OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Tag: Female Saints

  • Saint Ite of Kileedy, January 15

    January 15 is the commemoration of Saint Ite of Kileedy, ‘the shining light of the women of Mumhan’, as Saint Oengus the Martyrologist calls her. She is one of a handful of Irish female saints who have surviving Lives and in his account of Saint Ite below, Father Albert Barry has drawn on this rich hagiographical tradition to present a picture of her sanctity and her miracles:

    Saint Ite was born in the year 480, and was of the Deise family. St. Patrick had preached the Gospel to the Deise a few years before her birth. ”Patrick then went into the southern Deise (Co. Limerick), and began to build a Church at Ard-Patrick”, Tripartite. The Deise afterwards went southwards towards the sea (Co. Waterford).

    Ite was fond of fasting and prayer whilst she was still a child. The room where she slept seemed one night to be on fire, but when the inmates of the house rushed into it, they beheld a wonderful light shining from the face of the sleeping girl: and she looked like an Angel. 

    An Angel gave her three precious gems, telling her that the three Persons     of the blessed Trinity would in future watch over her.

    Her father wished her to marry, but she would not, because she had consecrated her virginity to God. He was very angry with her, but she said to her mother, “Although my father now forbids me to give myself to Jesus Christ, he will one day tell me to go where I wish in order to give myself to God”. She fasted and prayed for three days that the holy will of God might be done in her. On the third day the devil came and said to her, “Alas, you will withdraw yourself and many others from me”. And an Angel at the same time said to her father, ”Why do you hinder your daughter taking the veil of virginity? Ite will be a great and holy virgin before God and His saints. You ought to let her go wherever she wishes. She will serve God in another part of this land.” Her father, therefore, at once allowed her to go away.

    Ite left her father’s house, and on her way heard the devils saying: “Woe to us, the Angels of God help her: she will snatch many souls from us.” She went to a neighbouring church and there got the veil of virginity from a Priest, and, led by an Angel, went to the west of Hy-Connail and built a house for herself and some companions at Cluain Creadhail, at the foot of Sliabh-Luachra (Killeedy, Co. Limerick.)

    Ite and her Nuns prayed daily for the people of the place, and many blessings thereby flowed upon them. They, in turn, gave many gifts to her Convent. She had the gifts of prophecy and of working miracles, and she healed many sick persons by her prayers. She once told a holy friend that she had got these gifts from God, because from her youth she had always thought on holy things, and because she had so often prayed to the Blessed Trinity.

    Ite spent many days at a time without food, prayed much, and earnestly strove to bring up young maidens in the fear and love of God. Cuinnen of Conneire says of her:

    Ite loved much the bringing up of youth
    Humility without sadness:
    Her cheek to the floor she laid not:
    Ever, ever for the love of the Lord.

    Since she bound the girdle on her body.
    And I know it since I’ve heard it,
    She ate not a full or sufficing meal,
    Such was Mide.

    Aenghus, in his lives of the Irish Saints, also thus writes of her: 

    ”Ite ever bore great sufferings,
    and was much given to fasting,
    and was the shining     light
    of the women of Mumhan.”

    She was not only a teacher of youth, but even gave wise counsel to holy and learned men. S. Breanan and S. Mochoemoc owed much to her teaching. S. Breanan one day asked her to tell him what were the three works most pleasing to God. She said: ”Trustful resignation to God of a sinless heart: a guileless religious life: generosity with charity. These three works are most pleasing to God.” He then asked her to say what were the three things most hateful to Him. She answered: “Hatred of men: wickedness in the heart: too great love of money. These three things are very hateful to God.”

    A Nun one day saw three bright balls of light over Ite’s head as she was praying to the Blessed Trinity.

    Ite prayed to God that she might, on a coming feast-day, get Holy Communion at the hands of a very holy Priest. Her prayer was heard, and she was led by an Angel to Clonmacnois, and there ate the heavenly Bread. The holy Priest who gave her Communion afterwards set out for Ite’s Convent, and when he had come to it, asked her to give sight to a blind Monk then with him. She did so, and asked the holy Priest to sing Mass for her. After Mass she gave him a present of the vestments, but he would not take them, saying that he had been forbidden by his Abbot to take any gift from her. Ite then said, “Your holy Abbot will not be angry if you take this towel as a gift from me; I will tell you why. One day he came to the Convent of the holy virgin Caireche and she asked to be allowed to wash his feet. Then this holy virgin washed the feet of your Abbot and wiped them with a towel. I give it now to you, and he will be glad to get it when reminded of this fact”. The holy Priest then took the gift, and having got her blessing, went back to Clonmacnois.

