OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Author: Michele Ainley

  • 'A Seasoning to our Earthly Life': A Thought for the Feast of All Saints

     

    November 1 is the Feast of All Saints and below is a reflection on the importance of recording the lives of the saints from Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of Saint Malachy the Irishman. We will be marking the Feast of Saint Malachy on November 3 and the Feast of All the Saints of Ireland on November 6, but this thought from the Preface to Saint Bernard’s work relates to the significance of all of the saints we commemorate on this day, November 1:

    To describe the lives of the saints has ever been a precious task, since they serve as an example, or as it were, a seasoning to our earthly life. Thus, in a certain way, though dead, they live again among us, and many of those living in spiritual death are brought to the truth and recalled to eternal life. And now, verily, the rarity of sanctity makes this so much the more necessary; since it is plain that our times are lacking in men.

    Stanley S. Morrison, “Saint Malachy of Armagh (1095-1148).” The Irish Monthly, vol. 76, no. 906, (1948), p. 558.

    Content Copyright © Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae 2012-2021. All rights reserved.

  • An Irish Bishop Saint: Blessed Thaddeus McCarthy

    October 25 is the feast of Blessed Thaddeus [Tadhg] McCarthy,  a fifteenth-century Irish Bishop who, having been unjustly deprived of his see, set off to obtain redress in Rome only to die alone on his return journey. Yet although he belongs to a very different world than that of the early medieval period saints this blog usually features, I am nevertheless aware of a thread of continuity which links him to them. In
    his popular title ‘The White Martyr of Munster’, Blessed Thaddeus
    reflects the Irish understanding of martyrdom as preserved in the Cambrai Homily: 

    The white martyrdom for someone is when they part for the sake of God
    from everything that they love, although they may suffer fasting and
    hard work thereby.

     

    Furthermore, as an Irishman who died and was buried in Italy, he is following in the footsteps of those peregrini of the Golden Age of the Irish mission to Europe, from the great Saint Columbanus to Cathadulus of Taranto, Donatus of Fiesole or Ursus of Aosta.  This was a link acknowledged by Fra Anselmo Tommassini, in his 1937 study Irish Saints in Italy:

    Our pious pilgrimage throughout the various provinces of Italy in search of traces of Irish sanctity comes to an end with a strangely pathetic figure whose humility is equalled only by his dignity. Our last Irish saint [Blessed Thaddeus] links up in the most curious fashion with the first one encountered on this side of the Alps, with that St. Ursus, the apostle of the Valle d’Aosta, who gave his name to so many churches and hospitals…

    For it was in one of these hospitals, the Hospice of the XXI, where twenty-one beds were reserved for the use of poor pilgrims and an institution served by the Canons of Saint Ursus of Aosta, that Blessed Thaddeus died on October 24/25, 1492. Interestingly, Saint Ursus of Aosta’s feast is February 1, the same day as that of Ireland’s national patroness Saint Brigid.

    Four centuries years later the people of Blessed Tadhg’s homeland rejoiced in the rediscovery of his memory, in the official confirmation of his cultus and in the translation of his relics from Ivrea to Cork. Below is a Pastoral letter from someone very much involved in these celebrations, the then Bishop of Cork, Thomas (Alphonse) O’Callaghan, O.P. detailing the life of Blessed Thaddeus and commending him as an intercessor to his flock:

    An Irish Bishop Saint 
     
    In his Pastoral, the Bishop of Cork  says: —
    ‘With feelings of heartfelt  joy we announce to you that it has  pleased His Holiness Leo XIII. to confirm, by his apostolic
    authority, the veneration that has been paid since the close of the
    fifteenth century to the Servant of God, Thaddeus McCarthy, Bishop of
    Cork and Cloyne. Henceforth he will be revered by us with the title of
    Blessed. His feast will be celebrated in the diocese each year
    throughout all future time, and Mass will be offered in his honour. 
     
