LITANY OF SAINT PATRICK. APOSTLE AND PATRON OF THE IRISH RACE.

A fine old nineteenth-century litany which I intend to pray every day during the month of March:

 

LITANY OF SAINT PATRICK. APOSTLE AND PATRON OF THE IRISH RACE. 

 LORD, have mercy on us. 

Christ, have mercy on us. 

Lord, have mercy on us. 

Christ, hear us. 

Christ, graciously hear us. 

God the Father of Heaven, Have mercy on us. 

God the Son, Redeemer of the world, Have mercy on us. 

God the Holy Ghost, Have mercy on us. 

Holy Trinity one God, Have mercy on us. 

Holy Mary, Pray for us

Holy Mother of God, Pray for us

All ye holy Angels,  Pray for us

All ye Apostles and Evangelists, Pray for us

All ye holy Saints and Doctors, Pray for us

All ye holy Bishops and Confessors, Pray for us

St. Patrick, Apostle and Patron of Ireland, Pray for us

St. Patrick, vessel of election, Pray for us

St. Patrick, model of penitents, Pray for us

St. Patrick, example of mortification, Pray for us

St. Patrick, meek and humble, Pray for us

St. Patrick, mild and patient, Pray for us

St. Patrick, pure and temperate, Pray for us

St. Patrick, zealous pastor of souls, Pray for us

St. Patrick, ardent lover of Jesus, Pray for us

St. Patrick, singularly devoted to our Blessed Lady, Pray for us

St. Patrick, most constant in holy prayer,  Pray for us

St. Patrick, example of perfect charity, Pray for us

St. Patrick, glory of Ireland, Pray for us

St. Patrick, our powerful protector, Pray for us

St. Patrick, pillar of Catholicity, Pray for us

St. Patrick, confessor of the faith, Pray for us

 St. Patrick, herald of salvation, Pray for us

St. Patrick, our father in Christ, Pray for us

Lord Jesus, we beseech thee to hear us, 

That it would please thee through the intercession of thy servant Patrick, to make thy name glorious to all who know it not, we beseech thee to hear us,

That thou vouchsafe to preserve the Pope, and all ecclesiastical orders in religion, we beseech thee to hear us, 

That thou wilt protect our bishops and clergy, and all who labor in thy holy Church, we beseech thee to hear us, 

That thou wilt preserve and increase the faith among us, we beseech thee to hear us, 

That thou wilt enlighten all those who are in error, and bring them to the knowledge of thy truth, we beseech thee to hear us,

That thou wilt deliver us from all sin, we beseech thee to hear us,

From all pride and impurity, Deliver us, O Lord. 

From all hatred and ill-will, Deliver us, O Lord. 

From all violence and intemperance, Deliver us, O Lord.

From a sudden and unprovided death, Deliver us, O Lord. 

In the day of judgment, Deliver us, O Lord.   

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, Spare us, O Lord. 

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, Hear us, O Lord. 

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, Have mercy on us. 

Lord, have mercy on us. 

Christ, have mercy on us.

Lord, have mercy on us. 

Pray for us, St. Patrick,

That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. 

Let us pray. 

GOD, who hast vouchsafed to send thy confessor and bishop, the blessed St. Patrick, to preach thy glory to nations, grant, by his merits and intercession, that we may accomplish in thy mercy what thou commandest to be done. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

Rt. Rev. J. Milner, The Key of Heaven; or, A Manual of Prayer (New York, 1874), 551-556.

 

 

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Saint Brigid: 'Steadfastly Worshipped in the Heart'

 

We close the series of posts in honour of Saint Brigid based on the work of Alice Curtayne with the author's own conclusions about the relationship of our patroness with her people. It is one which she sees as having been carried in the heart and best expressed in the humble historic settings of the mud cabin, the Mass-rock or by those on the run from persecution, rather than in grand cathedrals. It is interesting to see that despite associating Saint Brigid with feminism and modernity, Alice Curtayne returns to traditional tropes in the final chapter of her book St. Brigid of Ireland :

It will be conceded that we cannot in Ireland worship the earthly remains of Brigid in any worthy fashion. One may state, without fear of giving offence, that no monument to her in this country expresses in any fitting manner her vast and enduring significance to the Irish race. But in direct contrast to the paucity of her relics, to the silence concerning her in stone, is the profusion of her traditions and the ardent, vehement devotion to her that is being forever proclaimed by the Irish people. The blank absence of the one is as chilling, as the emphatic presence of the other is warm. If her people have not painted and carved and wrought and built in her honour, yet neither most assuredly have they forgotten. And in this respect the cult of Saint Brigid of Ireland is the most sublime offering ever laid at the feet of mortal woman, because with so little material aid or external symbol of any kind, it has burned with such ardour through fifteen hundred years, fed by the spirit only.  

