A Day to Celebrate Evangelization

St. Patrick’s Day is really a day to celebrate evangelization. And as Father Sylvester Malone of Brooklyn pointed out in this 1884 address to the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, nowhere was it more successful:

It is said that at the close of the life of this one Apostle the whole island resounded with praise of Jesus Christ. This can hardly be said of any apostolic laborer in the work of evangelization in any other part of the world. It took centuries, filled up with the martyrdom of its teachers, before it was true in any other country to say of it that it was one of faith and morals. It is truly a day for us to celebrate when we can so far in point of time and find our whole island crowned with the Christian laurel of victory… So great was the zeal of his followers that it carried them outside of the island, even into England, to Scotland, Wales, Germany, Switzerland, and other European nations, where they planted the cross and left after them memorials of their own apostolic zeal, some of which still exist. We find many towns and cities which bear the names of Irish saints who were their teachers in secular as in religious lore.