Jackon South St Richards Catholic Church Annual International Food and Art Festival Miami Fl
As Ireland's Church Retreats, the Cult of a Female Saint Thrives
The cult of Saint Brigid, with its emphasis on nature and healing, and its shift away from the patriarchal religion of traditional Catholicism in Ireland, is alluring people from around the world.
KILDARE, Republic of ireland — Around the yr 480, as legend has it, a freed slave named Brigid founded a convent nether an oak in the east of Ireland. To feed her followers, she asked the King of Leinster, who ruled the expanse, for a grant of land.
When the pagan king refused, she asked him to give her equally 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 notwithstanding stretch beside the religious settlement she founded at Kildare (from the Irish Cill Dara, "church of the oak").
A millennium and a half later on, 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 requite equal status to women.
Much of the revitalized interest is the outcome of the Brigidines' emphasis on nature, ecology and healing, and their shift abroad from the patriarchal religion of traditional Irish Catholicism.
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"People are coming in groups from all effectually the world — interfaith groups, no faith groups, goddess groups, Buddhist monks, all sorts of people," said Sister Rita Minehan, ane of three nuns of the Brigidine Order who in 2015 opened Solas Bhride (the Calorie-free of Brigid), a hermitage and prayer eye on the outskirts of Kildare. "Her legacy is appealing to people again today, I remember because of her alignment with the earth, and because our planet is in danger."
Brigid'due south legend spread far and wide in northwest Europe centuries agone, taken by early Irish missionaries every bit they re-established Christianity later the fall of the Roman Empire. Variations on her proper noun — Brigitte, Breda, Bride, Birgit — are however found wherever their teachings took hold.
Pilgrims from across Ireland long came to Saint Brigid'due south Well, a leap in a marsh most Kildare, to recite formal Catholic prayers and seek the saint's blessing — especially around her feast day, Feb. 1.
But as the cult of Brigid has changed in recent years, and equally more people have flocked to Kildare from around the world, so too has the pattern of prayer.
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At sunset on the eve of Saint Brigid's Twenty-four hour period this twelvemonth, in identify of muttered rosaries, several hundred worshipers, generally women, lit candles from a central flame past the well. They watched as Angela Seoighe, a retired local instructor, hand-wove a giant Saint Brigid's Cross — a twist of rushes or straw that many Irish households still hang every year to protect confronting disease and burn down. 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."
Sis 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.
"Some of them say, are you Catholic nuns? Does the Pope know about y'all?" she said, amused. "And some of them come to us afterward, and say they are agape to say amongst themselves what we are saying aloud."
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Liz Pickard, an office worker from Denver, was raised Episcopalian, merely discovered the story of Brigid on an earlier visit to Ireland. She came to Solas Bhride this year for a weeklong stay in its hermitage.
"I was searching for meaning and she gives then much meaning," Ms. Pickard said. "Correct now, if you become down a sure route with religion, at that place's a lot of pain caused by these people, but with Brigid, I call up in that location's a lot of kindness, and a lot of service and courage."
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Two sisters, Georgina O Briain and Caragh Lawlor, sat in the at-home of Solas Bhride's central prayer space on Saint Brigid'due south Solar day, quietly weaving blitz crosses. They had come up from the neighboring county of Laois to pray for their mother, who was gravely ill.
"Brigid was both Christian and pagan, a mix of the ii, and while I'k non very religious, I am very spiritual, and she brings information technology together for me," Ms. O Briain said.
"There's an onetime proverb: There's room under Brigid's cloak for everyone," Ms. Lawlor said.
Brigid has always saturday at the intersection of legend and history, of folk faith and institutional Catholicism. She shares her name, and her attributes, with a much older pagan deity, the goddess of healing, wisdom, domestic animals and blacksmithing, who was celebrated on one of the 4 bang-up Celtic holy days, Imbolc, marking the cease of wintertime. Imbolc falls on February. 1 — Saint Brigid'due south banquet day.
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Mario Corrigan, a local historian, said that the first writings nearly Brigid date from a century after her fourth dimension. By then, the pagan and Christian figures were already fused.
Tellingly, Brigid's Christian nuns maintained a pagan-style fire shrine on the grounds of her abbey, even after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century, in which the English monarchy imposed strict Roman Catholic doctrine on the independent-minded Celtic church of Brigid, Patrick and Columba — Irelands' trio of patron saints. It was only in the 16th century — when King Henry VIII abolished convents and monasteries and so he could brand himself caput of the Protestant church in Britain and Ireland — that the fire was quenched.
Today, the reputed remains of that burn down shrine, a cleaved Celtic cross and a 105-foot stone round tower, congenital in the age of pillaging Vikings, are the most visible remains of the pre-Reformation settlement. But the Church of Ireland, which is Anglican, maintains a restored stone cathedral on the site of the one-time church, however bearing Brigid's proper noun.
The dean of the cathedral, the Rev. Tim Wright, said that with interest in Brigid increasing, the church would piece of work with the local community to develop the ancient site, just off Kildare's charming master foursquare, equally a religious and tourist attraction.
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A local committee is planning a major celebration of the saint for 2024, the i,500th anniversary of her reputed expiry. And the Irish government announced in January that starting next yr, there will exist a new annual holiday, on or nearly Feb. 1, to marking both Imbolc and Saint Brigid's Solar day. Information technology will exist, the government said, the first Irish gaelic public holiday to honor a woman.
For some Catholic feminists, the new involvement in Brigid reflects the liberalizing Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which appeared to signal an end to the subservient and cloistral role of women in the church.
"Many nuns, similar the Brigidines, became much more engaged with ecological and social issues, and they are as well in bear on with feminist groups effectually the world," said Mary Condren, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin's Center for Gender and Women'south Studies.
Margaret Hebblethwaite, a leading English language author on Cosmic matters, attended this year's acuity at Saint Brigid'south Well.
While she had heard the name of Saint Brigid as a child, Ms. Hebblethwaite had only recently learned that, unusually, Brigid and her female successors governed not just nuns but male monks, as well. Moreover, information technology is believed that Brigid, despite beingness a woman, was ordained as a bishop.
"She is such a model, and so badly needed by the church of today because of the bug of gender equality," Ms. Hebblethwaite said.
In many other Christian churches, those issues accept already been addressed. The Church of Ireland voted in 1990 to permit women to become priests, and in 2013, it appointed its first female person bishop. In December that twelvemonth, the About Rev. Pat Storey became bishop of Meath and Kildare — possibly the beginning woman to hold such a title since Brigid herself.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/world/europe/ireland-church-female-saint-brigid.html
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