The Irish government recently declared a national holiday for St. Brigid. A medieval historian explains her fascinating life and history.
St. Brigid of Kildare's shrine in Faughart, County Louth, Ireland. (Photo by RDImages/Epics/ Hulton Archive via Getty Images
So who is St. Brigid?Unlike Patrick, who came from Britain, Brigid was born in Ireland, sometime around A.D. 450, the child of a slave and a king in the province of Leinster. Even after her death, miracles supposedly continued to occur at her shrine. In fact, Brigid’s intervention from beyond the grave helped builders gather materials to build a new and magnificent shrine for her at Kildare, or so wrote Cogitosus. She guided an immovable boulder down a hill to her community for their new millstone. She caused a problematic door to hang correctly. These were minor but useful miracles – typical, I would argue, of the sensible saint.
Around the same time that these hagiographers worked, Brigid’s cult center at Kildare became one of the wealthiest and most powerful religious communities in Ireland. Cogitosus wrote that Kildare was “the head of virtually all the Irish churches and occupies the first place, excelling all the monasteries of the Irish. Its jurisdiction extends over the whole land of Ireland from sea to sea.”
In the 19th century, when Irish nationalists sought a symbol of their Catholicism and country in the budding fight for independence, they chose the missionary bishop and founder of Armagh. A national holiday was declared in 1903 to honor St. Patrick.
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