Renata Steffens
The Young Adults Rathmines prayer group based in Co. Dublin gathered on January 28 for a formation talk on St Brigid. Afterwards the group built St Brigid crosses with paper straws. Pictured is Tania Niño holding a St Brigid cross made on the day. A Dominican scholar has questioned the “erasure” of St Brigid in favour of a pagan deity “who might never even have been venerated in Ireland” by Dublin City Council (DCC).
DCC are currently promoting a city-wide celebration of “women past and present inspired by the Celtic goddess Brigit”, from Friday January 31 – February 3.
Fr Conor McDonough OP, who is a PhD student at the University of Galway working on biblical exegesis in early medieval Ireland, highlighted on social media: “The erasure of the historical Brigit continues apace [by DCC]. She existed, she was a nun, she was powerful, and prayerful, and deeply consequential in her own time and beyond. Why marginalise her in favour of a deity who might never even have been venerated in Ireland?”
Fr McDonough previously said: “It’s really quite incredible how this paper-thin theory became so widely accepted. We know almost nothing about the pagan divinity identified as Brigid in the 10th-century text, Sanas Cormaic. Brigid there is described as a goddess worshipped by poets, while her sister, also Brigid, is a goddess of medics, and another sister, Brigid again, is a goddess of blacksmiths. That’s it; that’s all we know. We don’t know whether there was really a cult of Brigit(s) in pre-Christian Ireland, all we have is this very late report, written at a time when Irish intellectuals were actively fabricating elements of the pagan Irish past.”