OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Author: Michele Ainley

  • Saint Eóin MacCarlain, August 17

    August 17 is the feastday of a Saint John (Eóin) of Saint John’s Point, County Down. Virtually nothing is known of this saint, but I visited the church at the location which bears his name in 2009 while on holiday. It is a charming building right on the coast and has only a few farmhouses and a lighthouse for neighbours. There is both a ‘bullaun’ and a holy well immediately outside the fenced perimeter, as I am pleased to say that Environment and Heritage Service take care of the church ruins. Their sign below shows how the church would have looked originally, it certainly wasn’t designed for large numbers or for large people!

    Bullauns are stones with a bowl-shaped depression where water can collect, they are commonly found in Ireland at ecclesiastical sites, and the water in them often used as a cure for headaches. Those who are interested in the New Age line on ‘megaliths’ invest them with a deep significance, but a more prosaic explanation is that they are simply discarded quern stones. This is the bullaun from Saint John’s Point, the step down leads to the well:

     

    So what do we know of this Saint John? Alas, nothing of his life, but the church is mentioned in medieval records:
    St. John’s Chapel was valued at three marks in the Taxation of Pope Nicholas, under the name of “the chapel of Styoun,” which name seems to have been formed from the Irish words Tigh-Eóin, “John’s house.” In the calendar of the O’Clerys, the festival of its patron is mentioned on the 17th of August, “Eóin MacCarlain, of Teac Eóin.” Immediately after the coming of the English, Malachi, Bishop of Down, granted the church of “Stechian” to the Abbey of Down. At the Dissolution the tithes of this chapel, under the name of St. Johnstown, were appropriate to the Preceptory of St. John in the Ards. The church, which was of a very ancient style of architecture, measured twenty by thirteen feet in the clear.
    Thus Saint John, Eóin son of Carlan, is one of the many Irish saints about whose life nothing is known, but whose memory has survived in the placenames and ruins of the locality in which he flourished. May he continue to bless County Down and its people.

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  • Saint Lughan, August 16

     

    August 16 is one of those days on the Irish calendars when all we have are the records of the names of the saints to be commemorated but no further surviving information. Canon O’Hanlon leads off with a Saint Lughan or Lugain who presumably was one of the earlier saints, as his name appears in the earliest of the surviving Irish calendars, the Martyrology of Tallaght. His name is repeated first in the late 12th-century Martyrology of Gorman and subsequently in the 17th-century Martyrology of Donegal, again without any notes or further indications of when and where he may have flourished. Canon O’Hanlon’s account reflects the spirit of his age as he depicts Ireland as a land uniquely afflicted by the destruction of its sacred heritage, the worst of it wrought by ‘the law-established religion of England’ which outdid the Goths, the Vandals and the Danes combined:

    ST. LUGHAN OR LUGAIN.

    DARK and evil are the works of men recruited from the dens of vice, and much misery have thousands brought upon the world; but, those who have been trained and schooled in the Church give their talents and virtues to the cause of justice, of charity, and of order. Much could we desire to learn more regarding the personal merits and actions of the latter class, yet such gratification cannot always be attained. A festival in honour of Lughan is found set down in the Martyrologies of Tallagh and of Donegal, at this date. Lugain Si is found written, in the first-mentioned record.  In that copy, contained in the Book of Leinster, the entry is somewhat different, at the 16th of August. The references to this holy man are so brief and obscure, that we cannot even conjecture his station in the Irish Church, his place, nor his period. The latter, however, seems to have been in the earlier eras of our ecclesiastical history. Almost every country in Europe can point out the mouldering ruins of church and cloister, overthrown and laid desolate by the destroying hand of war, or by the no less relentless onslaught of heresy. But in no other country has such destruction befallen the sacred edifices of religion as in Ireland, and with them have perished most of our precious records, containing memorials of our sainted men. In the first place, much of this loss to religion, civilization and learning dates from the inroads and marauding of the Danish pirates; and lastly, from the law-established religion of England in the sixteenth century, and which visited the holy places of Ireland with such a spirit of fell destruction, as neither Goth, Vandal, nor Dane had ever paralleled.

    Content Copyright © Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae 2012-2015. All rights reserved.

  • The Daughters of Carpre, August 15

    The earliest of the Irish calendars commemorates a group of holy women known collectively as the daughters of Carpre on August 15. How many sisters this group comprised is not recorded, indeed apart from a notice in The Martyrology of Tallaght appended to the name of the male saint Saran, also commemorated on this day, nothing more is known of them as Canon O’Hanlon explains:
    Feast of Carpre’s Daughters.
    In addition to the Festival and veneration observed at this date, as we read in the published Martyrology of Tallaght, for Firdacrioch et St. Saran, the Daughters of Carpre are likewise commemorated. In that copy, contained in the Book of Leinster, they are also noticed, at the 15th of August. Further light we cannot obtain, regarding these holy women, who are not mentioned at this date, in the Martyrology of Donegal.
    Content Copyright © Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae 2012-2015. All rights reserved.