cities had become triumphant celebrations of Irish "arrival" in the hallowed halls of city government--victors over the old guard Protestant Yankees. The importance of St. Patrick to growing Irish self-confidence was expressed in 1921 by Seumas MacManus, author of the sentimental favorite Story of the Irish Race, know for transforming traditional Irish folktales into modern ones: "What Confucius was to the Oriental, Moses to the Israelite, Mohammed to the Arab, Patrick was to the Gaelic race. And the name and power of those other great ones will not outlive the name and the power of our Apostle."
Today the U.S. celebration of the feast day is the jewel of Saint Patrick's Day, two hundred years after a massive immigrant movement brought its patron saint to the continent. Now new classes of immigrants embrace the "kiss me, I'm Irish" sentiment as a way to establish cultural acceptance and integration. All from a Briton, enslaved for years, who later transformed his adopted homeland... Happy Saint Patrick's Day!