OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Tag: Feasts

  • Feast of the Birth of Saint Colum Cille, December 7

    December 7 marks the feast of the birth of Saint Colum Cille (Columba), an event still remembered in the oral tradition and locality of Gartan, County Donegal. Another account of this feast can be read at my other site here, but below is an account of Gartan and its famous son from a 19th-century antiquarian guidebook.

    GARTAN

    St. Columbkille was born at Gartan, in the territory of Tirconnell, near the base of the Glendowan mountains.

    Manus O’Donnell chief of Tir-Connell, who died in 1532, has furnished the fullest collection of the acts of St. Columba, the patron saint of Tir-Connell… Manus O’Donnell records how it was he who had ordered the part of this life which was in Latin, to be put into Gaelic, and who ordered the part that was difficult (i.e. very ancient Irish,) to be modified, and who gathered and put together the parts scattered through the old books of Erin, and who dictated it out of his own mouth with great labour and a great expenditure of time in studying and arranging all its parts, as they are left here in writing by us, in love and friendship for his illustrious Saint, Relative and Patron, to whom he was devoutly attached”.

    In this work Manus O’Donnell describes the territory of Gartan. “That land, Gartan, which lies in the County of Tir-Connell is desolate, even to the appearance of a wilderness, on account of the very lofty mountains which take up its whole extent to the north, but a declivity which is adjacent to the more cultivated plains and exposed to the rays of the sun, and lakes situate at the foot thereof, render it most delightful in the Summer season”.

    LOUGH BEAGH

    St. Columbcille was born on the 7th December, A.D. 519 (as Colgan, has the date), O’Donnell gives 520, and Reeves gives 521, as that most likely to be the true period; he was forty-two years of age when he removed to lona; his death occurring there thirty-four years later.

    Around Gartan as the birth-place of St. Columbcille, shall always be centered a portion of the interest and veneration that is attached to his name.

    The parish of Gartan extends north to Calabbar Bridge, where the road to Dunlewy branches off. Its western boundary skirts west of the Dooish mountain, as it rises 1994 feet over the waters of Lough Glen-Veagh. Through a chasm formed by some mighty convulsion, the Lough extends for a distance of about three and a-half miles in length, by an average of about four hundred and fifty yards in breadth. Here is ‘ Lone Glenveagh”. The weird beauty of the place must be seen, it cannot be painted or sufficiently described…

    …As we proceed south, its eastern confine passes through the centre of Lough Kibbon, (a corruption of its Irish name Loch-mhic-Ciabain) we reach Gartan Loch, or Lough Beagh, sheltering amidst the more “cultivated plains”, mentioned in 1532 by Manus O’Donnell. This Lough extends in a south-westerly direction about two and a-half miles, with a more sinuous foreground, and is from a quarter to half a mile in width. Here on its banks St. Columbcille was born.

    The lines of St. Mura of Fahan cited by O’Donnell and the O’Clery’s are: “He was born at Gartan by his consent; And he was nursed at Cill-mic Neoin [Kilmacrennan] and the son of goodness was baptized at Tulach Dubhglaise [Temple-Douglas] of God”.

    Dr. Reeves observes that the local traditions decidedly confirm this Irish account. The writer, several years ago traversed every spot of this district, and stood on the flagstone pointed out by the people as St. Columbkille’s Stone, that marks the place where it is traditionally stated he was born. This stone is to be seen to the S.W., in the townland of Lacoo.

    The stone is about eighteen feet in circumference, and is indented with about sixty holes of average depth of two and a half inches. The flagstone itself is about six inches thick.

    W.J. Doherty, Inis-Owen and Tirconnell – being some account of Antiquities and Writers of the County of Donegal (Dublin, 1895), 13-16.

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  • 'Venerable, aged Simeon'

    I was surprised to see that the entries for the saints of October 8 begin in the Martyrology of Gorman with this lovely verse in praise of Saint Simeon:

    8. a.

    Símeon sruith saeglac[h]
    ro gab Ísu ollán,
    ar gecaib a gellamh

    ‘Venerable, aged Simeon
    who received great ample Jesus
    on the branches of his white arms’.

    A commentator has added in Latin ‘ipse accepit eum in ulnas suas, Luc. ii. 28‘. I could not find Saint Simeon commemorated on this day in any of the other Irish calendars, and as he is commemorated in the East on February 3, I wondered where the 12th-century Irish calendarist, Marianus O’Gorman, sourced this October feastday. The translator of the Martyrology of Gorman, Whitley Stokes, does not comment on this particular feast in his discussion of the Biblical saints found on this calendar but notes that ‘Gorman, as a rule, agrees with the western martyrologies’. And indeed the Roman Martyrology at October 8 records: ‘The same day, the birthday of the blessed Simeon, an aged man, who, as we read in the Gospel, took our Lord Jesus in his arms’.

