INTERNATIONAL NYTIMES: In Ireland, the legacy of St. Brigid thrives
KILDARE, Ireland — Around the year 480, as legend has it, a freed slave named Brigid founded a convent under an oak in the east of Ireland. To feed her followers, she asked the King of Leinster, who …More
KILDARE, Ireland — Around the year 480, as legend has it, a freed slave named Brigid founded a convent under an oak in the east of Ireland. To feed her followers, she asked the King of Leinster, who ruled the area, for a grant of land.
When the pagan king refused, she asked him to give her as much land as her cloak would cover. Thinking she was joking, he agreed. But when Brigid threw her cloak on the ground, it spread across 5,000 acres — creating the Curragh plains, which still stretch beside the religious settlement she founded at Kildare (from the Irish Cill Dara, “church of the oak”).
A millennium and a half later, a renewed cult of Saint Brigid is thriving in Kildare, even at a time when the Roman Catholic church is in retreat in Ireland, weakened by clerical sex abuse scandals, growing secularism and — Catholic feminists say — by its refusal, despite a collapse in the numbers of its all-male priesthood, to give equal status to women.
“People are coming in groups from all around …More
When the pagan king refused, she asked him to give her as much land as her cloak would cover. Thinking she was joking, he agreed. But when Brigid threw her cloak on the ground, it spread across 5,000 acres — creating the Curragh plains, which still stretch beside the religious settlement she founded at Kildare (from the Irish Cill Dara, “church of the oak”).
A millennium and a half later, a renewed cult of Saint Brigid is thriving in Kildare, even at a time when the Roman Catholic church is in retreat in Ireland, weakened by clerical sex abuse scandals, growing secularism and — Catholic feminists say — by its refusal, despite a collapse in the numbers of its all-male priesthood, to give equal status to women.
“People are coming in groups from all around …More
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Just me The bad news: “Some of them say, are you Catholic nuns? Does the Pope know about you?” she said, amused. “And some of them come to us afterwards, and say they are afraid to say amongst themselves what we are saying aloud.”
At dusk on the eve of Saint Brigid’s Day this year, in place of muttered rosaries, several hundred worshipers, mostly women, lit candles from a central flame by the …More
Just me The bad news: “Some of them say, are you Catholic nuns? Does the Pope know about you?” she said, amused. “And some of them come to us afterwards, and say they are afraid to say amongst themselves what we are saying aloud.”
At dusk on the eve of Saint Brigid’s Day this year, in place of muttered rosaries, several hundred worshipers, mostly women, lit candles from a central flame by the well. They watched as Angela Seoighe, a retired local teacher, hand-wove a giant Saint Brigid’s Cross — a twist of rushes or straw that many Irish households still hang every year to protect against illness and fire. Another nun from Solas Bhride, Sister Phil O’Shea, recited a new type of prayer.
“The earth is waking from its winter sleep,” she intoned. “Just listen — Brigid brings the spring.”
Sister Rita said that conservative visitors to Solas Bhride, especially from the United States, are sometimes taken aback by the shift in how Brigid is venerated.
At dusk on the eve of Saint Brigid’s Day this year, in place of muttered rosaries, several hundred worshipers, mostly women, lit candles from a central flame by the well. They watched as Angela Seoighe, a retired local teacher, hand-wove a giant Saint Brigid’s Cross — a twist of rushes or straw that many Irish households still hang every year to protect against illness and fire. Another nun from Solas Bhride, Sister Phil O’Shea, recited a new type of prayer.
“The earth is waking from its winter sleep,” she intoned. “Just listen — Brigid brings the spring.”
Sister Rita said that conservative visitors to Solas Bhride, especially from the United States, are sometimes taken aback by the shift in how Brigid is venerated.