Saint Brigid has never been worshipped in her own land under the loftv dome of splendid cathedrals. Her people’s conception of her has not yet been expressed in marble for the niches of palace walls: nor traced in delicate mosaics; nor painted in glowing frescoes; nor even enshrined in a literature through which genius might exalt her. It is in mud cabins of the rudest description, or beside the Mass-rock in some wind-swept glen, by fugitives in concealment and in flight, in underground caves, or emigrant ships, in the slave-gangs of the Barbadoes, in the basement kitchens of Pagan cities, that she has been steadfastly worshipped in the heart.

 Alice Curtayne, St. Brigid of Ireland, (Dublin 1933). 

 We conclude with a prayer appended to Alice Curtayne's pamphlet St Brigid- The Mary of Ireland:

PRAYER TO ST. BRIGID

Dear Saint Brigid, brilliant star of sanctity in the early days of our Irish faith and love for the omnipotent God who has never forsaken us, we look up to you now in earnest, hopeful prayer. By your glorious sacrifice of earthly riches, joys, and affections, obtain for us grace to "seek first the Kingdom of God and His justice" with constant trust in His fatherly care. By your life of laborious charity to the poor, the sick, the many seekers for light and comfort, obtain for us grace to be God's helpers to the utmost of our power during our stay on earth, looking forward, as you did, to our life with Him during eternity.

By the sanctified peace of your death-bed, obtain for us that we may receive the fullness of pardon and peace when the hour comes that will summon us to the judgement seat of our just and most merciful Lord. Amen.

 

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Saint Brigid: 'Supremely the Saint of Pastoral Life'

 

Over the last week we have seen how Alice Curtayne's book on Saint Brigid has examined our national patroness as a uniquely important figure in early Irish history. But we are going to turn now to the last of the author's three works, a pamphlet called Saint Brigid - The Mary of  Ireland.  The Australian Catholic Truth Society's edition was published in 1936, and reissued in 1960. The text is available to read online here. I have a copy of my own published in Dublin in 1933. The main text is the same but there are some charmingly naive illustrations in the Anthonian Press edition and some extra prayers appended. I will share some of those tomorrow, but today I want to turn to Alice Curtayne's treatment of Saint Brigid as the supreme saint of agricultural life. The author has presented Saint Brigid as a unique personality in early Irish history with unbounded energy, organizational genius and leadership qualities. But her hagiography is also filled with episodes relating to the provision of food. Popular culture, where her feast day was a significant date on the agricultural calendar, has always included a strong acknowledgment of the saint's patronage of agriculture, reflected in traditional iconography which depicts a cow at her feet. Alice Curtayne has little difficulty in reconciling all of the various aspects of Saint Brigid's life from the nun to the farmer. The provision of hospitality was a duty laid upon those in the monastic life and a common trope in hagiography:

 Everyone who came to her doors was entertained. In this lavish dispensing she was frequently disturbed by misgivings of an insufficient supply. Would the butter last out? Or would the beer go round? were the anxieties known to Brigid the hostess. But all earthy feasts come to an end. This great-souled woman always thought the backs of departing guests a sad sight. Did they have enough? And would they be fed tomorrow? were her recurrent troubles. There is an Irish poem ascribed to her in which she is supposed to envisage heaven as a stupendous feast, shared by countless guests and going on forever, replenished from inexhaustible supplies; even a 'lake of ale is mentioned. Though the authenticity of the poem is dubious, the idea is just. It is strictly true of Brigid that her heaven would be a state in which she could have all the pleasures of hospitality without its solicitudes.

Although modern scholars have confirmed that this poem was written some centuries after the time of Saint Brigid, Curtayne goes on to say:

Her visions were as characteristic of her as that notion of heaven. Professor Gardner, extending a thought of Shelley, has remarked somewhere that "the mystic's representation, the language that he uses, must all be coloured by his previous education and mental equipment". It is, indeed, highly interesting to observe that when the saints attempt to describe their visions they invariably end by describing some daily scene, but to which they attach an allegorical meaning...How characteristic in this respect were the visions of Brigid. In that one described in the Lebar Brecc, she "saw" ploughmen and sowers, clear shining streams, oats springing up, a furrowed field, all farm animals: sheep, swine, dogs. These are the things on which Brigid's eyes rested every day.

