They say on St. Patrick’s Day everybody has a touch of the green and whenever I’m watching the parade on Fifth Avenue, as I plan to do again tomorrow, I take pleasure in knowing that I really do have some Irish blood running through me.

While my father was 100% Norwegian, and his family line never mixed until his generation, my mother is half German and the rest is English, French, Scottish and Irish.

I also like knowing Patrick, whose real name was Maewyn Succat, was a zealous Christian missionary whose astounding influence led to Ireland’s full conversion to Christianity within 200 years of his arrival on the Old Country’s shores bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Patrick, unlike the stories you hear, was not an Irish Catholic who frightened off snakes and compared the Trinity to a shamrock.

“He did not banish the snakes: Ireland never had any,” writes David Plotz on the website Slate.com. “Scholars now consider snakes a metaphor for the serpent of paganism. Nor did he invent the Shamrock Trinity. That was an 18th-century fabrication.”

Patrick, a Protestant, was born in Wales around 385 A.D. At the age of 16, while playing on the beach with his sister, he was kidnapped by seafaring raiders, who carted him off to Ireland to sell him into slavery.

“Patrick spent six lonely years herding sheep and, according to him, praying 100 times a day,” Plotz writes. “In a dream, God told him to escape. He returned home, where he had another vision in which the Irish people begged him to return and minister to them: ‘We ask thee, boy, come and walk among us once more,’ he recalls in (his autobiographical document he called, Confession). He studied for the priesthood in France, then made his way back to Ireland.

Patrick, regarded for his firm biblical belief, is credited for ending Ireland’s slavery, human sacrifice, and most intertribal warfare.

Author Thomas Cahill’s 1996 book, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, contends Patrick's conversion of Ireland actually allowed Western learning to survive the Dark Ages.

As my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.), explains it, “When the vandals and the Visigoths, and everybody else, were plundering Europe, and destroying all the history of the Roman Empire and Europe in the 10^th to 12^th centuries, nobody cared about Ireland—that little rock sitting out there on the north Atlantic, blowing in the breeze—and so nobody went over there and messed with them, and consequently the archives stored there from the ancient Roman Empire survived.”

Jordan says it was after Patrick heard the gospel and got saved that he began to study the Bible and then made the decision to return to Ireland as a missionary.

“When he preached the gospel around 430 A.D., the whole of the Irish countryside had a revival and was converted,” says Jordan. “People got saved and burnt their old books and other pagan stuff. It completely transformed their whole society.”

One hundred years later, a guy by the name of Columba, influenced by Patrick, set out from Ireland as a missionary to a little remote rock in the sea, just west of Scotland, called the Isle of Iona.

Columba set up a Bible institute on top of the rock and trained men to carry the gospel all over central and northern Europe, showing again the tremendous influence Patrick’s ministry spawned.

“These guys were marked by believing they were under the Lordship of the Lord Jesus Christ only,” says Jordan. “They refused the luxury and extravagant living that the institutional (Catholic) Church had in abundance. They were zealous in the ministry of the Word, and didn't have any kind of sacerdotal system of rites and rituals.”

Due to the work of Patrick and Columba, the influence of Catholicism in Europe did not reach Britain until late in 4^th century.

“That’s because they were free from the continents' influence,” says Jordan. “And they are still, if you know anything about Europe and Britain, there's still that conflict between the British and the continent.”