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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