OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

Tag: Pilgrimage

  • Pilgrimages in Donegal

    Pilgrimages to a variety of ancient ecclesiastical sites in Ireland are commonplace today, but below is an article from 1877 when things were rather different. It is a report in the Australian press of a lecture given by a priest who commended the importance of visiting traditional holy sites, in this case the Doon Well in County Donegal. I found this piece interesting not just for the choice of Donegal rather than some of the more famous places Father Barter listed towards the end of his talk, but also for the way in which he linked the Doon well to Lourdes, which had grown in fame and popularity throughout the Catholic world since the apparitions to Saint Bernadette there nearly twenty years earlier. I noticed a typically Victorian presentation of Irish holy places as wild and remote, an idea, then as now, central to ‘Celtic Christianity’ and a sense of a lost earlier and purer age. Here it’s perhaps best summed up by the author’s reference to ‘the remote glens of Donegal, where the relics of some of the greatest of our Irish saints are not enshrined in gold or silver, but in crumbling walls, swathed in green ivy’. The writer recalls memories of the Penal Era as well, here too Victorian writers often presented the liturgy offered at the Mass Rock in a lonely glen as surpassing in spiritual quality the glories of High Mass offered in a European cathedral. I was unable to find out any further information on Father James Barter but for further information on the Doon Well you can do no better than this post by Dr Louise Nugent on her Pilgrimage in Medieval Ireland site:

    IRELAND. 

    PILGRIMAGES IN DONEGAL.

    The Freeman reports the following lecture which was recently delivered by the Rev. James Barter, at the rooms of the St. Kevin’s branch of the Catholic Union:—

    The rev. lecturer said a thick rain was falling when he drove late one evening last summer over the long and steep hill of Meenaroy, near Letterkenny, in the county Donegal. Looking before him into the dim twilight he saw a figure moving forward with much difficulty. Soon he came up with a peasant carrying a parcel on his
    back, who told him he was returning from a pilgrimage to “Doon Well,” with a few bottles of its miraculous water, and that his home was still distant thirty miles off, near those mighty cliffs on the western coast of the county beneath which the waves of the wild Atlantic rave and roar for ever. The peasant went on to talk with enthusiasm of the supernatural powers of his precious burden, while he listened, and fancied he heard in the moaning of the wind the sneers of modern unbelievers, directed, however, with harmless effect, against the strong faith of the humble pilgrim. (Applause.) As he descended into the valley of Lough Finn he looked back upon the poor man whom he had just left, and he was swaying under his heavy burden and the pelting rain. He watched him until his bent form receded into the darkness, and that vision was stamped upon his memory. This incident suggested the idea of seizing the present occasion to awaken the memories of those places in his own native mountains consecrated by the piety of a thousand years. The present seemed to him a fitting time to tread again these holy scenes. (Applause.) The old devotion of France for her ancient shrines, which had been swept away by the shock of the Revolution, had been revived. Within the last few years the apparition of our blessed Lady to the poor girl, Bernadette Soubirons, in the grotto at Lourdes, has poured balm into the wounds inflicted on that great Catholic nation by blasphemers who set up the Goddess of Reason in Paris. Summer after summer a long stream of pilgrims, even from our own shores, poured out upon the scene of that apparition, and their gratitude for favours there received has crowned the rock of Massabielle with one of the finest temples of modern times. While wealth and fashion hurry through the gay cities of the Continent to swell the tide towards this favoured shrine and the celebrated sanctuary of Paray le Monial, it was, he thought, “a holy and wholesome thought” for such of his countrymen as declined to be dragged at the chariot wheels of fashion to gird their loins with the coarse cincture of the pilgrim of olden time and retire, into the remote glens of Donegal, where the relics of some of the greatest of our, Irish saints are not enshrined in gold or silver, but in crumbling walls, swathed in green ivy. (Hear, hear.) Here the vastness of the solitude would enable one to commune more fervently with God—the heart would be moved more deeply by the earnest piety of a fine people, and the will strengthened by the example of their pure and simple lives. (Applause.)

