OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Category: Irish Saints

  • Saint Camelacus of Rahan, November 3

    November 3 is the feast day of Saint Camelacus (Camulacus, Caomhlach, Cáemlach) of Rahan, County Offaly. He appears to have been the original founder of the church at Rahan, but was later overshadowed by Saint Mochuda (Mochutu) or Carthage, the saint more readily associated with the monastery at this site. An original founder saint being eclipsed subsequently by another isn’t unknown. Speaking of the seventh century, Richard Sharpe, the translator of The Life of Saint Columba for the Penguin Classics series, makes this point:

    They were years that witnessed immense changes in Irish society and in the Irish church. In particular, some early saints disappear from view as their churches were eclipsed by those of other saints. For example, a letter written in the 630s to Ségéne, fifth abbot of Iona, mentions a group of leading church founders; the list includes St Nessan, who fades from view before anything was recorded of him. Rahan, Co.Offaly, was regarded as the church of St Camelacus in the early seventh century, but a hundred years later his place had been reassigned to St Mochutu.

    Richard Sharpe, ed. and trans. Adomnán of Iona, Life of St Columba (Penguin Books, 1995), p.4

    But fortunately, unlike Saint Nessan, Saint Camelacus did not vanish completely for he is recorded in a number of early medieval sources. One of Saint Patrick’s earliest hagiographers, Tirechán, writing in the closing decade of the seventh century, recorded the names of bishops appointed to establish churches by the Irish patron. He tells us:

    He sent Camelacus of the Comienses to Mag Cumi and with his finger pointed out to him the place from the hill of Granard, that is the church of Raithen.

    What ‘of the Comienses’ means has never been determined. Some scholars feel that the saint’s own name raises questions too. Aidan Breen writes in the online Dictionary of Irish Biography:

    The name Came(u)lacus is unusual. It could be Gaulish, and the epithet ‘of the Comienses’ might therefore refer to some Gaulish tribal group. If that is the case, Camelacus would have been one of the Gaulish bishops who assisted Patrick, along with Auxilius, Iserninus and Secundinus.

    However, he goes on to acknowledge that the name Camelacus could be a Latinization of the Irish Cáemlach and Commienses of a tribal grouping in Offaly.

    The Martyrology of Gorman records the saint under the name ‘Caemlach’ on November 3 with a scholiast note adding ‘from Rathen’. The Martyrology of Donegal records ‘CAEMHLACH, of Raithin’ at the same date.

    But it is as the Latin Camelacus that one of the most intriguing sources testifies to our saint. For a Hymnus Sancti Camelaci is among the twelve hymns found in the late seventh-century Antiphonary of Bangor. The hymn, Audite bonum exemplum (Hear the good example), bears a number of similarities to the better-known and much longer Audite omnes amantes (Listen, all who love God) in honour of Saint Patrick, traditionally ascribed to the authorship of Saint Secundinus, which the Antiphonary also preserves. Father Michael Curran MSC, in his 1984 study The Antiphonary of Bangor and the Early Irish Monastic Liturgy, pointed out some similarities between the two hymns. Both are alphabetical hymns, both begin with Audite and both contain some other textual similarities. Furthermore:

    Audite bonum also speaks of Camelacus, who was a fifth-century contemporary of Patrick, as if he were still alive, except in the final two stanzas where he is spoken of as being in his eternal home.

    All of these similarities may indicate either that Audite bonus is an imitation of Audite omnes or that both were written by the same author. The shorter hymn draws a warm and attractive picture of Camelacus, who is characterized above all by humility, gentleness and joyful fidelity in the service of God. Mention is made more than once of his poverty.

    Michael Curran MSC, The Antiphonary of Bangor and the Early Irish Monastic Liturgy (Dublin, 1984), 46-47.

    One of the most interesting references in the Hymn to Saint Camelacus is found in the final stanza which says that Christ will place our saint in the company of the patriarch Abraham and he will reign in paradise with the holy Lazarus. This is clearly a reference to the parable of Dives and Lazarus found in the sixteenth chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke. In his 1887 collection The Tripartite Life of Patrick with Other Documents relating to that Saint, Whitley Stokes included the curious Tale of Patrick and his Leper, where the leper is named Comlach. Father Curran suggests that the association of Saint Camelacus with Lazarus in the hymn anticipates this later tradition. The link with lepers is further strengthened by the founding of a leper colony at Rahan by Saint Carthage, directed there, according to hagiography, by Saint Colmán of Lann Elo. A growing number of modern scholars believe that Colmán of Lann Elo is the true author of the hymn of Secundinus in honour of Saint Patrick, Audite omnes amantes and thus Father Curran wonders if Saint Colmán had a personal devotion to Saint Camelacus and might also be the author of the hymn in his honour.  He speculates that:

