OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

ALL THE SAINTS OF IRELAND

  • The Rosary of Ireland

    I have come across many items in the Victorian religious press written on the theme of Ireland and the Rosary, but the piece below, published in Australia’s Catholic Freeman’s Journal, struck me as unusual in a number of ways. ‘The Rosary of Ireland’ applies the traditional division of Joyous, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries to the history of this country and employs many of the popular tropes of the National Revival. Ireland of the joyous mysteries is romantically portrayed as an island set in a silver sea, filled with fair maidens and valiant warriors, which embraces Saint Patrick and its Christian destiny. The mystic isle is then transformed into the insula sanctorum, home of Patrick, Columba and Brendan and the ‘countless thousands more’ who contribute to the golden age of the saints. It is interesting to see a mention of the angel Victor, described in a footnote as ‘the Guardian Angel of Ireland’. The sorrowful mysteries employ familiar tropes of the Penal era – the Mass Rock, the struggle to maintain faith and nationhood and exile – but it was not until I reached the glorious mysteries that I realized I was not reading something written in the nineteenth century at all. For the glorious mysteries relate to the achievement of Irish independence, and it was only at that point that I noted that The Rosary of Ireland had been published in 1938, one year after the promulgation of the Irish Constitution, article one of which declared that:

    The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible,and sovereign right to choose its own form of Government, to determineits relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political,economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions.

    It is clear that our writer, M. Eugenie Hill, acknowledged the part played by the literary revival in Ireland taking her place among the nations. She makes more than one reference to ‘Inisfail’, a poetic name for Ireland, but perhaps more specifically a reference to the work of Aubrey de Vere (1814-1902):

    Published in 1862, Inisfail is the longest single poem by an Irish writer in English, a distinction which ought to grant it at least a portion of the critical attention which it currently lacks. Subtitled A Lyrical Chronicle of Ireland, it is composed of a sequence of one hundred and thirty-two lyric poems, each of which is a meditation upon an aspect of suffering and salvation. The sequence as a whole is structured around an historical narrative frame proposing continuities in Irish history from the time of the Cromwellian invasions to the end of the Penal Laws, with references to the events of the 1840s.

    Chris Morash, “The Little Black Rose Revisited: Church, Empire and National Destiny in the Writings of Aubrey de Vere.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 20, no. 2 (1994): 45–52.

    De Vere’s poems were frequently quoted by Victorian writers on the saints and the early medieval Irish church and it was in Inisfail that he wrote of ‘the little black rose that would be red at last’, which the writer of The Rosary of Ireland links with the brilliant Easter sun. Is this a reference to the Easter Rising of 1916 and perhaps by extension to the poet revolutionary, Joseph Mary Plunkett (1887-1916) and his poem I See His Blood upon the Rose? The Rosary of Ireland ends with another Irish revolutionary, Robert Emmett (1778-1803) and a reference to his speech from the dock where he declared ‘when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.’

    So I think that these literary allusions distinguish The Rosary of Ireland  from the many other offerings found in the popular religious press on the theme of Ireland’s relationship to the rosary. It was interesting too to see the survival of the ethos of the Victorian ‘Celtic Revival’ in a work published in the 1930s and I only wish I knew more of its author:

    THE ROSARY OF  IRELAND.

    Joyous.

    Before the Christian era ages agone,
    Ere Bethlehem’s bright star in glory shone,
    A beauteous land there was, a land most fair,
    Set in a silver sea, a jewel rare.

    A land of joy and peace, laughter and song,
    Famed for her ladies fair, and warriors strong.
    Erin the brave, for glorious deeds renowned,
    Is still, alas! by Pagan fetters bound.

    But lo! a guardian watches o’er the land,
    ‘Tis Victor, from the shining angel band;
    The time is come at last to break the chain.
    And for his chosen children, Heaven to gain.

    The Angel Victor* speeds like lightning rays,
    Bends o’er the sleeping Patrick, softly says,
    ‘Come, holy youth, the Irish voices call,
    Come with the Light of Faith, and lift the pall.’

    And now for Erin dawns the wondrous day.
    Nearer, and nearer still, with flashing ray,
    A dazzling light appears, as from afar,
    Glimmering and twinkling like the Morning Star.

    ‘Who dares enkindle fire’ the Druids cry,
    ‘Before our sacred fire is lit must die.
    Go! quench the light that now on Tara gleams,
    Or never shall we dim its shining beams.’

    Clothed in his Sacred Vestments, Patrick spoke,
    And Erin from the sleep of death awoke,
    The Druid idols from her now she spurns,
    Then gladly to the Faith of Patrick turns.

    Swiftly the torch of Patrick lights all round
    — Monasteries, Churches, Convents, Schools abound.
    Island of Saints and Scholars thro’ the ages,
    Leaving no blot nor stain on Erin’s page.

    Columba, Brendan, countless thousands more
    Sail o’er the ocean far from Erin’s shore,
    With Cross in hand, and Patrick’s flag unfurled,
    Her Missioners go forth, to teach the world.

    *Victor is the Guardian Angel of Ireland.

    Sorrowful.