    A man, broken-hearted, through the death of his son, came to the Convent, and weeping very much, begged her to bring him back to life. He said: “I will not give over weeping, nor will I leave this house until you bring him back to life.” She answered gently: “What you ask is above my merits, and is a work fit only for the Apostles and holy men like them”. But he said: ”I am, above all, sorry because my son lost the use of his speech, so that he was not able to confess his sins; I, therefore, beseech you to get from the Holy Trinity that he may come back to life even for one day.” Ite then said: ” How long do you want him to live if the good God should have pity on you and bring back your son to life?”  The father answered: “I will be glad if he lives even for one day.” Ite said: ” He will live for more than seven years from this time.” She prayed earnestly to God, and her prayer was heard, and the child came to life again.

    Her uncle died, and his sons by her wish came to the Convent. She said to them: “My uncle, your father, is dead. Alas, he is now suffering for his sins. We ought to do something to lessen his sufferings. Let each one of you give bread and meat and butter to the poor every day for the next year for the good of his soul. Then come back to me.” They did as she bade them and then came back to see her. Ite said to them: ”Your father has been freed from much suffering through your alms and my prayers. Now go and do the same thing during the coming year and then come back again.” When they had come back at the end of the year Ite said: ”Your father is now freed from his sufferings, but give clothing to the poor and come back once more. They did so, and having come to her again, she told them that their father had at last gone to heaven: ” Your father now enjoys everlasting happiness through your alms, my prayers, but above all through the mercy of God; keep always from the sinful pleasures of this world, that you may not suffer for your sins as he did.” They thanked God and their holy cousin and went home.

    In the year 546 the clan of the Corcoiche of Hy-Figeinte (Co. Limerick), made war on the people of Hy-Connaill. Ite told the soldiers to do penance for their sins before going to battle. They did so, and she prayed whilst they fought, and the small and weak army of Hy-Connaill, through her prayers, won the battle.

    One of her nuns fell into sin and God made it known to Ite. She said: “Today one of our family has fallen into sin; I wish to know who among you has become the prey of the ravening wolf?”  Each denied it, but Ite drove the guilty one from the house. However, she took her back afterwards, and, helped by Ite, this nun, led henceforth a blameless life, and did great penance until her death.

    Ite suffered great agony from a cancer that ate away her side, but she bore it gladly from her love for Jesus Christ.

    In the year 569, Ite became very sick, and crowds flocked from all sides to the Convent on hearing of her illness, and, kneeling outside, prayed for a happy death for her whom they loved so much.

    When she was dying she prayed earnestly to the holy Trinity to bless the Priests and people of Hy-Connaill, and with a prayer to the blessed Trinity on her lips she slept in the Lord.

    Holy Mass was solemnly sung for her, and she was buried in presence of a great crowd of weeping people. Many miracles were worked by her both then and afterwards, and she was taken by the people of Hy-Connaill as their patron and protector. She has ever since been called “The Brigid of Munster.”

    Her feast-day is kept January 15th.

    Rev. Albert Barry, Lives of Irish Saints (Dublin, n.d.)


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

  • Saints Ethnea and Fidelmia, January 11

    M.F. Cusack, The Life of St. Patrick (1871)

    Saints Ethnea and Fidelmia (Ethna and Fidelma) are sisters who feature in one of the most beautiful stories from the hagiography of Saint Patrick. The pair boast an impressive aristocratic pedigree, being the daughters of King Laoighaire and grand-daughters of Niall of the Nine Hostages. Their story is set against the backdrop of the struggle between Christianity and paganism as Saint Patrick comes to Croghan, the royal residence of the kings of Connaught. There he encounters these daughters of King Laoighaire. We can let Saint Patrick’s biographer, Tirechan, take up the story:

    Afterwards, then, before sunrise, holy Patrick came to the well that is called Clebach on the eastern slopes of Cruachu. They sat down beside the well, and suddenly there appeared two daughters of King Loiguire, Ethne the fair and Fedelm the red. These had come, as is the women’s custom, to wash in the morning. They found the holy gathering of bishops with Patrick by the well, and they had no idea where they were from or what was their nature or their people or their homeland; but they thought that maybe they were men of the si or the gods of the earth or phantoms.

    The girls said to them: “Are you really there? Where have you come from?”

    Patrick replied to them:”It would be better for you to confess faith in our true God than to ask questions about our origin.”

    The first girl asked: “Who is God and where is God, and whose God is he, and where is his house? Has your God sons and daughters, gold and silver? Is he alive forever? Is he beautiful? Have many people fostered his son? Are his daughters dear and beautiful to the men of this world? Is he in heaven or on earth, in the sea, on mountains, in valleys? Give us some idea of him: how may he be seen, how loved; how may he be found – is he found in youth or in old age?”

