Nigeria’s Patron Saint Is St. Patrick, Thanks To The Influence Of Irish Bishops : Goats and Soda:
In the early 1920s, Irish priests of the Order of the Holy Ghost established their mission in southern Nigeria. Later St. Patrick’s Society for Foreign Missions, dedicated on March 17, 1932, became one of many Catholic groups in Nigeria providing education both religious and secular.
These days Catholics in the country number some 20 million, and Nigerian seminaries send their ordinates all over the world to serve as priests. In fact, since numbers of clergy in Ireland have long been in decline, Nigerian priests have recently been assigned to churches there.
Though St. Patrick’s Day is not an official public holiday in Nigeria, plenty of Guinness stout will be consumed anyway. It’s the second most popular beer in the country, brewed with sorghum or maize instead of the European recipe’s barley, and packs a 7.5 percent alcohol content.
