St Laurence O’Toole, a stained glass window in Christ Church Cathedral Laurence O’Toole, Dublin’s Own Special Saint
The Latin Lives of St Laurence of Dublin
edited with critical introduction by Maurice F. Roche
(Four Courts Press, € 45)
Catherine Swift
St Laurence O’Toole is the patron saint of Dublin Archdiocese and, quite apart from the churches which are dedicated to him, such as North Wall, Kilmacud and Baldoyle, many others have stained glass windows, paintings or statues of the saint.
For all of that, the history of St Laurence O’Toole has not been widely studied and Fr Dermot Forristal’s popular biography The Man in the Middle: St Laurence O’Toole (first published in 1988) is the main account currently available.
We owe a particular debt of gratitude, therefore, to the enthusiasts who came together to publish this book. Maurice Roche’s Ph.D thesis on the lives of St Laurence O’Toole was completed in 1981 with the help of his sister, Nellie who typed the manuscript but the university copy was subsequently mislaid.
Connections
His widow, Ms Eileen Phelan, gave the family copy to Fr Ivan Tonge who passed photographs on to Mary Kelly (OPW) and Charles Doherty (UCD). They, in turn, had the photographs turned into digital text. Missing pages were provided by Dr Jesse Harrington of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
St Laurence lived in interesting times in an era where bishops often spent much of their careers as royal administrators”
In a very real sense, therefore, this book represents a labour of love – love not just of the individual scholar for his subject, but of those who went the extra mile to ensure that Dr Roche’s research could be made available to all interested in the early Irish Church.
St Laurence lived in interesting times in an era where bishops often spent much of their careers as royal administrators. Born Lorcán Ua Tuathail, he was brought up in Glendalough where he became abbot at 25. He later was elected Archbishop of Dublin and consecrated by the Archbishop of Armagh in 1162 when the Leinster king, Diarmait mac Murchada (Dermot mac Murrough) controlled the city.
Diarmait was married to Lorcán’s half-sister Mór so that the new archbishop subsequently became uncle-in-law to Earl Richard de Clare (Strongbow) who ruled Dublin from the Norman conquest until his death in 1176. At the same time, Lorcán is identified as the ‘chancellor of the king of Connacht’, Ruaidri Ua Conchobair (Rory O’Connor), in the Treaty of Windsor of 1175 and he died at Eu, in Normandy, in 1180 while bringing Ua Conchobair’s nephew as a hostage to the Angevin court at Le Mans.
The biographical overview provided by Dr Roche is very much of its time in debating the potential role of Irish patriotism in motivating Laurence’s actions; however, his conclusion was that Laurence was a pragmatist who endorsed Realpolitik and co-operation with all secular overlords.
Lives
Despite these political connections, our main sources for Laurence are hagiographic – a collection of Latin lives which Dr Roche argues were drawn up in the thirteenth century and designed to bolster the case for papal canonisation.
A major part of the work is the edition and discussion of four lives termed the Arsenal Life, the Abbeville Life, the Vita Prima and the Vita Secunda. The Arsenal Life is a concise, factual document which Dr Roche believes was commissioned by the Eu canons to provide information on Laurence’s Irish career and may have been compiled by Henry of London, as Archbishop of Dublin, in the early 1220s.
The Abbeville Life can be divided into two parts of which the first is strongly homiletic and exegetical in tone. The second, in contrast, is largely a historical narrative. Dr Roche concluded that the text represents work by John of Abbeville who studied in Paris and later became dean of Amiens, being written between 1215 and 1225. The later additions appear intended to transform John’s work into something closer to a proper biography and mostly deals with the canonisation in Eu.
English historians sometimes produce two-dimensional descriptions of Hubert Walter”
The third life, the longest and most detailed of the four, is termed by Roche the Vita Prima and he believes it was written by a canon of Eu in or shortly after 1226 with the intention of promoting the pilgrimage cult of the newly canonised saint. The Vita Secunda represents the final version and is essentially a revised form of the Vita Prima. English translations are provided for the Arsenal Life and the Vita Prima.
In describing Laurence’s contemporaries, Henry Mahr-Harting noted that English historians sometimes produce two-dimensional descriptions of Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, simply as a royal administrator, enthusiastically raising taxation to pay for Richard the Lionheart’s ransom while contrasting him with the Carthusian monk, Hugh of Lincoln, who is depicted as a spiritual and reform-minded ‘Holy Man’ with no interest in secular politics.
In Laurence O’Toole, these two aspects of the twelfth-century episcopate are inextricably intertwined and Maurice Roche provides us with the evidence necessary to visualise Dublin’s patron saint in all his human complexity.
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St Laurence O’Toole has a place in the popular traditions of Dublin as the city’s own special saint. Living as he did during a very conflicted passage in history soon after the arrival of the Normans in the country and the claims of the King of England to also be the Lord of Ireland this is not surprising.
Today the ancient simply made iron reliquary holding the remains of the saint’s heart is to be found enshrined in a little side chapel off the nave in Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, where it has been since medieval days, through many vicissitudes (including the recent theft of the reliquary in 2012 and its mysterious return by being left down in the Phoenix Park for the police to find in April 2018.)
However, a recent visit left the impression that the shrine today is mostly visited by tourists rather than Dubliners, who in fact are missing out on a relic that provides a long sense of continuity with the city’s past to all those sensitive to the movements of Irish history.
Dr Catherine Swift Lectures in medieval Irish history at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.