Brigid of Kildare

Venerable Brigid of Kildare was an abbess, founder of the monastery at Kildare and one of the three patron saints of Ireland, with Saint Patrick and Saint Columba. She is honoured as a saint of the undivided Church and remembered on 1 February. Little is known for certain about her, and her oldest lives are full of miracles and traces of older Irish beliefs.

Childhood

The oldest sources are two Irish hymns of the seventh century and Latin lives of the seventh and eighth centuries, among them that of Cogitosus, a monk of Kildare. Tradition says she was born around 451 at Faughart near Dundalk, or in Leinster. Her father, Dubthach, was a Leinster chieftain, and her mother, Broicsech, a Christian slave, baptized, the account says, by Saint Patrick. Brigid was therefore born in bondage. Cogitosus says she spent her youth at work, tending flocks and churning butter.

From childhood she was merciful and gave to the poor from the goods of the house. It is told that her annoyed father took her to the king of Leinster to sell her. While he spoke to the king, she gave her father's jewelled sword to a beggar, so that he could feed his family. The king saw her holiness and persuaded Dubthach to grant her freedom.

The monastery of Kildare

According to tradition, she received the monastic veil at the hands of Saint Mel of Ardagh. Around 480 she founded at Kildare (Cill Dara, "church of the oak") a monastery on land given by a king, the beginning of communal monastic life for women in Ireland. She called the hermit Conleth to help her, and he became the first bishop of Kildare. For centuries the monastery was led by an abbess and a bishop, it had a school of art in which manuscripts, metalwork and textiles were made, and it became a great centre of learning. Brigid founded other convents as well.

She is remembered for her care of the poor and the sick. In a story kept in the Orthodox synaxaria, she spent a whole night speaking of the joys of the Kingdom of Heaven with the blind nun Dara. In the morning, moved by the beauty of the sky, she prayed to the Lord, and Dara received her sight. After a little while the nun asked that her sight be closed again, because, she said, the more clearly the world is seen, the less clearly God is seen by the soul. Brigid prayed again, and Dara was blind once more.

Her friendship with Saint Patrick is recorded in the Book of Armagh. At Kildare a fire was kept burning for centuries in her honour.

Repose and veneration

She departed to the Lord at Kildare, tradition says on 1 February, in the year 523 by some sources (usually given as 524 or 525), after receiving Holy Communion from Saint Ninnidh. She was buried at Kildare, and tradition says her relics were moved to Downpatrick during the Viking raids. Late in the thirteenth century her head was taken to Lumiar near Lisbon, and portions of it returned to Ireland in 1929. The relics that remained in Ireland were destroyed in the sixteenth century.

The Irish call her "Mary of the Gael". She is patron of learning, poets, blacksmiths, healers and cattle. On her day, crosses of Saint Brigid are woven from rushes for the home in Ireland. Since 2023, 1 February has been a public holiday in Ireland.