    After a brilliant description of the scenery surrounding the Rock of Doon, the lecturer related some of the historic memories connected with it. He said it was under the shadow of that rock the Catholics of the neighbourhood had to hear Mass in the dark days of persecution. It was upon that rock the O’Donnells were inaugurated chieftains of Tyrconnell, and it was here the ill-fated Sir Cahir O’Doherty fell, fighting for his rights against the English, in 1608, when he rose in rebellion to revenge the outrage offered him by Sir George Paulett, Governor of Derry. (Applause.) Close to this Rock of Doon, said the lecturer, is a well, blessed by a holy priest who lay concealed in these mountains. This was the sacred fountain from which the poor man whom he had met on the bleak Meenaroy fetched his burden, and it was the object of one of the most frequented pilgrimages in Donegal. On special or station days pilgrims might be seen in long procession winding over the mountain path leading to this privileged spot. They go round the well—some on their knees—reciting the rosary – and other prayers in tones so solemn and subdued that in the distance they came swelling on the ear like the tender wailing of the “Miserere.” (Applause.) The holy places of Palestine were then sketched, and the enthusiasm with which they were frequented by pilgrims from the west down to the tune the Crusaders were expelled from Jerusalem by the Moslem. What had occurred, said the lecturer, in the Holy Land in early Christian times, and at Lourdes in our own day, was repeated at the well of Doon and at many another holy well and shrine in Ireland, for the hand of God had not been shortened. In Donegal there was not the Holy Sepulchre, nor the Mount of Olives, nor Calvary, but we had the penitential retreat of St. Patrick in the Island of Lough Derg, and numerous spots sanctified by the presence of St. Columba, now marked by a rude cross, or a blessed well, or the grass-grown remains of a chapel.

    Over twelve centuries had passed away since Columba’s time, but his memory was still cherished by the people of his native mountains, and the faith of which he was the great apostle was still as green in their hearts as the wooded slope at Gartan on which he was born. These holy places were now sadly neglected. Sheep and cattle grazed within their hallowed precincts. He was sure they would join him that evening in the expression of a hope that a faithful people would help, before many years, to build upon these privileged spots, if not imposing structures, at least neat chapels, in which the local clergy could hear the confessions of the pilgrims on station days. It was not in Donegal alone these places of pilgrimage were to be found, for Glendalough, in Wicklow, Clonmacnoise, on the Shannon, and St. Brigid’s, in Clare, were celebrated among the shrines of Ireland. There was Gougan Barra also, the famous sanctuary of St. Finbarre, rising out of the smooth lake, with a crown of moss on its brow, in which the traveller could read another lesson on the neglect with which the shrines of our country were treated. But he story of Gougan Barra and the other celebrated pilgrimages of Ireland remained to be told as it deserved. He had begun at least to give the history and scene of the holy places at Tyrconnell.

    Often had he wandered from his home there among those peaceful shades, and filled his soul with their sacred associations, and in inviting his countrymen to follow his example he felt convinced they would be amply rewarded. (Applause.)

    The Advocate, Saturday February 24, 1877, p.5

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  • Saint Colmán the Pilgrim, November 7

    On November 7 we commemorate a Saint Colmán who is called ‘the Pilgrim’ on the later Irish calendars. The 12th-century Martyrology of Gorman records at this day:

    Colman lergrinn loigt[h]ech, Colmán, delightful, indulgent

    to which the note is added:

    ailithir Innsi mo Cholmóc, a pilgrim, of Inis mo Cholmóic.

    The later Martyrology of Donegal has this entry:

    7. C. SEPTIMO IDUS NOVEMBRIS. 7.

    COLMAN, Pilgrim, of Inis-Mocholmóg.