    He
    was of the princely house of McCarthy, and was born in the year 1455, at a
    time when his family was just regaining its former power in Munster.
    Numerous buildings and castles, the ruins of which are scattered through
    the diocese, and with which we are familiar, were erected by his
    kinsmen and contemporaries, Cormac McCarthy Laider, who was appointed
    his protector in Cork by the Sovereign Pontiff, Innocent VIII., built
    Blarney Castle, and many churches in the neighbourhood of our city. He
    founded Kilcrea Abbey and the Abbey of Ballymacadane. Gifted with a rare
    natural disposition, and trained from his childhood in the practice of
    virtue, Thaddeus had hardly completed his studies when, despising all
    worldly allurements, he hastened to enrol himself in the ranks of the clergy. The fame of his learning, of his piety, and of his other
    virtues, spreading and increasing from day to day, he was, while yet in
    the flower of his youth, and already effulgent with sanctity, appointed
    by the Sovereign Pontiff, Sixtus IV., to govern the See of Ross; and he
    received episcopal consecration in the Church of St. Stephen (del Caeo),
    in Rome, on the Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross, A.D. 1482.
    Having become in very soul the model of his flock, he ruled the Church committed to his care with prudence and diligence. By his devotion to
    religion, and his zeal for souls, he merited to be praised as the best
    of pastors. Like our Divine Lord, whose life he imitated, he carried a
    heavy cross; and in the exercise of his episcopal duties he was opposed,
    and calumniated, and denounced as a mercenary pastor, and as a steward
    of iniquity. The intrigues of his enemies went so far that the mind of
    the Sovereign Pontiff, Innocent VIII., was turned against him, and he
    was visited with severe ecclesiastical penalties. He bore his
    humiliation in perfect patience, without a word of complaint, and his
    virtue, tried on the touchstone of tribulation, attained in a short time
    the arduous summit of perfection. The innocence of Thaddeus was soon
    after proved, and his sanctity was made so evident that the same
    Pontiff, Innocent VIII., resolved not only to restore him, but to call
    him to still greater honours. He appointed him to the united Sees of
    Cork and Cloyne, regarding him rather as an angel than a man, and
    deeming him worthy of the greatest favours. When, by the bitter
    persecution of powerful enemies, and by the laws that then excluded the
    native Irish from ecclesiastical benefices,
    he was again forced into exile, he left Cork clad in the meanest attire
    in the garb of a pilgrim, and proceeded to Rome. Having worshipped at
    the Tomb of the Apostles, he laid his cause before the Vicar of Christ,
    who received him with affectionate cordiality, furnished him with
    strong-worded letters, and denounced in the severest terms the trespass
    on the liberty of the Church. In returning on foot he stopped to rest at
    Ivrea, in Piedmont, where, poor and unknown, he was received into the
    Hospital for Pilgrims. There, broken down from privations and toil,
    wearied by long travelling, and already ripe for Heaven, he delivered
    up his soul to God on October 24, 1492, in the thirty-seventh year of his
    age. 
     
    His death was announced by a light from Heaven shining in a
    marvellous manner, and the strangeness of the event attracted many to
    the bedside on which were laid his mortals remains. The Bishop of Ivrea,
    Nicholas Garigliatti, accompanied by his clergy, hastened to the spot,
    and discovered that the poor pilgrim was the Bishop of Cork and Cloyne.
    His body, attended by a great multitude of the faithful, the clergy, and
    civil magistrates, was carried to the Cathedral in solemn procession,
    which the accounts of the time say was rather a triumph than a funeral.
    It was placed under the High Altar, in the same sepulchre with St.
    Eusebius, patron of the Diocese of Ivrea, where it has since been
    venerated, and God willed the remarkable sanctity of His servant should
    be attested by many miracles. 
     
    It remains for us, dearly beloved
    brethren, to pay due honour to his memory, and to have recourse to his
    intercession, that by his prayers we may obtain what we stand in need
    of. Though forgotten during the centuries in which it was sought to blot
    out all traces of our religious history and our traditions, we may
    trust that he has not ceased to plead for us at the Throne of God, and
    that he has ever been, as the Prophet Jeremiah was to the Jewish nation,
    a lover of his brethren, who prays much for the people.”  Catholic Press, (Sydney, NSW), Saturday 4 April 1896, page 21
     
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  • Saint Maelaithgen of Clonenagh, October 21


    October 21 is the feast of Saint Maelaithgen of Clonenagh,  whose death, according to the Annals of the Four Masters, occurred in the eighth century: 

    The Age of Christ, 767. Maelaithgen, Abbot of Cluain-Eidhneach [died].

    John O’Donovan, ed. and trans, The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters, Vol. I, (Dublin, 1856), p.371.

    Cluain-Eidhneach, modern Cloneagh, County Laois was an important monastic foundation established, possibly in the sixth century, by Saint Fintan (feast February 17). The feast of his eighth-century successor Maelaithgen is recorded on the Irish calendars at October 21. On this day the late eighth/early ninth-century Martyrology of Tallaght lists ‘Moelanaigh (Maelathgein)’, the late twelfth-century Martyrology of Gorman ‘Mael-Aithcen without folly’ and the seventeenth-century Martyrology of Donegal  simply ‘Maelaithghein’. There is, however, a link between our abbot and another of the historic Irish calendars, The Martyrology of Oengus, for the Life of Oengus the Martyrologist (feast March 11) records that he began his career at Clonenagh under the tutelage of Saint Maelaithgen. The great seventeenth-century hagiologist, Father John Colgan, noted this link when writing of Oengus in his Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae: 

    Inspired from his earliest infancy with an ardent desire of Christian perfection, he  embraced the religious life in the monastery of Cluain-edhneoch … where, under the care of the holy Abbot Malathgenius, he made so rapid a progress in learning and in the science of the saints that in a short time no name in Ireland ranked higher, both for profound and sacred erudition, and for all the virtues of the religious state.

    Rev. Matthew Kelly, Dissertations Chiefly on Irish Church History, (Dublin, 1864) p.209-210.

    The date of his feast at October 21 and his reputation for holiness and learning are all that seems to have been preserved of the memory of Saint Maelaithgen of Clonenagh.

    Content Copyright © Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae 2012-2021. All rights reserved.