OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Tag: Irish Saints

  • Saint Briga of Kilbride, January 21

    Today we commemorate Saint Briga who is a namesake of Saint Brigid and may possibly be one of her contemporaries. Canon O’Hanlon admits that the evidence for both the exact feast day of this saint and for her identity are rather shaky and his account only serves to illustrate some of the difficulties involved in researching the lives of the Irish saints. The attribution of January 21 as the feast day of Saint Briga of Kilbride is made in the twelfth-century Calendar of Cashel, a source which was available to the seventeenth-century hagiologist, Father John Colgan, but which is now lost:

     

    Saint Briga or Brigid of Kilbride, in the Diocese of Lismore , County of Waterford and of Kilbride or Brideschurch, County Kildare. [Possibly in the Fifth or Sixth Century.]

    A saint called Briga, the daughter of Congall, is thought to have been “sinchrona” with her great namesake, the renowned Abbess of Kildare. In the Calendar of Cashel, at the 21st of January, she is called St. Brigid of Killbrige, in Lismore diocese. In the Third and Fifth Lives of St. Brigid of Kildare this present holy virgin is called Briga. According to the latter of these authorities, she is said to have lived in the Leinster province, and to have been mother, or superioress, over a monastery and its nuns, who were servants of Christ. From such accounts, Colgan says it is possible she may have been that virgin whose memory was venerated in the Liffy plain, which lies near Kildare.
    On the 9th of March, a St. Brigid is venerated, according to the Martyrologies of Tallagh and of Marianus O’Gorman, and she may have been a contemporary with the great St. Brigid, Abbess of Kildare. But Colgan thinks it more probable that the virgin visited at Kilbride was identical with St. Brigid, or Briga, venerated at this day, according to the Calendar of Cashel. From the circumstance recorded of St. Briga having invited the illustrious Abbess of Kildare to her home, she appears to have lived on terms of intimacy with this latter, who wrought one of her many miracles here. This is found related in the acts of St. Brigid, the great patroness of Ireland. Yet, a difficulty is presented, where an account is given of certain transactions occurring in the plain of Theba, or Theabtha, and when it is stated, her friend the holy virgin Briga lived also in that district. For there, as we are told, St. Brigid was asked to visit another pious virgin, called Briga, and at the house of this latter. The Abbess of Kildare accepted such invitation at the time, as she had on similar occasions ; and when arrived at the house, she was received with great joy and honour. According to the usual custom of treating guests, her feet were washed; and the water having been removed, it was afterwards applied by a nun, whose feet had long been crippled with gout. Having washed them with this water, the infirm sister’s feet were healed, and almost before they could be wiped.

    Saint Brigid afterwards spent a considerable time there, and in conference with the nuns, while treating on various spiritual topics. But the arch-tempter from the beginning, who envied the innocence of our first parents in the garden of Paradise, found means to enter St. Briga’s establishment, at a time, too, when the hostess and her illustrious guest were seated at table. His presence was first revealed to St. Brigid, who fixed her eyes steadily on him for a time. Then communicating what she had seen to her entertainer, and signing the eyes of the latter with a sign of the cross, Briga beheld a deformed monster. The holy Abbess of Kildare commanded him to speak, and to make known the purport of his unwelcome visit. The Devil replied: “O holy virgin, I cannot avoid speaking, nor can I disobey your orders, as you observe God’s precepts and are affable to the poor and lowly.” He then avowed a desire to cause the spiritual death of a nun, who had yielded to his temptations. He even told the name of this nun to the holy abbess, when the latter, charitably calling her, and signing her eyes with a sign of the cross, desired her to behold the monster. The nun was terrified at this sight, and shedding abundance of tears, promised to be more circumspect for the future. Brigid felt great compassion for this penitent, and banished the demon from their presence. Thus, on occasion of her visit, St. Brigid procured the corporal restoration of one, and the spiritual liberation of another, belonging to that sisterhood. Supposing the foregoing transactions to have occurred at Kilbride, or Brideschurch, in the county Kildare, it follows that the present St. Briga—if we have rightly assigned her festival to this date—must have been a special favourite and companion of the illustrious abbess, whose “magnalia,” in the earlier period of the Irish church, have been so wonderfully extolled by her biographers.

