St. Brigid of Ireland

Brigid of Ireland is one of those saints whose historical existence is entirely certain and whose biography is so overgrown with legend that considerable patience is needed to find the woman underneath. She was roughly contemporary with Patrick, probably born around 450 and dying around 525, and she founded the great double monastery at Kildare — a community of both men and women governed under her authority — which became one of the principal centres of Irish monastic life and of Irish art, its scriptorium producing work of lasting quality.

The life assembled from the earliest Irish sources shows a woman of remarkable practical energy: organizing a religious community from nothing, managing what amounted to a small agricultural settlement, receiving visitors from across Ireland, negotiating with local kings, adjudicating disputes. The many miracles attributed to her — the multiplication of food for the poor, the healing of the sick, the beer brewed from water — do what miracle stories in this tradition always do: express something true about the saint's character in the only idiom the culture possessed for such communication. The cheerful abundance of her miracles, their constant connection to feeding the hungry and caring for the destitute, says something real about what Kildare was and what Brigid was within it.

A theological dimension of her cult worth noting is the early parallel drawn between Brigid and the Blessed Virgin. She is sometimes called the Mary of the Irish, the Mary of the Gael, not because the comparison is meant literally but because she occupied in the popular religious imagination of her people something of the same place of maternal intercession that the Virgin held in the universal Church. This title, given to a real abbess and organizer rather than to a purely legendary figure, suggests the depth of genuine holiness that the tradition perceived in her.

The eternal flame kept burning at Kildare, tended by the nuns, is mentioned in records extending across several centuries and was finally extinguished at the suppression of the monastery in the sixteenth century. It remains one of the distinctive and enduring marks of her foundation.