One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

Saints Patrick, Bridget and Columbkill.”

Downpatrick is visited annually by thousands of pilgrims. The town is practically supported by them, and the tomb has to be guarded against vandalism, particularly on Sundays, Good Friday, Easter, and other religious holidays. Relic hunters have carried away tons of earth from about the grave, which they dig up with their fingers or trowels or sticks and consign to bottles, boxes, or baskets. As soon as the cavities become too large, the custodian hauls a cart of soil from the nearest field and fills them up.

It is asserted in the guide book that St. Patrick was never canonized by the pope, and that he is recognized as a saint only by the Irish people. This is a singular assertion. The Roman Catholic prayer book used in Ireland mentions March 17, the feast of St. Patrick, as one of the holy days upon which there is strict obligation to attend mass and to refrain from all unnecessary labor.

According to the best authorities, St. Patrick was born at Nemthur (the Holy Tower), now known as Dumbarton, Scotland, in the year 387, and his father, Palpurn, was a magistrate in the service of the Romans. When he was sixteen, in the year 403, Patrick was taken captive and sold as a slave. A rich man named Milcho brought him to Ireland and employed him to herd sheep and swine in County Antrim. At the end of six years of slavery he escaped, returned to his home and family and then went to a monastic school at Tours, France. After receiving his education and being ordained he went to Rome, where he was blessed by Pope Celestine and commissioned to go to Ireland as a missionary. He landed at the mouth of a little stream called the Slaney, only about two miles from Saul, and settled at Downpatrick, where the chief gave him the use of a sabhall or barn for divine service, and upon that site was erected the famous monastery which took its name, Saul, from the barn. He remained there for several years, teaching and training disciples, and then visited every part of the island, preaching the gospel to the kings and chiefs as well as to the poor half-civilized habitants of the mountains. He founded many churches and monasteries in different places and finally settled down at Armagh as Bishop of Ireland in 457, where he remained for eight years. In March, 465, when he was seventy-eight years old, while paying a visit to the monastery of Saul, the scene of his first ministrations in Ireland, he was seized with a fatal illness and breathed his last. The news of his death was the signal for universal mourning in Ireland, and thousands of the clergy and laity came from the remotest districts to pay their last tributes of love and respect to the greatest of missionaries.

The Village of Downpatrick

St. Bridget, who ranks next to St. Patrick in the veneration of the Irish, was the daughter of a nobleman, and was born at Fochard, a village near Armagh, in the year 453. Her great beauty and her father’s wealth and position caused her to be sought in marriage by several of the princes of Ireland, but early in life she became a convert to the new religion, consecrated herself to its service, and retired to a forest near Kildare, about twenty miles from Dublin. She built herself a cell in the trunk of a great oak, around which grew a great religious community. She died Feb. 1, 525, at the age of seventy-two years. For many years the nuns of Kildare kept a light burning constantly in her memory. “The bright light that shone in Kildare’s holy flame” was suppressed, however, by the Archbishop of Dublin for fear it would be interpreted as a pagan practice.

The body of St. Bridget was originally buried at Kildare, but in the year 1185 was translated with great solemnity to Downpatrick, attended by the pope’s legate, fifteen bishops, and a great number of clergy. Her head was carried to the convent of Neustadt, Austria, and in 1587 was removed to the Church of the Jesuits in Lisbon.

St. Columba, or St. Columbkill, died while kneeling before the altar of his church on the Island of Iona, a little after midnight, Jan. 9, 597. He was originally buried in his monastery, and his body was removed to Downpatrick the same year as that of St. Bridget.