For Saint Brigid is supremely the saint of pastoral life. She is the genius of our Irish homesteads, and every farm is in a sense her shrine. She is the tutelar spirit of our meadows and gardens. But within the iron gates of industrial cities, she is a stranger. All her legends are about farm life, milking cows, making firkins of butter, calling home the sheep in the rain. She was at home in a dairy. The legends evoke discomfitures that are very familiar: the dairymaid's confusion when a superior worker sneers at her butter, as insufficient in quantity or indifferent in quality. Brigid was a notable butter and cheese maker, and her home-brewed ale was famous throughout the land. After her profession, even when she was Mother Abbess of thirteen thousand nuns, she still spent part of each day at those rural occupations. We read of her coming in from shepherding, her garments saturated with rain; or supervising the reapers from dawn to sunset in the harvest fields about her convent settlement; or contentedly busy over her stores of honey and wholesome brews...

Alice Curtayne, St. Brigid - The Mary of Ireland, (Dublin 1933), 18-19.  

 

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Brigid and the Bishops II

St Brigid Feeding the Poor by Imogen Stuart

 

We are continuing today with the relationship between Saint Brigid and the Irish bishops. Yesterday we saw that Alice Curtayne believed the relationship was one of equals, and noted the lack of tension between the saint and those in episcopal authority. She then goes on to recount some instances of miracles worked by Saint Brigid which involved bishops. The opening episode is particularly interesting as its shows her unafraid to speak her mind in the presence of senior male clerics:

Brigid is credited with an epigrammatic mode of speech and a certain imperiousness of manner, even with bishops. Once a bishop, with some companions, came to  her convent to deliver a sermon. They had come a long journey and greeted her with the news that they were hungry.“So are we hungry—for instruction,” she answered. “Go into church and speak first, and then you shall eat.”

Other miracles offer more standard hagiographical fare. The miraculous provision of plenty is one of the most common tropes found in the lives of medieval saints. These miracles testify to the faith of the saints, to their trust in God's providence and to their status as God's favoured servants. Saint Brigid's reputation in hagiography is one of generosity, as the following episode recounted by Alice Curtayne testifies:

Once seven bishops together went to visit her, and they have gone down into fame as the Seven Bishops of Cabinteely. Do you suppose that Brigid was disturbed by this invasion of the episcopacy? It would not appear so. She sent one sister to the cows that had already been milked twice that day; and another sister to a larder that was as deplenished as Mother Hubbard’s; and another sister to an ale-vat that was drained dry. Yet the bishops feasted adequately, for food was a commodity Brigid never failed to find for her guests.

 The monastic virtue of hospitality is also on display in this miracle involving Bishop Bron of Killaspugbrone, County Sligo. 

There is a charming story told of one Bishop Bron, who, journeying to Brigid with some companions, lost his way. Finding themselves stranded in a wilderness at nightfall, they were forced to sleep in the open. Then all were comforted by the same dream. They thought (as they drowsed in exhausted and chill discomfort) that through the darkness and wild weather they beheld the lights of Brigid's settlement and that, stumbling to it, they saw her come smiling to the cashel gates to lavish upon them the hospitality for which she was famous. First the feet of the footsore guests were washed and then, installed in repose, warmth, security, they were given good food in that delightful atmosphere of solicitude that was peculiarly Brigid’s. So restful was this dream, the pilgrims suffered not in the least from their night’s exposure. They were even refreshed, and with daylight they hopefully resumed their trudge. And lo! at a turn of the road, their hearts soared to see the familiar figure in white driving towards them. Brigid, having been supernaturally warned, had come out to rescue them from their plight.

 Bishop Bron featured in another miracle involving Saint Brigid, which Alice Curtayne does not recount in her book, but which you can find on the blog here.  

Alice Curtayne ends her chapter on Brigid and the Bishops with this tribute: 

Brigid’s achievements and power, when contrasted with her total lack of training, stand out most singularly. In this display of creative genius, she had plainly divine gifts.The bishops did not wait for a decree of canonisation to acclaim what was so manifest to all men. But when it was discovered that she possessed, too, a genuine discernment of souls, people began to flock to her from all sides. Not the bishops only, but all the great in the land, pagans and Christians, and the humble, too, sought her out.

Alice Curtayne, St. Brigid of Ireland (Dublin, 1933). 