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  • Saint Fechin of Fore, January 20

    January 20 sees the commemoration of a great ascetic, ‘the Anthony of Ireland’, Saint Fechin of Fore. I have abridged the following account of his life from a 19th-century parish priest of Collooney, Archdeacon Terence O’Rorke, whose work demonstrates much local knowledge of and pride in the saint. The book is available online through the Internet Archive and the chapter on Saint Fechin is well worth reading in full.

    Saint Fechin was, probably, the most active and influential of the Irish saints of the seventh century. He is the first priest that is named in the Third Order of Irish saints, on the famous Catalogue published by Ussher in the Brittanicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates. The order of the names is :
    “Fechin, presbyter ; Airendan, Failan, Coman, Commian, Colman, Ernan, Cronan ; and very many others, presbyters.”
    Unlike his master, Nathy, who has never found a biographer, Fechin has had his life written by several persons. Colgan gives three lives of the saint; one composed by Augustine Magraidin, who was a Canon Regular of the island of All Saints, in the Shannon, and died there the “Wednesday next after All Saints, in 1405”; another in twenty-seven Latin hexameters, translated and abridged for the Acta SS. Hib. from seventy- four metrical Irish districts ; and a third, compiled by Colgan himself, who tells us that he made the compilation from four different lives of the saint, viz. : that by Magraidan, the metrical life, and two others in Irish, one of which he supposes to be a translation of a Latin original, composed in the time of Saint Aidan, a contemporary of Fechin. This last he is inclined to ascribe to Saint Aileran, the author of a life of Saint Patrick, and a life of Saint Bridget. We are told in Magraidan’s life, which is the first life given by Colgan, that Aileran the Wise recorded the miracles of Saint Fechin in the island of Imay. It does not appear from this announcement whether Aileran composed a detailed life of our saint or not ; but whichever Aileran’s work was a full life or a mere report of the saint’s doings in Imay we have, in either case, proof of the great respect in which Fechin was held ; for the biographer of Saints Patrick and Bridget would hardly devote his pen to the proceedings of Saint Fechin, if these proceedings did not partake of the importance and dignity of those that the writer had already described.
    Considering, then, the circumstances under which the Second Life [ Magraidin’s composition goes commonly by the name of the First Life, or Prima Vita; while Colgan’ s composition is called the Second Life, or Secunda Vita] was drawn up, it ought to be the most valuable of all the records that we have of Saint Fechin. As Colgan had materials to draw on that are no longer available, and was, from special knowledge of Irish history and hagiology, singularly qualified to make proper use of these materials, his conclusions regarding the saint should be more trustworthy than those of any other biographer…
    “This compilation (Second Life),” says Father O’Hanlon,”proceeded from three different lives of Fechin, which were composed in Irish. One of these had been taken from a much older codex, written, it is said, in the time of Saint Aidan, who was a contemporary of Saint Fechin, and over 900 years before Colgan wrote. This was a codex of Immaigh, in Connaught, where our saint lived. The second very old life wanted both the beginning and the end, although otherwise very trustworthy. The third was very old, likewise, and written in seventy-four elegant metrical distichs, recounting a great number of the saint’s miracles. The three codices were found to be over prolix for separate publication, so that Colgan thought it better to collate and abridge their contents, which substantially he has published.” If, then, Colgan, instead of “collating and abridging” the lives that he had before him, and giving their substance in the Second Life, had published them separately, exactly as they were written, these lives would be found to precede in date the composition of Magraidin, and to have, in a greater degree than that work, that element of authenticity which they now seem to lack. Bearing this consideration in mind, it is clear that the Second Life has the strongest claims on our deference to what it asserts respecting the career of the saint.