    Interestingly, there is an inscribed stone at Kilcolman, Maumanorig, County Kerry whose Ogham inscription mentions ‘Colman the pilgrim’. Archaeologist Peter Harbison links this site with the pilgrimage route in honour of Saint Brendan the Navigator to Mount Brandon, saying:

    It was from the earthen-banked round enclosure of Kilcolman in the townland of Maumanorig, overlooking Ventry harbour, that the Saint’s Road to Mount Brandon appears to have had its visually detectable starting point. Within it is a bullaun, and beside that a large, low boulder with two crosses carved on it (Fig. 23). One of these crosses, unusually deeply sunk into the surface of the stone, is a large cross of arcs – a series of compass-drawn arcs arranged so as to form a cross. It is surrounded by a circle and stands on a stem with a three-pointed foot. The other, smaller, equal-armed cross is more shallowly carved, has bifurcating terminals and is placed close to the end of an Ogham inscription, which forms two sides of a frame around the large cross. This inscription Macalister read as ‘ANM COLMAN AILITHIR’ and translated as ‘Name of Colman the pilgrim’. But given the pilgrimage context, it might be better to think of it in terms of asking for a prayer for the soul of Colman the pilgrim. The use of the formula ANM is generally regarded as being late in the series of Irish Ogham inscriptions and another instance on a stone at Ratass near Tralee was dated to the 8th or early 9th century by Donncha Ó Corráin, on the basis of the genealogy of the person named in the inscription. The Kilcolman stone, may, therefore, not be too far removed in date from the Ratass stone.

    Peter Harbison, Pilgrimage in Ireland: the Monuments and the People (London, 1991), 191.

    Even more remarkable is the fact that this is not the only reference to a pilgrim Colman preserved in stone, for there is a stone at Clonmacnoise which bears the name Colman written in ordinary script but with the word bocht, poor, inscribed in Ogham underneath it. But perhaps given that there are at least two hundred and fifty Irish saints who share this name this is not so surprising. There is nothing to suggest that this poor Colman is the same individual as the pilgrim of Maumanorig and nothing to suggest that either is the Colman the pilgrim commemorated in the calendar of the saints today, but it is interesting none the less.

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  • Saint James the Apostle, Spain and Ireland: A 17th-century View

    July 25 is the feast of Saint James the Apostle and I came across some interesting claims that he may have visited Ireland in the work of a seventeenth-century Irish priest, John Lynch (c.1599-1677). Father Lynch was one of a number of post-Reformation Irish writers who sought to uphold the reputation of the native medieval Church. The target of his most famous work, Cambrensis eversus (Cambrensis Overturned), published at St. Malo in 1662, was not any of the classical reformers, but rather the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman chronicler, Giraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales. Gerald’s accounts of Ireland betrayed a colonialist-type approach to the natives whom he saw as unsophisticated barbarians who were not even properly Christian at all. He recorded all manner of weird and wonderful tales in association with Irish saints and holy places, including, I might add, the story of the perpetual fire at Kildare and its all-female attendants. For Gerald, Ireland was less a ‘land of saints and scholars’ and more a land of the bizarre and barbarous. Father Lynch’s work set out to put the record straight and in doing so he amassed a huge body of historical evidence. A central plank of his thesis was that Ireland had always been faithful to the centre of Western Christianity at Rome, something for which its people were now suffering. Some of the sources produced were rather curious, as Professor Salvador Ryan explains:

    Most surprising of all, perhaps, Lynch underscored Ireland’s ancient loyalty to the Roman Church by claiming that the Gospel had first been preached in Ireland by no less than one of the twelve Apostles. Cambrensis eversus cites Joseph Pellicer (1602-79), chronicler to King Philip IV of Spain, who in the course of expounding on the legend that St James the Apostle had preached the Gospel in Spain, had also claimed that there were ‘many authorities and facts proving that James had also preached in Ireland’. Here Lynch also quotes the work of his fellow countryman, the historian Philip O’Sullivan Beare (c.1590-1660), whose Tenebriomastix (‘A Scourge for the Trickster’), written in the early 1630s, details how St James, on his return from Spain, had preached in Ireland, accompanied by his father Aristobulus or Zebedee, who stayed on after him as Ireland’s first bishop. Only then had James passed over to Britain. Lynch thus established an impeccable Roman and even apostolic pedigree for the Irish Church.

    S. Ryan, ‘Reconstructing Irish Catholic History after the Reformation’ in K. van Liere, S. Ditchfield and H. Louthan, eds., Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012), 197.