    It is possible that the new monastery and its leper-colony was a memorial and tribute to Camelacus, the first bishop of Raithin, who was remembered for his evangelical poverty and possibly for his care for lepers, if not already regarded as a leper himself.(p.47)

    Yet it remains equally possible that the Audite bonum exemplum, the Hymn to Camelacus, is a shorter and less sophisticated composition written in the style of the Audite omnes amantes.  Whatever the truth, it is fascinating to see Camelacus, this otherwise obscure holy man, being one of only three saints, along with our national apostle and Saint Comgall, Bangor’s founder, to merit a hymn in his honour in The Bangor Antiphonary:

    [15.] Hymnus Sancti Camelaci.

    i. Audite bonum exemplum
    Benedicti pauperis
    Camelaci Cumiensis
    Dei justi famuli.

    ii. Exemplum praebet in toto
    Fidelis in opere,
    Gratias Deo agens,
    Hilaris in omnibus,

    iii. Jejunus et mansuetus
    Kastus hic servit Deo,
    Laetatur in paupertate,
    Mitis est in omnibus,

    iv. Noctibus atque diebus
    Orat Dominum suum ;
    Prudens, justus, ac fideiis,
    Quem cognati diligunt.

    v. Regem Dominum aspexit
    Salvatoremque suum :
    Tribuit huic aeternam
    Vitam cum fidelibus.

    vi. Xps [i.e. Christus] illum insinuavit
    Patriarchae Abrahae,
    Yn Paradiso regnavit
    Cum sancto Lazaro.

    (text from F.E.Warren and W. Griggs, The Antiphonary of Bangor: an early Irish manuscript in the Ambrosian Library at Milan 2 vols, (London 1893–1895).

    Content Copyright © Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae 2012-2024. All rights reserved.

  • Saint Feber of Boho, November 6

    November 6 is the Feast of All the Saints of Ireland but is also the day on which we commemorate a little-known female saint of County Fermanagh, Saint Feber (Feadhbhair, Feadhbar, Fedbair, Febor, Faber) of Boho. Since we have only four surviving written Lives of Irish women saints, stories of Saint Feber have mostly survived in popular tradition preserved in the place where she once flourished. Her name is recorded though in Irish genealogical sources and also on the calendars of the saints. The Martyrology of Gorman records the name ‘Fedbair’ at November 6 with an accompanying scholiast note describing her as ‘a virgin from Botha Eich Raichnig’. The Martyrology of Donegal replicates this with its entry for ‘Fedbair, Virgin of Botha-eich Uaichnich, in Tir-Rátha’. Pádraig Ó Riain in his Dictionary of Irish Saints tells us that the genealogies describe Feber as a daughter of Dallbhrónach, mother of a number of saints. Her family tree also makes Saint Feber an aunt to Saint Brigid of Kildare. and Ó Riain notes that Feber was ‘said to have been subject to Brighid at her church in the townland of Toneel, parish of Boho, which she shared with her sister Sanct Bhróg.’ However, it is to popular tradition that we must turn for further details of the establishment of a church by Saint Feber. Here we find some classic hagiographical tropes: the assistance of a wild animal and the righteous anger of the saint leading to the cursing of a river and its subsequent flowing against the hill.

    In a letter dated November 6, 1834, John O’Donovan of the Ordnance Survey wrote:

    The village of Monea is called in Irish Muine Fhiadh, i.e. Hill of the Deer. The name is accounted for by a story similar to those told to account for the names of old churches in Derry. The virgin St. Feber first attempted to build her church at Kildrum at the place where the holy well now called Tobar Feber is to be seen, but what had been built in the course of the day was destroyed in the night by some invisible being. At last a deer, blessed beast, was pleased to point out a site where Feber might erect her church without interruption. He carried Feber’s books on his horns to Monea, and there the holy virgin finished the erection of her church without annoyance. But when the deer was crossing the Sillees River (Abhainn na Sailíse) he slipped on its slippery banks and the books fell off his horns and it was sometime before he could fix them on again. This was effected by the genius or sheaver (shaver) who presided over the Sillees, who did all in his power to prevent the establishment of the Christian Religion in that neighbourhood. As soon as Feber had understood that the demon of the river thus annoyed the good beast, she was filled with holy indignation -she became much wroth – and with (in?) sanctified fury and heavenly anger, she cursed the River, praying that the Silleece might be cursed with sterility of fish and fertility in the destruction of human life, and that it might run against the hill. 

