Cleveland St. Patrick's Day: Can You Eat Meat? Parade Route, And More

CLEVELAND, OH - St. Patrick's Day is Friday and the city will turn Irish for one day. The famed downtown Cleveland parade will begin at 1:04 p.m. on Superior Avenue, at E. 18th Street and conclude on Rockwell Avenue and Ontario Street.

Temperatures are expected to inch upward. The high for Friday is 42 degrees. The low is 28 degrees. However, the chance of rain is approximately 70 percent, so bring an umbrella to your parade.

The Grand Marshal of the parade will be Roger Weist. The Mother-of-the-Year award will be given to Mary Angela Murphy. Inside co-chair is John Patrick Lackey for the parade and outside co-chair is Margaret Lynch, the Cleveland St. Patrick's Day parade website says.

You can learn more about this year's parade honorees by clicking here.

Eating Meat?

Until Vatican II, an assembly of 2,400 Roman Catholic bishops in the 1960s that liberalized some church practices, every Friday was meatless.

One of the major questions hovering over St. Patrick's Day in 2017 is whether or not devout Catholics can enjoy a meal of corned beef and cabbage on a Friday in the heart of Lent. On one hand, St. Patrick's Day is an iconic and historic Cleveland tradition. On the other, abstaining from meat consumption on Fridays is a major Catholic tenet.

Luckily, the Diocese of Cleveland solved the dilemma. Bishop Daniel Thomas issued a dispensation for the Cleveland Catholic faithful, saying they could enjoy a nice meal of corned beef on Friday without failing their religious principles. Cleveland isn't alone in receiving special dispensation. Twelve other dioceses have also received special dispensation for St. Patrick's Day, the Catholic News Service reports.

The History of the Parade

The 2017 parade is the 175th anniversary of St. Patrick's Day parades in Cleveland, the The United Irish Societies of Greater Cleveland says on the Parade website. A few years ago, the Parade celebrated 150 years. How did the anniversary celebration leap forward 25 years?

The group says it recently found evidence in old newspapers that the parade has longer, older roots than originally believed. Using their new research, the group says the first parade in Cleveland St. Patrick's Day history was held in 1842 and was organized by the city's third resident priest, Rev. Peter McLaughlin.

Unlike the 2017 version of the parade, McLaughlin's parade was a celebration of temperance, so there was no alcohol at the event. Instead, the parade started with a mass at St. Mary's before launching into a parade march to the Catholic Temperance Society.

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