    In reply, Patrick, filled with the Holy Spirit, said: “Our God is the God of all people, the God of heaven and earth, of the seas and the rivers, the God of the sun and the moon and of all the stars, the God of the high mountains and of the deep valleys. He is God above heaven and in heaven and under heaven, and has as his dwelling place heaven and earth and the sea and all that are in them. His life is in all things; he makes all things live; he governs all things; he supports all things. He kindles the light of the sun; he builds the light and the manifestations of the night, he makes wells in arid land and dry islands in the sea, and he sets the stars in place to serve the major lights. He has a son who is coeternal with him and of like nature. The Son is not younger than the Father nor the Father than the Son; and the Holy Spirit breathes in them. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not separate. Truly, now, since you are daughters of an earthly king, I wish that you will believe and I wish to wed you to the king of heaven.”

    And the girls said, as if with one voice and from one heart: “Teach us most diligently how we may believe in the heavenly king, so that we may see him face to face. Direct us, and we will do whatever you say.”

    And Patrick said: “Do you believe that you cast off the sin of your father and mother through baptism?”

    They replied: “We believe.”

    “Do you believe in penance after sin?”

    “We believe.”

    “Do you believe in life after death?” “Do you believe in the resurrection on the Day of Judgment?”

    “We believe.”

    “Do you believe in the unity of the Church?”

    “We believe.”

    And they were baptized, and a white veil placed on their heads. They demanded to see the face of Christ, to which the saint said: “Unless you taste death, and unless you receive the sacrament you can’t see the face of Christ.”

    They replied: “Give us the sacrament, so that it will be possible for us to see the Son, our bridegroom.”

    They received God’s eucharist and slept in death. Their friends laid them both in one bed, covered with their clothes, and raised a lament and a great keen.

    The druid Caplit, who had fostered one of them, came and wept. Patrick preached to him, and he believed, and the hair of his head was shorn. And his brother Mael came and said: “My brother believed in Patrick, but I don’t. I will convert him back again to heathenism”.

    And he spoke harsh words to Patrick and to Mathonus. But Patrick preached to him and converted him to God’s penance. The hair of his head was shorn. Its style had been that of the druids – “airbacc giunnae“, as it is called. From this comes the most famous of Irish sayings, “Calvus [‘bald ‘, i.e. ‘Mael’] and Caplit: the same difference” – they believed in God.

    When the days of keening the kings’ daughter came to an end they buried them beside the well of Clebach and made a round ditch in the fashion of a ferta. That was the custom of the heathen Irish. But we call it relic, that is, the remains of the girls.

    And the ferta was granted in perpetuity to Patrick and his heirs after him, along with the bones of the holy girls. He built an earthen church in that place.

    (translation from Liam de Paor, Saint Patrick’s World, 163-165).

    Canon O’Hanlon admits that the evidence for the numbering of Ethnea and Fidelmia among the saints of Ireland on 11th January, owed more to the 17th-century hagiologist Father John Colgan than to the Irish calendars. A Saint Feidelmai is listed on the Martryology of Tallaght on January 11, as was noted by Colgan, who also noted the presence of a Saint Ethnea on the 28th February. Thus, as O’Hanlon confesses:

    ‘The only reason Colgan had for placing the festival of both holy virgins at this day was the circumstance of a St. Fedelmia first occurring in our calendars, and a want of knowing that day to which their Acts could more appropriately be assigned.’

    Whether either of these saints listed on the calendars can be identified with the daughters of Laoighaire is open to question. But as Canon O’Hanlon points out, Colgan has good reason for his making sure these ‘heroic virgins’ occupy their place:

    ‘First, all the Acts of St. Patrick concur in recording their admirable innocence of life, their miraculous conversion, and their no less miraculous passage to the society of their Spouse, Jesus Christ. Secondly, the fact of a church having been erected to their memory, at the place where they died, manifests the affectionate reverence entertained for them by St. Patrick himself. Thirdly, the transmission of their relics, from the first place of their deposition to the Metropolitan See of Armagh, indicates still more the respect in which those noble virgins were held, long after their departure, and which seems corroborative of their having been in the odour of sanctity. ‘

    Who could disagree? The beauty and pathos of the story of the conversion of these royal sisters at the well and of the wonderful confession of faith which their questions elicited from Saint Patrick, make them indeed worthy.