    Rev. M. O’Flanagan, Letters Containing Information Relative to the Antiquities of the County of Fermanagh: Collected During the Progress of the Ordnance Survey in 1834-5 (1928), 54-5.

    A more recent commentator suggests that O’Donovan’s version of the Saint Feber, the stag and the river story was not the only one. Henry Glassie points out:

    In O’Donovan’s telling, Saint Febor’s opponent was supernatural, more often her opponent is human – a local chief – but her three curses end most tellings.

    He then goes on to give us the version from the autobiography of William K. Parke, a native of Derrygonnelly, County Fermanagh. Derrygonnelly is a town on the Sillees River, whose flowing against the hill Parke explains by telling the story of 

    “a lady saint known as Saint Faber”, who roamed the area with her pet deer, “endeavouring to convert the locals to Christianity”.  Her main objective was the local chief, O’Phelan, who “wanted nothing to do with this new fangled religion”. He ordered his servants to release the dogs on her. She fled, attempted to leap the Sillees, failed, her holy books were destroyed, and she cursed the river. The curses were that the river was to be dangerous for bathers, bad for fishing and to flow for ever against the hill.

    Glassie also cited another version of the tale from the same author. The quote above was taken from Parke’s 1988 autobiography Fermanagh Childhood , but in Glimpses of Old Derrygonnelly, published a decade earlier, Parke quoted from an old article from the local newspaper, The Impartial Reporter: 

    “St Faber fleeing from her enemies raised her staff cursing the water to be turned back so that she could save her deer carrying the Holy Books. The river ran on as far as Lisgoole Abbey where the monks met it and turned it into Lough Erne”.

    Henry Glassie, The Stars of Ballymenone, new edition, (Indiana University Press, 2016), footnote, p.483.

    The three curses of Saint Feber are part of a tradition of saintly malediction found in medieval hagiography in general, but a feature of the Lives of Irish saints in particular. I spoke about the context in which our saints utter curses on Episode 30 of the radio programme All the Saints of Ireland, which you can find at the podcast library of Radio Maria Ireland here. As I explained, cursing usually arises as a response to the dignity of the saint being disrespected. That is clearly the case here, where the chieftain aggressively attempts to thwart the saint’s missionary work and she invokes the judgement of God, not against the man, but against the river which endangered her animal companion and the holy books he carried. As I remarked on the radio broadcast, the cursing of things, food-producing sources such as rivers or trees, may owe something to the cursing of the fig tree by Christ on his way to Jerusalem. There is thus nothing unusual in this episode of Saint Feber and the Sillees, we see instances in other saints Lives of the cursing of rivers so that fish will not be caught.  It’s also true that unusual natural features in the environment are often attributed to the actions of saints, in this case the flowing of the Sillees against the hill. It is worth noting, however, that cursing is predominantly a male preserve in the Lives of the Irish saints but Saint Feber seems every bit as capable as any male saint. In the newspaper account the raising of her staff, the symbol of her authority, to pronounce the curse is also in keeping and reflects the ritualistic aspect of uttering maledictions. 

    A final observation is that the saint’s memory continues to be reflected in the landscape around Boho, In addition to the Tobar Feber there is a bullaun associated with the saint preserved at Killydrum townland. She is the patron of the Sacred Heart Church at Boho, one of the very few historic church sites still in Catholic hands. The parish website here adds some other details to Saint Feber’s story, claiming that she was the daughter of a local druid who was converted to Christianity by Saint Molaise of Devenish. It says too that the holy well of Saint Feber has a particular reputation for curing warts. There is a second well at Monea and Saint Feber is also the patron of the Catholic parish church there.

    So, although not much historical information has survived about this female saint of Fermanagh, her memory is still very much alive in the place where she once flourished.

    Content Copyright © Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae 2012-2024. All rights reserved.

  • Ivrea and 'A Bishop of McCarthy's Royal Name'

    To mark the feast day of Blessed Thaddeus McCarthy, below is an 1897 article on Ivrea, the Italian town whose people took this fifteenth-century Irish bishop to their hearts and reintroduced him to his own countrymen. It’s poignant to read how the Bishop of Ivrea in ‘black ’47’, the worst year of the Great Hunger, not only sent money for famine relief but documents relating to the humble Irish pilgrim who had died in Ivrea in 1492. A post on the translation of the relics of Blessed Thaddeus, which also took place in 1897, can be read at the blog here:

    IVREA.