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Brigid and the Bishops

 

First Edition of St Brigid of Ireland by Alice Curtayne

'Brigid and the Bishops' is the title of Chapter IV of Alice Curtayne's biography St Brigid of Ireland.  In recent years much has been made by the supporters of women's ordination of the episode in her hagiography where, receiving her profession as a nun, the bishop accidentally read the office of episcopal consecration over her. In 1934 an Australian reviewer of St Brigid of Ireland wrote 

This study of Saint Brigid is written in the new method of hagiography of which the author is one of the pioneers among the English-reading public. 

and so, I was interested to see how Alice Curtayne approached the idea of 'Brigid the Bishop'. She begins her chapter by noting:

 It was the practice of Celtic Christianity that a bishop only could receive the vows of nuns. When Brigid became a nun, then, there began her first friendship with bishops, which was to develop later into a kind of fellowship with the episcopacy—one of the most curious features of her life. Ten or twelve years before her birth, Saint Patrick had already established the Irish Hierarchy under the primacy of Armagh. That hierarchy appears to have immediately discerned Brigid and received her, without hesitation, on terms of equality. Of struggles with ecclesiastical authority— sorrowful commonplace in the lives of later saints —there is no trace in Brigid’s career...

 ... Although Patrick himself is not to be counted among the bishop preceptors, counsellors and friends who thronged about Brigid, let it be remembered that these included the Apostle’s closest friends. Brigid was intimate with Patrick's intimates, so that even though she was not personally acquainted with him, the statements in the old “Lives” representing them as of one mind and heart, still remain strictly true.

After recounting Saint Brigid's close friendship with Bishop Erc of Slane, depicted in hagiography as one of Saint Patrick's earliest and most important converts, and noting that 'a great many of Brigid's chariot journeys were undertaken under Erc's direction', Curtayne then grasps the nettle of Brigid's own status:

 The importance assumed by Brigid in the eyes of the episcopacy has given rise to at least one absurd legend, which must be dismissed. It is sometimes said that Brigid “appointed” Conlaeth to Kildare, almost as though she had conferred episcopal jurisdiction upon him. Worse, it is even stated in one Irish “Life” that Brigid herself was a bishop, the anomaly being explained by the fact that at her profession the rite of episcopal consecration was read over her in mistake; it is added with circumstantial detail that Maccaille protested to Mel, saying a bishop’s order should not be conferred on a woman, and that Mel answered it was clearly the work of God in this case and should stand! 

It is true that Brigid’s chief foundation, Kildare, preserved for many centuries a double line of succession of abbesses and bishops; and it is equally true that for long the nomination of the Bishop of Kildare appeared to be subject to some extent to the Abbess’s approval. But of course Brigid was not a bishop, nor was it in her power to confer episcopal jurisdiction. What emerges from this legend is what gave rise to it: her strong-mindedness, and the deference ungrudgingly accorded her by the episcopacy. She was the admired friend and the counsellor of bishops. What more natural than that the old Irish writer should assume that she was even a bishop herself, although it happened by accident!  

Now, of course modern scholars would offer a fuller analysis of the governance of Kildare and set the story of Brigid's own episcopal claims in the context of later historical developments, such as the struggle between Kildare and Armagh for primacy in the Irish church. But Alice Curtayne was right to point out that hagiography depicts Saint Brigid as having enjoyed a friendship of equals with the bishops, even though there is no evidence that she or any other woman actually exercised the office of bishop.

 

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"What is Brigid to us, or we to Brigid, that we should seek to know her?"

 

St Brigid by Leo Whelan

Yesterday, Alice Curtayne left us with the question "What is Brigid to us, or we to Brigid, that we should seek to know her?"  It was one she posed in the 1930s but one which remains current in the 2020s and below is her answer:

But there is a whole series of surprises - so great as to be akin to shocks - awaiting those who set out on a determined rediscovery of Brigid. The first shock is suffered in finding out her triumphant, her everlasting, her placid modernity. She presents an eternal example of feminine achievement, such as to astonish the most extreme of our modern feminists. We have never approached it. For she asserted herself against a set of circumstances so formidably adverse to self-expression that the present times can provide no parallel to them. The clearer grows Brigid's story, the more splendid becomes her effort. We find that, after all, we have nothing to add to her accomplishment in the domain of human endeavour and that - in the best sense - she can still lead womankind, as she led it fifteen hundred years ago. 