    It is the almost unanimous opinion of those who have written on Saint Fechin, that he was born in Billa, a village in the County of Sligo, barony of Leyney, and parish of Ballysadare. The spot on which he is said to have first seen the light is, at present, and has been from time immemorial, a place of pilgrimage under the name of Leaba-Fechin, (Fechin’s bed). In this spot there is a large stone, on which are impressions looking like indented hand marks ; and the legend is : that these marks were made by his mother as she grasped the objects near her in the agonizing travail that accompanied the birth of so great a saint. Between this stone and another close by there is a hollow in which men suffering from pain in the back lie down, invoking Fechin,”who was born there,” in the fond hope of being thus cured of their infirmity through his intercession. Over these stones was erected (it is said by the saint himself) a church, which was called the Church of Saint Fechin, the walls of which were standing about seventy years ago, the foundations being still to be seen.
    In the next place, the numerous memorials of the saint that meet one at every step in the neighbourhood, prove it to have been his native place. Adjoining the ruins of the church is a piece of land called Parc-Ehin Fechin’s Park, where the saint is said, when a little boy, to have tended cattle for his parents, an occupation that was not counted demeaning in any one in those primitive times. In Parc-Ehin may still be seen the stone on which he is reported, even in Magraidin’s life, to have performed a singular miracle. Wishing to tie up an animal some say a cow, some a calf, and others a wolf and having within reach no stake to which the tying could be attached, the saint ran the hand through a large stone, and, passing a cord through the hole he had made, thus accomplished his object. A few hundred yards to the north of Parc-Ehin, in the townland of Kilnemonogh, is” Fechin’s Well”; half a mile or so to the south is another ” Fechin’s “Well,” as also a ” Fechin’s Bridge” ; the strand of Ballysadare and Streamstown was called ” Fechin’s Strand” ; and throughout the parish are several other objects associated with the saint’s name.
    As it is reported of several other Irish saints, so it also said of Fechin – that his birth and sanctity were predicted. Saint Columba, passing through the valley of Fore in Westmeath was pressed by the owner of the place to found a church there, but excused himself by saying, that the honour was reserved for a great saint named Fechin, who was soon to be born. Stellanus, the proprietor of the valley, saw it once filled with beautifulbirds, having in their midst a column of fire that towered up to heaven, and learned from an angel that the vision prefigured Fechin and his fervent monks. A similar vision is said to have been vouchsafed to a man named Cruemus, who is commonly supposed to be Crumther-Nathy, and who saw in spirit the valley swarming with doves, one of which was of great size and striking beauty, the large bird representing Fechin, and the others the members of his community.
    It is certain that Fechin followed Saint Nathy to Achonry, as soon as that establishment was opened, and acquired there much of the learning and sanctity for which he afterwards became so famous.
    Fechin’s first care, on becoming a priest, was to furnish the territory of Leyney with churches. Ballysadare was our saint’s first foundation, after building which, the zealous priest erected religious establishments in Billa, Kilnemonogh, Drumrath, Kilgarvan, and Ecclasroog or Edarguidhe… But the most famous of the saint’s foundations, and the one in which the holy man habitually resided in later life, was that of Fore, in Westmeath.