    THE present writer — who is not the writer of the following paper but only of these few introductory words — claims the credit of having been the first to sing in English the praises of the Blessed Thaddeus whose connection with Ivrea procures for that Italian town the distinction of being now commemorated in an Irish Magazine. It happened thus. In 1847, the Bishop of Ivrea, in northern Italy, sent Dr. Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, forty pounds for the famine-stricken people of Ireland; and he also took the opportunity of enclosing documents about an Irish pilgrim who had died at Ivrea in 1492, and was revered there from that day till now as a saint and worker of miracles. These documents were given to the learned President of Maynooth, Dr. Laurence Renehan. Among them was a copy of an epitaph written in Gothic characters on parchment. About the year 1854, or 1855, Dr. Renehan gave this to one of the students of the diocese of Dromore, to be translated metrically, as it was written in Latin hexameters. The translation lay among the old President’s papers, till they came, after his death, into the care of Dr. Daniel MacCarthy, afterwards Bishop of Kerry. In the first volume (1864) of The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, page 377, Dr. MacCarthy published in his account of Blessed Thaddeus MacCarthy, the following lines which the Editor of this Magazine claims as his own across an interval of more than twice twenty golden years.

    ‘Neath marble tombs in this the Virgin’s shrine
    The bones of many a saint in peace recline.
    Thaddeus here. From Erin’s shore he came,
    A Bishop, of McCarthy’s royal name;
    At whose behest were wondrous cures oft made.
    Still Latium, Genoa, invoke his aid
    Dying, he mourned that not on Irish soil,
    Where sped his youth, should close his earthly toil;
    Nor Cloyne, nor Kerry, but Ivrea owns
    (For God so willed) the saintly Bishop’s bones.
    ‘Tis meet that they, in marble shrine encased.
    Should be within the great cathedral placed.
    Like Christ, whose tomb was for another made,
    He in Eusebius’ cenotaph is laid.

    Soon sacred prodigies his power attest,
    And all the earth proclaims him pious, blest.
    ye who hither come, our saint assail
    With prayers and votive gifts; nor, traveller, fail
    To greet with reverence the holy dead.
    Since Christ was born a thousand years had fled,
    Four hundred then and ninety-two beside
    Had passed away, when St. Thaddeus died.

    A city, which tradition points out as the place where our national apostle, St. Patrick, was raised to episcopal rank, as a prelude to his evangelisation of Ireland, and which for over four hundred years has been the faithful guardian of the remains of that strangely persecuted Irish Bishop, now known to the Catholic world as the Blessed Thaddeus, whose beatification Ivrea celebrated last September in so memorable a manner — this city of Ivrea deserves fuller notice than has been accorded to it in the Irish press. But beyond this special interest for Irish readers, its history is in itself sufficiently curious.

    It was known to Pliny, Ptolemy, and Cicero, as Eporedia, and in various public records down to the year 1200, as Iporegia, Iporiensis, Civitas, and Eporeja. This subalpine town, now named Ivrea, was originally a Roman Colony, founded during the sixth Consulship of Caius Marius, 664 years after the foundation of Rome, and about a hundred years before the birth of Christ. Lying as it does, upon the left bank of the river Dora Balta, the Romans founded it as an outpost to confine the aboriginal Salassians in the valleys to which they had driven them back.

    From a colony Ivrea rose to be a municipality with its full staff of decurions, ediles, questors, and other Roman officials. On the break-up of the Roman Empire it shared the same fate as the rest of Italy, and passed through the hands of many masters until A.D. 572, when the Lombardians made it a ducal seat, which it continued to be until 773, when it became subject to Charlemagne who placed a Marquess to rule over it. Several of the Marquesses of Ivrea held kingly rank elsewhere. After the death of the Marquess Arduin, the city was for a time governed by its bishop: from whom it passed under the yoke of the Emperors of Germany. These held it till 1248, when they made it over to Thomas II., third son of Thomas I., Count of Savoy, whose successors acquired further rights over it in 1313.

    Ivrea was not yet done with its changes of government. In 1543 it was occupied by the Spaniards, who built in it a castle for its defence. In 1554 came the French; but five years later it was restored to Duke Emmanuel Philibert. In 1641 it fell, for the second time, into the hands of the French, who, after abandoning it for a while, again got hold of it in 1704. In 1796 they captured it for the last time ; and from May, 1800, Ivrea was the capital of a French department, till the fall of Napoleon in 1814. Since that time it has remained an appanage of the House of Savoy.

    Ivrea was once a city of fifty thousand inhabitants, but through wars and pestilence its population has dwindled to ten thousand. It is healthy, and possesses attractive surroundings — castles and convents, vine-clad hills, valleys, and exquisite lakes.