    Fortunately a translation of Cambrensis eversus is available online, so I thought it might be interesting to see exactly what the Spanish chronicler had to say about Saint James and Ireland. The claims are cited in connection with a discussion of the antiquity of Irish Christianity which in Lynch’s view predates not only Saint Patrick but also the mission of Palladius:

    However, that there was no absurdity in Prosper’s statement of the existence of Christians in Ireland before the arrival of Palladius is evident from the undoubted fact that many illustrious heralds of the faith had preached Christ in Ireland before the mission of Paladius; and that their labour was not without fruit is equally certain from the scattered ears, if not the abundant harvest which sprang up in the field of their religious labours. Thus, according to Joseph Pellicer historian to the king of Spain, there are many authorities and facts to prove that St. James the apostle preached the Gospel in Ireland. He quotes many passages to that effect from the Works of Julian archpriest, of St. Justa, which I transcribe here from the “Tenebriomastix” of Philip O’Sullivan against Camerarius.

    “No. 136, I have read in the book of Dexter of Barcelona, that St. James, on his return from Spain, preached the faith in Ireland. He embarked at the port of Braganta, in Gallicia, and was accompanied by Aristobulus, or Zebedee, his father, who, it is said, remained there after him, and was the first bishop. The apostle then passed over to Britain, having provided Ireland with bishops, priests, and deacons. No. 167, St. James, returning from Spain, visited Britain and Gaul, and preached in Ireland. He landed in the harbour of Dublin and erected a church to St. Mary, and converted those districts to Christianity. His seven companions, his own disciples and, as it were, his fellow apostles, Torquatus and Ctesiphon, were established by him in Ireland. No. 208, It appears from a constant tradition and the old monuments of Spain, that St. James, the son of Zebedee, passed over to Ireland (which had been peopled from Spain) with seven disciples and others, and laid there the foundation of the Christian faith. No. 434, This apostle wrote the first Epistle and Scripture of the New Testament to the Spaniards. No. 482, Idelsetus, chosen among the 12 disciples of St. James, was consecrated in Ireland and sent with others by St. Peter into Spain. No. 483, Seven holy bishops, disciples of St. James, returning from Rome, landed in Gaul, and passing thence preached the faith in Ireland.”

    To these we may add a passage from Vincent of Beauvais. “When the apostles visited all parts of the globe, St. James, by the inspìration of heaven, landed on the shores of Ireland, where he strenuously announced the word of God, and is said to have chosen seven disciples — namely, Torquatus, Secundus, Indalecius, Tisephont, Eufrasius, Cecilius, and Ischius.” Joseph Pellicer asserts that these facts are confirmed by Braulio in his additions to the Chronicle of Maximus. The words of Dexter appear to add some authority to these statements, where he writes under the year 41, “that St. James visited Gaul and the Britains” for Ussher proves, by a host of authorities, that Ireland was anciently included among the British isles.

    Rev. M. Kelly, ed and trans, John Lynch ‘Gratianus Lucius, Hibernus’, Cambrensis Eversus, Vol. II (Dublin, 1850), 663-665.

    Professor Ryan’s work puts these 17th-century Spanish quotations firmly into their historical context and makes some further interesting observations on other attempts to link Ireland and Spain:

    O’Sullivan Beare also makes every effort to identify Ireland’s early history with that of Catholic Spain. He emphasizes the ‘Milesian Myth’ which details how the Irish race is descended from four sons of King Milesius of Spain, who came to Ireland in 1342 BC, and how since that date Ireland has been ruled by no less than 181 kings of Milesian lineage. In one notable episode from the distant past, a mythical king of Munster is restored to his kingship by 3,000 Spaniards after he flees to Spain and marries the king’s daughter. Like Lynch, O’Sullivan Beare also makes reference to Ireland’s supposed link with St. James the Apostle. Modern scholars have noted that throughout this period Ireland is spelt as Ibernia rather than Hibernia in an effort to create the optical illusion that the name is somehow cognate with Iberia.

    S. Ryan, ‘Reconstructing Irish Catholic History after the Reformation’ in K. van Liere, S. Ditchfield and H. Louthan, eds., Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012), 198-199.

    Today there is an Irish Society of the Friends of Saint James which was founded to promote the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. A paper by scholar Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel on The Irish Medieval Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela is available to read at the archives of the periodical History Ireland here. Blogger Edel Mulcahy also has a piece on The Camino Connection here.

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