 Isn't it interesting to see Saint Brigid associated with feminism and modernity in 1935? Alice Curtayne affirms here her view of the uniqueness of Saint Brigid, the woman and of her achievement. And she is not done yet:

When Brigid had overcome the adverse circumstances which would have confined her, she used her freedom in a way that will greatly surprise every student of the present day who seeks to piece together her story. Already, in that remote fifth century, we find her doing all those things which the world shouts in our ears as the discovery and boast of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With independence of mind and energy, Brigid undertook the organisation and the defence of women, and thus became the saviour of the feminine ascetic movement in Ireland. But she was much more than a mere organiser. She was a literary and a cultural inspiration. Foundress of the famous school of Kildare, she was a promotor of craftsmanship. There were artists turning out croziers, chalices and shrines, and illuminating manuscripts because of Brigid's self-emancipation. She had a circle of friends who represented that which Christian history calls a school of mystics, and which the modern world might describe as a salon. But with all this activity, she remains the patron of agricultural life, for throughout her whole career she was never disassociated from cows and sheep and the labour of the fields. In all those spheres of action where we are gropingly trying to reconstruct at the the present day, Brigid was a pioneer. 

Alice Curtayne, 'The Rediscovery of Saint Brigid', The Irish Monthly, Vol. 63, No. 745 (Jul., 1935), pp. 412-420. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20513775  

Whilst one could certainly argue that there is a hyperbolic element in Alice Curtayne's record of Saint Brigid's achievements, nevertheless it remains quite a tribute to a woman, written by a woman in the 1930s. As a male contemporary reviewer, Aodh de Blacam, noted "Miss Curtayne's Brigid is a great nun - great in soul, great in labour, great in her achievement and influence." For me she is a much more compelling figure than the feminist goddess of our own times. 

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Rediscovering Saint Brigid

St Brigid by P.J. Tuohy 1924-25

 

I am staying today with Alice Curtayne's 1935 article on 'Rediscovering Saint Brigid'. I find this paper particularly intriguing as I struggled to appreciate her perception that the memory of Saint Brigid had faded. Saint Brigid was very much a part of the nineteenth/early twentieth century Celtic Revival's rediscovery of the Irish saints as a whole. Canon O'Hanlon, for example, had published a substantial biography of her in 1877 under the title Life of St. Brigid, Virgin: First abbess of Kildare, Special Patroness of Kildare Diocese, and General Patroness of Ireland. Thirty years later Augustinian Father J.A. Knowles published his Saint Brigid, a work running to almost 300 pages. In addition, Cardinal Moran, who had obtained a relic of Saint Brigid's tooth from Cologne for the Brigidine sisters in the 1880s, included her in a series of pamphlets on all three of the Irish patrons published by the Australian Catholic Truth Society in 1905. There are many other examples of poems, articles and stories from the popular religious and secular press which might also be cited. So, I think it is fair to say that in the fifty years before Alice Curtayne's article appeared Saint Brigid had not been overlooked or forgotten. Now in fairness, as we saw in yesterday's extract, she begins by saying 'I do not say that Ireland had forgotten her, but we were very ignorant of her, and very unconcerned about our ignorance'. She goes on to say:

Saint Brigid! To the majority of our people she is still only a name: a beautiful name, because it is musical and has antiquity.There is a vague notion current that it connotes strength of some kind, so it is cheerfully passed on to children and the donors are content. To others, that name resounding like a knell from our remotest past, is backed by some vague abstraction suggested by the artist: Saint Brigid is a shadowy personage (garbed in red Tuohy supposed!), grasping a crozier, or holding a miniature model of a church, and gazing serenely into vacancy....

 As Curtayne sees it, the deficiencies in iconography are only a part of the problem:

The person of Saint Brigid is still obscured from view in the mists of ancient history, and it is really only by an extreme effort of mind that people can believe there is reality behind that name: that Brigid really "lived, moved and had her being," that she had a distinctive personality with which it is highly important we should restore communion. It is important to us a nation. Sometimes it seems that our only way of survival lies through this restoration of the Celtic Christian mind.

They err who imagine that this personage of our early history cannot bring us any enlightenment in our modern complexities. It is supposed that, whatever her reality may have been, she is now too remote from us, too severed by the gulf of centuries and the vicissitudes of history, to hold any practical guidance for us in our present welter. The general attitude, never expressed - naturally- but quite clearly implied, is: "What is Brigid to us, or we to Brigid, that we should seek to know her?"  

 Alice Curtayne, 'The Rediscovery of Saint Brigid', The Irish Monthly, Vol. 63, No. 745 (Jul., 1935), pp. 412-420. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20513775 

So, it seems that for Alice Curtayne it was not that the name of Saint Brigid had been forgotten, rather it was the reality behind that name. In tomorrow's posting we will look at some of the answers the writer offered to the questions she has posed here.

  

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