    But Erin’s star of joy is setting fast,
    And bitter sorrow must be hers at last,
    Since she has had the joy of happy years,
    She now must share her Lord’s deep woe and tears.

    Ireland of Sorrow, like your Lord to be
    Despised, derided, spat upon, as He,
    Pierced to the Soul and garments dyed bright red,
    Holding the Cross through centuries of dread.

    Deep as the sea, as Mary’s sorrows were,
    Dolorous Ireland, in her grief you share,
    Faithful till death, and setting death at nought,
    Guarding the Priceless Pearl by Patrick brought.

    The fight goes on against the demon band,
    The powers of darkness rend the faithful land.
    And Erin, of the Chalice, drinks so deep,
    Her treasured Faith and Nationhood to keep.

    And as a light in darkness shines more bright
    The Faith of Ireland shone through darkest night.
    Tho’ trodden underfoot by ruthless foes,
    More gloriously with deeper lustre glows.

    A vivid redness floods the evening sky,
    As flames from burning churches mount on high,
    And bells give forth a harsh and clarion call,
    When lofty towers and noble spires fall.

    The shamrock shows a deeply crimson stain,
    Where round the Mass Rock Priests and people slain,
    And bowed in grief, as Erin’s thousands fell,
    Unconquered still, she braves the gates of hell.

    Scattered afar the Children of the Gael,
    Exiled and banished from their Innisfail,
    They plant the Cross of Christ in foreign climes,
    And thro’ these exiled ones, the Mass bell chimes.

    Glorious.

    But Erin’s long and dreadful woe is past.
    The sun burst’s rising in the East at last,
    And spite of centuries of pain and loss,
    She stands Victorious beneath the Cross.

    Hail! valiant Eire, bravest of the brave.
    Her exiled Children call across the wave,
    The ‘small black rose’ *puts on its crimson bloom,
    The brilliant Easter sun dispels the gloom.

    Then silvery clear ring out the joyous bells,
    Victory and peace their happy message tells,
    Erin among the nations takes her place,
    A noble nation and a noble race.

    Hail glorious Eire, let us joy with you;
    To God and Patrick may you e’er be true
    Thro’ all the ages that are still to be
    May you maintain your spotless purity.

    The sin of heresy will ne’er defile
    The peerless Faith you hold, dear Emerald isle,
    You who for centuries have been appointed
    The Cradle and the School of God’s Anointed.

    The glorious band of patriots we hail
    Who gave their lives for you, sweet Innisfail,
    Your freedom won, and now in letters gold,
    May gentle Emmet’s epitaph be told.

    *’The Little Black Rose,’ by Aubrey de Vere.

    M. EUGENIE HILL.

    Catholic Freeman’s Journal Thursday 19 May 1938, page 37

     

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  • 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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  • Saint Maol Eóin, October 20

     

    A blog reader asked me recently about a saint Maol Eóin (Maeleoin, Mael Eoin) with a feast day on October 20. The martyrologies are the only source of information I could find about him and they provide some tantalizing clues, although the calendar entries are somewhat confusing. The Martyrology of Oengus ends its entry for the day with: 

    the fair sun at that mountain, 
    of those splendid Children of Eogan

    but the late twelfth-century Martyrology of Gorman hails:

    Mael Eoin of the beauty,
    with splendid Aedán
    A scholiast note records that Mael Eoin was:

    a bishop and an anchorite.

    The seventeenth-century Martyrology of Donegal in its entries for October 20 leads with:

    Maeleoin, Bishop and Anchorite,

    I found these calendar entries difficult to decipher. The name of Maol Eóin does not appear on the Martyrology of Tallaght, but could he be one of the unnamed ‘Children of Eogan’ i.e. a descendant of Eoghan, (perhaps a reference to the founder ancestor of the Eóganachta) recorded in the Martyrology of Oengus?  Saint Marianus O’Gorman not only names Saint Maol Eóin but appears to link him with the equally obscure Aedán. It is to the later, anonymous scholiast on the Martyrology of Gorman that we owe the information that Saint Maol Eóin was a bishop and anchorite, but where and when he held these offices we don’t know. A wide variety of ecclesiastical offices are described in the Irish annals and it is not uncommon for a bishop to be described as the holder of an additional title. Nuadu, for example, a ninth-century Bishop of Armagh, was also described as bishop and anchorite, something I discussed in an earlier post here.

    Canon O’Hanlon references the later calendars in his brief account of Saint Maol Eóin in Volume X of his Lives of the Irish Saints:

    ARTICLE V. ST. MAELEOIN, BISHOP AND ANCHORITE. 

    At this date, Marianus O’Gorman has inserted in his Martyrology the feast of Mael Eoin “of the beauty,” and the scholiast states he was a bishop and an anchorite. To what particular See he be longed has not transpired, neither can we find the period when he flourished. The name of Maeleoin, Bishop and Anchorite, occurs also in the Martyrology of Donegal, at the 20th of October. The Bollandists repeat these notices, at this day.

     Thus, sadly, it seems that Saint Maol Eóin is one of the many Irish saints shrouded in obscurity, with only the Martyrology of Gorman offering any clue as to his identity.

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