OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Tag: Feasts

  • 'Great Mary's Holy Nativity': September 8

     

    The birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary is commemorated on September 8 and is a feast found on our earliest Irish calendars. The Martyrology of Oengus records:

    8. Thou shalt commemorate Mary: thou art not deadened on a scanty meal: with Timothy and three hundreds of martyrs.

    and the scholiast notes:

    8. is commemorated .i. natiuitas etc. Mary’s nativity is commemorated here, on a scanty meal, for pit means a meal, quasi dixisset thou shouldst not fast on Mary’s feast.

    It is obviously a mark of the joyful nature of the feast and its importance that the normal fasting rules are set aside and a ‘scanty meal’ is not deemed appropriate.
    The Martyrology of Tallaght also records the feast as:
    Natiuitas Mariae matris Iesu 
     
    and the later twelfth-century Martyrology of Gorman notes:
    Noemghein Maire móre
    Great Mary’s holy nativity.
    Canon O’Hanlon in the September volume of his Lives of the Irish Saints has a short article about the Feast in which he mentions that the County Wexford parish of Kilnenor was one of those which held a traditional pattern on September 8. I was able to consult an online version of the Ordnance Survey Letters which Canon O’Hanlon had cited in his footnotes and there I learnt that this pattern ‘was held on the 8th of September till the year 1798, when it was abolished’.

    Article VI. Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

    In the ancient Irish Church, the Festival of the Birth of our Divine Lord’s Mother was celebrated on the eighth day of September, as we learn from the Feilire of Aengus. On this there is a short comment. About the year 695, this feast was appointed by Pope Servius. In various parts of Ireland, this festival was celebrated formerly with very special devotion, as parishes, churches and chapels had been dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and this was a favoured festival day. The patrons or patterns that until of late were yearly celebrated very conclusively attest it. In Kilnenor parish, County of Wexford, there is a holy well, at which a patron was formerly held on the 8th of September. According to a pious tradition a concert of angels is said to have been heard in the air to solemnize the Nativity or Birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

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  • Domhnach na Cincíse: An Spiorad Naomh umainn

     

    To mark the feast of Pentecost below is a short poem, an Invocation of the Holy Spirit, by Maol Íosa Ó Brolcháin, a scholar saint of Donegal, who died in 1086 and whose feast day is commemorated on January 16. A 2013 post on the saint and his work can be found in the blog archive here. The original Irish text and a Modern Irish version can be found in Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin’s 1986 study Maol Íosa Ó Brolcháin, below is the text in Modern Irish plus an English translation from George Sigerson’s 1897 anthology Bards of the Gael and Gall:

    An Spiorad Naomh umainn
    ionainn agus linn,
    an Spiorad Naomh chugainn;
    tagadh, a Chríost go tobann.
     
    An Spiorad Naomh ag áitreabh
    ár gcoirp is ár n-anama;
    dár slánú go réidh
    ar ghuais, ar ghalar,
     
    ar dheamhain, ar pheacaí
    ar ifreann lena ilolc;
    A Íosa! go mbeannaí
    agus go saora do Spiorad sinn. 

    HOLY SPIRIT

    MAELISU *

    Holy Spirit of Love
    In us, round us, above;
    Holy Spirit, we pray
    Send, sweet Jesus! this day.
     
    Holy Spirit, to win
    Body and soul within,
    To guide us that we be 
    From ills and illness free,
     
    From sin and demons’ snare,
    From Hell and evils there,
    O Holy Spirit, come!
    Hallow our heart, Thy home.

    * Maelisu, grandson of Brolcan, of Derry, died in the year 1038. ‘Mael-Isu” means “Client of Jesus” (literally, the “Tonsured of Jesus”.

    George Sigerson, Bards of the Gael and Gall (London, 1897), 192.

    Note: Sigerson has given the date of the poet’s death as 1038. The Annals of Ulster however record Máol Íosa’s death in 1086, describing him as ’eminent in wisdom and piety and in poetry in both languages ‘, i.e. Irish and Latin. A more literal translation can be found in Gerard Murphy’s 1956 anthology, Early Irish Lyrics: Eighth to Twelfth Centuries.
     

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  • The Feast of the Transfiguration in the Martyrology of Oengus

    August 6 is the day on which the Feast of the Transfiguration is celebrated throughout the Universal Church. However, it was not always so, as a German ecclesiastical historian explains:

    From quite an early date, this festival had been celebrated in divers churches, both East and West, on different days. The date now observed, the 6th August, was appointed for the festival by Calixtus III. in 1457, in memory of the victory over the Turks, gained by John Capistran and George Hunyadi, at Belgrade. In the choice of a day, he seems to have been influenced by the Greek calendar, where the festival had already been kept on this day.

    K.A. Heinrich Kellner, Heortology: A History Of The Christian Festivals From Their Origin To The Present Day (London, 1908), 105.

    One of those different days is found on the early ninth-century Irish calendar, The Martyrology of Oengus. Here the Feast of the Transfiguration is commemorated on July 26, as Canon O’Hanlon noted in his entries for this day in Volume VII of the Lives of the Irish Saints:

    Article IV. Festival of Christ’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor.

    According to the “Feilire” of St. Aengus, at the 26th of July, the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Divine Lord on Mount Tabor was commemorated in the ancient Irish Church. To this a comment is found affixed. In the Bruxelles copy of Usuard this Feast is also set down, and while the Bollandists give the text, they express ignorance of the source whence it had been drawn, but they refer to the 6th of August as the chief Festival held in the Universal Church.

    26. At the passion of Jovianus
    with his fair train of pure gold
    was the Transfiguration, at daybreak,
    of  Jesus on Mount Tabor.

    The accompanying note reads:

    26. on Mount Tabor, i.e. in the tribe of Nephthalim, on a mountain of Galilee. Transfiguration of Christ etc.

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