For the Feast of St. Patrick, the patron saint of the Archdiocese, Bishop Edmund Whalen, Vicar for Clergy, says St. Patrick is a saint for all of us because in some way we’re all immigrants like he was.

This feast day, he says, isn’t about “plastic derbies and all kinds of jokes about drinking. It isn’t something about all kinds of leprechauns and all kind of crazy stuff like that,” he continued.

“No,” he said, “Saint Patrick was taken as a slave from his native England to Ireland. It was there in the midst of his suffering that he developed a deeper faith…as he thought there was no hope.”

St. Patrick teaches us about forgiveness, he said, because after St. Patrick was freed from slavery and returned to England, he accepted the call “to go back and bring the light of faith to the Irish people, the ones who had enslaved him.”

Listen to the entire reflection in the video above.