    A mill that Fechin erected under the Benn of Fore, to grind grain for his community, was held in almost as much respect as the church. And there is little wonder in this, when we recollect the miraculous way in which the mill is alleged to have been first erected, and, next, supplied with water. As to the erection, Giraldus Cambrensis writes :” There is a mill at Fore, which St. Fechin made most miraculously with his own hands in the side of a certain rock ;” and in regard to the water supply we read in the Life of Saint Mochua, as it is given by the Bollandists under the 1st of January, that ” Mochua came to Fore, a town of Meath, in which Fechin had erected a mill at the foot of a mountain, without having any water near ; and as nothing was now wanting but the water, the mill being finished in other respects, the two saints set out for Lough Lene, which was two miles away. Arrived at the lake, Mochua makes a hole with the point of a staff in the bank that lay next to the mill ; Fechin and the priests that accompanied him did the same ; and, on the moment, the water passing in a wonderful manner under ground through the mountain, dashed out not far from the mill, and, falling on the wheel with great force, set the mill a-going.”…
    It was at the monastery of Ballysadare, during one of his visits that the saint conceived the design of converting the inhabitants of certain islands in the West of Ireland, as it was from the same monastery he started to engage in that great undertaking…
    Fraternal charity, mortification, and the spirit of prayer shone out among the saint’s virtues ; and of these fraternal charity was, perhaps, the most conspicuous. This great virtue Fechin practised under all its forms : ministering to the sick, redeeming prisoners, and feeding the hungry.
    No sores or diseases were so loathsome as to repel the man of God. On a visit to Ballysadare he cured a sick person whose illness was so disgusting that the monks themselves had a horror of it, and forhad the man in consequence to come near the monastery; but this miserable person, hearing of Fechin’s presence, came before the saint, who, far from repelling or treating him like the monks as an outcast, received him with open arms, consoled him, and restored him to health and happiness.
    Fechin’s mortifications or austerities were prodigious. The Irish saints learned to practise mortification from Saint Patrick, who fasted always on bread and water, and prayed 100 times a day, and as many times a night, in the midst of frost, and snow, and rain. It would be hard to find another saint so animated with the spirit of our national apostle as Fechin. To say nothing of the holy man’s fasts and prayers, and other rigorous observances during the day, he is said to have divided the night into three parts, passing the first part in chaunting psalms and hymns ; the second he spent in solitary meditation under a palm tree that grew near the monastery ; and in order to keep away sleep and crucify the flesh, the fervent servant of God bound one of his feet to the tree with an iron fetter, and placed hard by a vessel of water, supporting, meantime, against the breast with his hands a large stone, which, if sleep was allowed for a moment, would fall down into the vessel and splash him with the water, thus punishing negligence or indulgence. And the third part of the night Fechin devoted to vocal prayer, standing all the time deep in cold water. Even while asleep he practised mortification; for, as an old poem on the characteristics of the Irish saints tells us:
    “Fechin the generous of Fobhar loved,
    It was no hypocritical devotion,
    To place his fleshless rib
    Upon a hard bed without clothes.”
    With such a life Fechin had nothing to fear at its close. When that close came, A.D. 664, the saint could hardly be less than 80 years of age, having been a priest and founded churches during the lifetime of St. Nathy, who is supposed to have died about the year 615. Eighty years, so full of perfection as to cause his life to be taken for a series of miracles, filled the man of God with that hope which “confounded not.” After “finishing his course,” like St. Paul, as well as keeping the faith himself and spreading it abroad among those destitute of it, like the same saint, it only remained for Fechin to receive the crown due to his many merits, as anchorite, as abbot, and as apostle.

