Great Life Work of Saint Brigid

A handsome tribute to the legacy of Saint Brigid and to her famous foundation at Kildare from the pen of Bishop Thomas Joseph Shahan, rector of the Catholic University of America. Bishop Shahan was born in 1857 to a family who had emigrated to America from Killarney in the late 1840s. It is obvious from his article, syndicated in the New Zealand press, that he retained a deep awareness of his Irish roots and he takes a high view not only of Ireland's most famous female saint but of Irish womanhood in general. We also see the influence of racial theories which ascribed 'a natural racial mysticism' to the Gael. This piece was published in 1917 when such views were commonplace, but the idea of the dreamy, innately spiritual Gael, who has a special awareness of the thin barrier separating this world and the next, never did go away completely and resurfaced in the "Celtic Christianity" movement of recent decades:

“After St. Patrick,” says Bishop Shahan, of the Catholic University, “it is a woman, St. Brigid, who has done more than any one else to fashion the life of medieval Ireland. Throughout all the Middle Ages, the Abbess of Kildare is one of the great powers of Ireland, for she represents Brigid, just as the Archbishop of Armagh represents St. Patrick. The art of Ireland is largely an outgrowth from Kildare, and that glorious old abbey was for ages a centre of humanity and charity, as well as a refuge of virtue and genius. There was no more awful public crime than the violation of this national sanctuary, more venerable than ever were Dodona and Ephesus, and it may be said without fear of contradiction that this old monastery of Kildare, which was already venerable when Charlemagne began to reign, has done more for the elevation of women and the formation of a Christian public opinion in her regard than any other similar institution of the Middle Ages. So great was the medieval Irish veneration for this holy place that when the bishops of Ireland assembled in council they placed the Abbess of Kildare on a throne higher than their own, as a token of respect for Brigid, who had been the counsellor of the bishops of Ireland while she lived. 

Across the pages of all the Irish annals, from St. Patrick to the Reformation, there moves a long procession of grave and virtuous daughters of Erin, and we feel instinctively that they were the salt of the earth and the light thereof in many a century of blind and endless warfare, and we cease to wonder at the millions of pure and lovely women whom Ireland has bestowed with generous hand upon the peoples of the New World, to be the mothers of a spiritually minded race, and to preserve forever that lovely Christian idea of the highest womanhood, in which innocence and beauty are only the visible workings of refined religious hearts, and in which a natural racial mysticism blossoms out into the purest love of, God and the most intense personal relationship with that other world which is above and beyond coarse, perishable matter, and in which the Gael has never ceased to live, by his imagination and his desires.

”GREAT LIFE WORK OF ST. BRIGID, New Zealand Tablet, 27 September 1917

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