     I will close with the Song of Simeon in Irish, taken from the translation of the New Testament by Canon Coslett Quinn:

    A Thiarna, is anois a cheadaíonn tú do do sheirbhíseach imeacht faoi shíocháin, de réir do bhriathair;
    mar tá mo shúile d’eis do shlánú a fheiceáil,
    an slánú a réamhullmhaigh tú os comhair na gciníocha uile,
    an solas a tharbharfadh eolas ort do na Gintlithe,
    agus an solas a bheadh ina ghlóir do do mhuintir Iosrael.

    Lúcás II, 29-32.

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

  • The Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel in Ireland

    As September 29 is the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel I republish a 2009 post from my former blog which provides a sketch of the history of the feast in Ireland:

    Canon O’Hanlon has a brief account of the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel in Ireland based on the surviving calendar entries for September 29:

    In the Church from a very remote date, the Festival of this Head of the Angelic Host had been observed with special solemnity. In Ireland, St. Oengus the Culdee has pronounced a distinguished eulogy on him, at the 29th of September, in the “Feilire”, thus translated by Dr. Whitley Stokes in the Leabhar Breacc copy:

    ” At the fight against the multitudinous
    Dragon of our Michael stout, victorious, the
    soldier whitesided, hostful, will slay
    Wrathful Antichrist.”

    Allusion is made to his fight with the Dragon and Anti-Christ. The Scholiast has comments which state, that Michael was Prince of the Angels, and that as a soldier he was the champion whose name is explained by ‘sicut Deus’ in Mount Garganus. In recording his feast at this day, Marianus O’Gorman addresses the Archangel Michael as a powerful intercessor:

    “May the great Archangel Michael be a buckler to me against devils to protect my soul!”

    I was intrigued by these references to Saint Michael and the battle with the Antichrist and went on to do some further reading on the subject. One of the papers I read posed the question:

    The tenth and eleventh centuries witnessed an extraordinary increase of interest in the archangel in western Europe. What explains the rapid growth of this cult during the period, especially in the years between 950 and 1050?

    The author gives this answer:

    1. The militancy of St Michael as a symbol for this turbulent epoch. This development of sacred militancy is unquestionably one of the principal reasons for the popularity of the saint.

    2. Another is the increasing prominence given to St Michael as a personal protector of every Christian soul, the angelic cura animarum. Some of this interest stems from the western discovery of the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius in the 9th century, with his attention to the hierarchy of spirits and the function of the archangels as messengers. Yet some of it also arises from the Celtic tradition in which during the Middle Ages St Michael was seen as a soulmate, one responsible for conducting each person after death to Judgment. Out of this tradition would come the image of Michael with his scales weighing the souls at Judgment, an image that would later become so prominent on the western facade of Gothic cathedrals.

    3. A third aspect of the increasing importance of the archangel in this period is his apocalyptic role. How do we account for the growing interest in the apocalyptic Michael?…

    He then looked specifically at the cult of the Archangel in Ireland:

    As in so many other aspects of the Christian life of the early Middle Ages, Ireland seems also to have been a harbinger in its early interest in the cult of the apocalyptic Michael. A good example is found in the occurence of the feast of St Michael in 767. A terrifying thunder storm created a wave of panic in which the Irish, convinced the Last Judgment was about to occur, begged the archangel to intercede for them:

    ‘The fair of the clapping of hands [so called] because terrific and horrible signs appeared at the time, which were like unto the signs of the day of judgment, namely great thunder and lightning, so that it was insufferable to all to hear the one and see the other. Fear and horror seized the men of Ireland, so that their religious seniors ordered them to make two fasts, together with fervent prayer and one meal between them, to protect and save them from a pestilence, precisely at Michaelmas. Hence came the Lamhchomart, which was called the fire from heaven’ (Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters from the Earliest Period to the year 1616, ed. J O’Donovan, Vol I (Dublin 1851), pp 370-73.) The Annals of Ulster list the event under 771.

    The presence of Michael in Ireland seems more manifest in a number of ways in the 10th and early 11th centuries. The archangel was depicted with his scales on a high cross at Monasterboice. He also appears in the concluding portion of the great Irish epic of salvation history, the Saltaird, c.988. In this work of over 8,000 lines, which seems to have served as one of the foundations for the later medieval interest in the Fifteen Signs Before Doomsday, Michael will summon all to the Last Judgment:

    ‘The archangel will call a clear call over the clay of every man, upon Adam’s strong seed: all the many will arise”. (Lines 8229-32 of the Saltair na Rann).

    The growing importance of this archangel for the Irish is additionally confirmed by the fact that sometime in the period between 950 and 1044, the most famous site dedicated to him in Ireland had his name attached to it. The jagged peak jutting 700 feet almost straight up out of the Atlantic twenty miles off the south-west Irish coast became, not simply Skellig, but Skellig Michael.

    Daniel Callahan, The Cult of St Michael the Archangel and the “Terrors of the Year 1000” in The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious Expectation and Social Change, 950-1050 by Richard Allen Landes, Andrew Gow, David C. Van Meter (Oxford Univ Press US, 2003)181-204.

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