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  • Saint Fine, Abbess of Kildare, January 9

    Canon O’Hanlon has a very short entry for Fine or Finia, an eighth-century abbess of Kildare, whom the great 17th-century Irish hagiologist, Father John Colgan, believed had died on January 9, an event recorded in the Irish Annals:


    St. Finia or Fine, Abbess of Kildare. [Eighth Century.]
    Because truth and innocence of life distinguish holy virgins, they live without stain before the throne of God. We are informed by Colgan, that Finia, Abbess of Kildare, died on the 9th of January, A.D. 800. The same year is set down for the death of this Fine, in the Annals of the Four Masters.
    Although it is not expressly stated, Colgan seems to regard this day as dedicated to her memory.
    It seems impossible to discover much else about this particular successor to Saint Brigid as an individual, but Christina Harrington, in her valuable work on the role of women in the Irish church, can place the office of abbess into a context for us:
    The sources of material on Irish abbesses are extremely patchy, and the overall quantity of evidence quite slim. The Irish left no guiding or prescriptive texts on this office; there is no surviving correspondence such as is found in Anglo-Saxon England and which proves so illuminating for the abbess’s position there. There is a small but important quantity of legal material in which are found occasional notes concerning abbesses’ rights and privileges; there is a large amount of hagiography containing anecdotes about abbesses; and there are annal entries for abbesses of the most famous houses…
    In female saints’ Lives, the characterization of the foundress serves repeatedly to restate the holy ideal not only for the ordinary nun, but also for the abbess, since in Ireland the major female saints were abbesses. As the spiritual heir of the foundress saint, the abbess was supposed to manifest at least in part her patron’s virtues and be in her own lifetime a role model in the religious life. The Lives also offer insights into the practicalities of an abbess’s duties, both to her own nuns and also to the outside world. Thus the foundress formed the prototype for the abbess’s role, both spiritually and practically….
    In her community of nuns, the abbess too was the supervisor and governor, domina and mother. In the female Lives, the abbess is the person who is directly responsible for ensuring the monastery’s survival. She decides if the community is to move location. She procures food and beer in times of scarcity, and organizes help in fending off attackers in times of danger. It is she, for example, who asks for charitable help from clerics, monasteries, and other nunneries when her own community runs into difficulty.
    Decisions on who joined the familia were within the abbess’s remit: it was she who approved the intake of novices and the adoption of fosterlings and abandoned babies. She was responsible for the maintenance of the moral standard and adherence to the rule. Then there were matters of discipline, and in the Lives the abbess appears as inspector, judge, and setter of punishments.
    Like the foundress saint whose heir she was, the abbess had to strive to embody the seemingly contradictory qualities of world-renunciation and temporal dominion. She was to uphold the ascetic tradition whilst at the same time shoring up and even expanding her church’s sphere of control…
    One of the abbess’s most important tasks in the continued work of aggrandizing her church was the provision and reception of hospitality, which in early medieval Ireland formed one of the major currencies of social interchange, social cohesion, and assertion of power and status. Failing to provide hospitality to those whose rank warranted it brought dishonour upon the failed host; providing abundantly brought status, and fulfilled economic and/or ecclesiastical obligations…
    The ideal abbess was a provider of abundance to all the religious superiors who came to her community. A poem attributed to St Brigit from the tenth or eleventh century, shows her as the giver of hospitality: the feast she provides is one of spiritual nourishment, and her overlord is none less than Christ and the hosts of heaven. Hospitality was a Christian virtue and Brigit its exemplar, just as Monenna was treated as an exemplar of the discipline of fasting.
    C. Harrington, Women in a Celtic Church- Ireland 450-1150 (Oxford University Press, 2002), 165-169.
    Harrington has much more to say about the office of abbess, and has a particularly interesting analysis of the power that these women were able to wield in both the secular and the ecclesiastical spheres. Irish law did not see women as legally competent and some of the sources upheld the need for all women to have a male ‘head’. In theory this would seem to create a problem for Abbesses as the equivalent of male ‘heads’ of religious communities. Yet the sources also indicate that this was not necessarily so in practice. Harrington sees the accounts of abbesses acting as confessors or soul-friends as especially important to the question of ‘headship’, although of course an Abbess could not hear confession in the sacramental sense. Indeed, some Abbesses were even prized as soul-friends by men, Saint Samthann of Clonbroney is one famous example. Abbesses like Fine were also drawn from the Irish aristocracy of the day and thus derived some of their authority from their connections to powerful ruling families. In her case this authority was bolstered by the fact that Fine was the heir to a foundress of exceptional sanctity, and it is surely a mark of how important a figure the Abbess of Kildare was felt to be that the Irish Annals continued to record the deaths of the successors of Saint Brigid for centuries after her passing.

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