Where each saint would be,
How wilt thou smile
Upon Life’s stormy sea.”
[b]“Respect
the Remains of 20,000 Saints
buried near this spot.”
[c] “In hoc loco requiescant in pace.”
When the Bollandist Fathers undertook to write their great work on the Saints of Christendom, they were staggered when they found that Ireland and Wales claimed to have had as many as all the rest of Christendom put together. They say of the Irish, “They would not have been so liberal in canonising dead men in troops whenever they seemed to be somewhat better than usual, if they had adhered to the custom of the Universal Church throughout the world.”
The total number of Welsh saints whose names are known as founders is about five hundred, but there are the twenty thousand whose bones lie in Bardsey, and Bishop Gerald of Mayo is said to have had three thousand three hundred saints under him.
But the fact is, a saint in the Celtic mind was something very different from one as conceived in the Latin Church. He was one who had entered the ecclesiastical profession, and was counted a saint, whatever his moral qualities were. Piro, Abbot of Caldey, tumbled into a well when drunk, and was drowned, but he was regarded as a saint all the same. The title of saint has changed its significance. S. Paul addressed the “saints” at Corinth, but he lets us understand that a good many of them were very disreputable characters, and a scandal even to the heathen. They were saints by vocation, but not by manner of life. In precisely the same way the Welsh called all those saints who took up the religious profession. Whether they were decent, well-conducted saints, that was another matter.