  • Saint Blathmac of Iona, January 19

    Today we commemorate a 9th-century Irish martyred saint, Blathmac of Iona, who perished at the hands of the Vikings in defence of Saint Columcille’s relics. Author John Marsden sets the martyrdom of Saint Blathmac into its wider historical context:

    ‘The Annals of Ulster at 825 record the year of plague and famine when the Vikings fell on the churches of Downpatrick and Moville with fire and sword.
    A great pestilence in the island of Ireland … a great famine and failure of bread.
    The plundering of Dun-lethglaise by heathens.
    The burning of Magh-Bile with its oratories by heathens, in which a great many were slain.
    While a ‘great many’ monks were slain at Moville, it is another, and more impressively attested, bloodletting which singles out 825 as a year indelibly marked by the red martyrdom. This most infamous of viking atrocities against the Gael is entered with characteristic brevity by the Annals of Ulster at 825.
    Martyrdom of Blathmacc, son of Flann, by heathens in I-Columcille.
    The same event is shrewdly placed in a modern perspective by the historian Barbara Crawford as the point where ‘the Viking traders of recent history books and television series turn into the Viking raiders of yesteryear’.
    Blathmac mac-Flainn was, like Columcille himself, of royal blood and born a prince of a branch of the Ui-Neill. He had been a warrior who had entered the religious life as the abbot of some unidentified monastic community, most probably one enjoying the patronage of his own dynasty in Ireland. Resolving with solemn deliberation to suffer ‘the scars of Christ’, he came from Ireland to join whatever monastic community remained on Iona to assume some form of abbatial authority over the shrine at greatest hazard from the sea-raiders. In so doing he confirms the strange new sanctity which surrounded I-Columcille in the decades following Cellach’s transfer of the chief church of the Columban dominion to Kells. The most holy island of the western sea had passed into the viking age as the Golgotha of the Gael.
    It remained the burial ground where lay the ‘tombs of the kings’ and, more importantly, where Columcille himself awaited resurrection when the sixth age came at last to its end. The exact whereabouts of Columcille’s tomb on Iona had been shrouded in mystery since he was first laid in its earth in 597. Adamnan tells how miraculous meterological intervention secured for his community the privacy of the saint’s interment…
    When the bones of other saints were translated into the reliquaries of gold and silver in the eight century, it has been assumed that the remains of Columcille were similarly enshrined. The annals contain a sequence of entries for the early ninth century noting the voyages of Cellach’s successors, the abbots Diarmait and Indrechtach, carrying the ‘reliquaries’ of Columcille between Kells and Iona. These have been taken to represent the physical remains of the saint regularly ferried between the two churches, but some closer examination of the Irish text of the annals suggests that this might not have been exactly the case. The annalists use two different Irish words in this context, both of which translate as ‘relics’ but each with its own precise meaning. The word martra is used to represent the corporeal remains of a saint, while mionna generally identifies what might be called relics of association. A crozier or a habit worn by the saint, even lesser physical remains such as a fingernail or small bone separated from the body, were mionna,which is the word used by the annals for the relics of Columcille shipped back and forth between Erin and Alba. If those venerated remains encased in gold and silver were not in fact his physical remains, then what remained of the earthly form of the saint would have stayed on Iona. Whether as a temporary or a permanent arrangement, there is indisputable evidence that the enshrined remains of Columcille were on the island when Blathmac suffered his martyrdom defending them from the northmen in 825.
    Whether by reason of his courage, his piety, or, more probably the grisly nature of his martyrdom, Blathmac’s renown spread to the continent with the Irish monks seeking sanctuary overseas in greater numbers as the viking onslaught on Ireland intensified. It must have been one of these peregrini, most probably a surviving eyewitness of the event, who provided Walafrid Strabo, abbot of the Irish monastery at Reichenau in Switzerland, with the wealth of detail which informed his remarkable poetic elegy on the martyrdom of Blathmac. Abbot Walafrid’s hexameter verses, written within twenty-five years of 825, survive as the most detailed contemporary narrative of a viking raid on the western seaboard. His continental viewpoint prompted him to identify Blathmac’s assailants as ‘Danes’ when they were indubitably of Norse origin, but his account has every other hallmark – not least quotations of speech – of a first hand-testimony. It is also a text of great length and laden with pious homilies framed with scriptural quotation, so I have selected only those passages of especially significant relevance here.
    A certain island lies on the shores of the Picts, placed in the wave-tossed brine; it is called Eo, where the saint of the Lord, Columba, rests in the flesh. This island he [Blathmac] sought under his vow to suffer the scars of Christ, for here the frequent hoardes of pagan Danes were wont to come armed with malignant furies.
    Blathmac, forewarned of the approach of sea-raiders, called his monks together to prepare them for the impending martyrdom. Those ready to endure that fate were to stay beside him, but those not yet ready were to take refuge elsewhere in the island. There seem to have been places of safety appointed and accessible by designated pathways for just such an occasion and it is reasonable to assume that some similar arrangement had been used during earlier raids.
    The community, moved by these words, determined to act according to their strength. Some, with a brave heart resolved to face the hand of sacrilege, and rejoiced to have to submit their heads to the raging sword; but others, whose confidence of mind had not yet risen to this, took flight by a path to known places of refuge.
    The golden dawn dispelled the dewy darkness and the glittering sun shone again with glorious orb, when the pious cleric stood before the holy altar, celebrating the holy offices of the mass, himself a victim acceptable to God to be offered up to the thundering sword. The rest of the brethern lay commending their souls with prayers and tears, when behold, the cursed bands rushed raging through the unprotected houses, threatening death to those blessed men and, furious with rage, the rest of the brethern being slain, came to the holy father, demanding he give up the precious metals which enclosed the sacred bones of Saint Columba. But [the monks] had taken the shrine from its place and deposited it in the earth in a hallowed tumulus, or grave, and covered it with sods.
    This was the plunder the Danes desired; but the holy man stood firm with unarmed hand, with a stern determination of mind; taught to stand against foes and to challenge encounter, unaccustomed to yield. He then addressed the barbarians in the following words:

    ‘I know not of the gold you seek, where it may be placed in the ground, and in what recesses it may be hidden; but if it were permitted by Christ for me to know, never would these lips tell it to your ears. Savagely bring your swords, seize their hilts and kill. O God, I commend my humble self to Thy protection’.

    Hereupon the pious victim was cut in pieces with severed limbs, and what the fierce warrior could not compensate with a price, he began to seek out by wounds in the stiffened entrails. Nor is it a wonder, for there always were and always will arise those whom evil rage will excite against the servants of the Lord.
    Thus the abbot Walafrid portrays the martyrdom of a ‘servant of the Lord’ in an account which indicates some greater significance than the summary despatch of a martyr to his crown.
    The Irish calendars of saints record the date of Blathmac’s death as 24th July, which falls into the later raiding season and suggests an attack made by a warband returning to the north after its plundering of Down and Moville. The reiterated references to ‘rage’ in Walafrid’s account would suggest the raiders as berserkr, the blood-frenzied warrior-priests of Odin found throughout the Scandanavian saga sources. If the raiders of 825 were berserkers, then the grisly detail of Blathmac’s martyrdom assumes a greater significance than the casual brutality of the sword, because Walafrid’s account is quite consistent with the saga evidence for the ritual sacrifice to Odin, known across the northlands as the ‘blood-eagle’….
    If such was the fate dealt out to Blathmac mac-Flainn, then the renown accorded his martyrdom might be explained in terms of its fearsome symbolism no less than its savage circumstances. It can only have represented the symbolic sacrifice of the White Christ before the shrine of Columcille to Odin battle-bringer.
    No image from the pages of the insular gospel books is possessed of such ominous aspect as the folio from the Book of Kells portraying Christ at Gethsemane in the form of a Celtic holy man seized by two gnomic warriors. It would have appeared to the sixth age of the world as the foretelling on vellum of the red martyrdom of Blathmac on I-Columcille.
    John Marsden, The Fury of the Northmen – Saints, Shrines and Sea Raiders in the Viking Age AD 793-878, (London, 1996), 87-91.
    Canon O’Hanlon also mentions the two different feasts for Saint Blathmac:
    He appears to have had a double festival: one on this day, and another on the 24th of July. This saint is venerated abroad on the 19th of January. In the Martyrologies of Donegal and Tallagh his feast is set down on the 24th of July. This latter, perhaps, was some translation of his relics.
    Finally, O’Hanlon sees the name of our saint as being especially appropriate:
    We are told that in the Irish language this saint is called Blathmhac. The first syllable of this compound name has an equivocal signification. Blath, when pronounced long, has the literal meaning,” a flower,” and the metaphorical signification, “beautiful” when pronounced short, it is rendered into the English words,”honour” or “fame.” The word Mhac is Anglicized “son.” Truly was this heroic man named.

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