    Long established as an Episcopal See, Ivrea has its cathedral and other churches, two seminaries, besides flourishing schools and orphanages, with institutions for the poor and sick. The Cathedral was once a pagan temple and circular in form, as was generally the case with pagan temples dedicated to the sun. About A.D. 350 it was purged of paganism and consecrated to the service of the true God under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin assumed into heaven, whence it became known as St. Mary’s Ivrea. In course of time much of the building was demolished and its form altered. Of the older portion nothing remains but the two campanili, some tombstones, and a fresco on a pillar of the choir. The church was enlarged in 1854.

    In this Cathedral were deposited the remains of the now beatified Thaddeus MacCarthy, Bishop of Cork and Cloyne; and it also possesses the bodies of several other saints and martyrs. In the garden behind are portions of the ancient cloister, dating from the days when the members of the chapter lived together and formed one community, as was the rule till about A.D, 1240.

    Near the Cathedral stands the fifteenth century Church of the Confraternity of St. Nicholas of Tolentino, the interior of which is richly ornamented. Behind its high altar of marble is the choir, containing thirty stalls of carved wood representing scenes in the life of St. Nicholas. It contains also a beautiful old painting of the Madonna and Child, with St. Nicholas the Bishop, and St. Nicholas of Tolentino at each side.

    In another part of the city is a beautiful church-tower, known as St. Stephen’s, which is all that remains of the Benedictine Abbey of that name founded at Ivrea by the Bishop in 1041. This abbey flourished till the fifteenth century, but in the next century it was partially demolished, and in 1757 all except this tower was taken down. Some manuscripts that had belonged to this abbey are preserved in the Cathedral Archives.

    This church-tower would appear from its materials to have been built out of the ruins of the old Boman amphitheatre of Ivrea. Amongst other Roman remains is the one-arch bridge across the Dora, which was almost totally destroyed by the French in 1706, during a siege which did immense damage to the churches and other buildings of the town. The bridge was restored by Victor Amadeus, King of Sicily, in 1716, and still further improved a century later by King Charles Felix, in 1830. There are also various urns of baked clay dating from the third century before Christ, and a beautiful marble Sarcophagus, erected in the time of Augustus to receive the remains of Caius Valerius Atticus who died at Ivrea.

    Prominent amongst the mediaeval monuments, is the castle of the Four Towers, which was built in 1368, in the highest part of the city. In 1676, one of the towers containing eight hundred barrels of gunpowder, was struck by lightning and destroyed, a hundred and seventy persons perishing under the ruins. The castle of the Four Towers is now used as a prison.

    The chief of the modem public monuments is one raised in memory of General Perrone de San Martino, a native of Ivrea, who lost his life on the battlefield of Novaro in 1849.

    In the times when stage-coaches and railways were as yet undreamt of, Ivrea stood on what was then the highway between Italy and France; and to this circumstance it owed much of its former importance. It owed to it also the distinction of having been visited at dates widely apart by great military commanders like Hannibal, Charlemagne, and the First Napoleon. This fact also accounts for St. Patrick passing through Ivrea, as is said, in the year 431, and St. Malachy of Armagh, the friend of St. Bernard, in 1139. This moreover made it the scene of the lonely but glorious death of the Blessed Thaddeus in 1492, while making his way homeward on foot as a poor and unknown pilgrim.

    Nothing now remains of the Hospice of the Twenty-one Pilgrims in which he died. It was erected in the year 1005 at the suggestion of St. Bernard of Mentone, and stood on the spot now called the Cassinali di S. Antonio on the old Aosta road outside the city. It derives its name from the fact that members of the Solerio family endowed it with funds for the support of twenty-one passing pilgrims. It was destroyed during the Franco-Spanish war in 1644; but the church, then rebuilt, is still standing.

    That Ivrea has not ceased to venerate the remains of the Blessed Thaddeus was proved by the sacred festivities of last September, in which the Bishops of Cork, of Cloyne, and of Ross took part in response to a pressing invitation, as the successors of their saintly countrymen. One of these prelates, Dr. Fitzgerald of Ross, has since been taken from us suddenly by death.

    A foremost part in these solemnities was taken by Canon Saroglia, the learned and pious Vicar-General of the diocese, on whom chiefly had devolved the laborious researches which prepared the way for the beatification of Thaddeus, Bishop of Cork and Cloyne. From his writings, especially his Album of Ivrea, the present paper has with his kind permission been compiled. He is now engaged upon a large work devoted to the religious history of Ivrea, to be published under the title of “Eporedia Sacra.”

    James Coleman.

    The Irish Monthly, Vol. 25, No. 285 (Mar., 1897), pp. 146-150.

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