It is that time of year again. Or rather, it is one of those times of year again, where I rail against the appropriation of Ireland’s Christian heritage by elements who co-opt religious Feast Days for secular enjoyment.
We are becoming accustomed – inured almost – to the annual attempts to re-cast Christmas as a ‘winter festival’ or a generic ‘holiday’. St Patrick’s Day has been overtaken as the national holiday celebrating Irishness, or some reductive form of self-congratulations.
But it is St Brigid’s Day, marking and honouring Ireland’s foremost female saint, that has been seen its identity most forcefully and deliberately challenged. In 2023, St Brigid’s Day was marked as a public holiday for the first time, following a campaign to have a national holiday of female identity balancing the honour that is afforded St Patrick. After all, Ireland already had three holidays dedicated to men – Christmas, St Patrick and St Stephen’s days. Ireland needed a holiday that identified as female. But identifying as Christian was problematic.
Carelessness
To lose one feast day may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. While St Patrick’s Day and the accompanying drunken celebration has morphed through a gradual cultural drift, accidental almost, St Brigid’s Day has been subject to something a much more deliberate appropriation.
St Brigid’s Day is celebrated on February 1, the first day of Spring, and the date of a pre-Christian festival, Imbolc, and thus the argument is put forward that Irish Christianity had gazumped the pagan population by taking over this day. The Celtic goddess, Brigit, whom even less is known about than the Irish saint, is first mentioned in the 10th Century, over 500 years after the birth of the Christian saint, yet the argument goes that this goddess pre-exists the saint with little or no evidence to back up the assertion.
If an alien were to land in Dublin and review the 80 plus events across the city, they would struggle to find any religious or Christian connection to the festival”
Fr Conor McDonough OP, who has done some research into this is perplexed: “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.”
Marking the first week in February, Dublin City Council, has created a city-wide celebration honouring the women of Ireland, celebrating the coming of spring “inspired by the Celtic goddess, Brigit”. This year is the festival’s fourth edition. If an alien were to land in Dublin and review the 80 plus events across the city, they would struggle to find any religious or Christian connection to the festival.
The alien would ask where the patron saint of midwives, newborns, Irish nuns, fugitives, blacksmiths, dairymaids, boatmen, chicken farmers, cattle, scholars, is represented in the ‘vulva stories’? Where is the representation of her formidable Christian faith and the social justice drive that it inspired in her?
The events are much more a celebration of the pre-Christian Celtic Goddess Brigit than the Christian Brigid. Does any reasonable person believe that the celebration would exist without the real, flesh and blood, person that was Brigid of Kildare? Only if they lie to themselves. Yet, her identity has been stolen to celebrate a mythical Goddess or some legendary figure that has little historical evidence.
Brigid really did exist. Born in the 5th Century, she fought the patriarchy to follow her own path of healing and compassion for the poor and the sick. The most well-known story of Brigid is where she defied the will of her father, a wealthy and powerful landowner. She was in the habit of taking food from her father’s larder to give, surreptitiously, to the destitute. One day, with a slab of meat under her cloak, she was stopped by her father who wanted to know what she was carrying. When she revealed her goods, the meat had transformed into a bundle of flowers and she was off the hook.
Drumbeat
Reflective of modern Ireland, the drumbeat to the festival is inclusivity and universality, spiritualism rather than religion. A real-life feminist, with ideals of looking after the less fortunate, is being erased by modern Ireland, and the only reason for this is because of her Christianity and her part in the story of Christian Ireland. This is the triumph of dubious legend over 1,500 years of real-lived Ireland. It is reflective of the denial of Europe’s Christian heritage by the European Union, a divisive marginalisation of Christian believers and their heritage.
Each celebration of ‘the goddess Brigit’ that is repeated in media and by government entities, ought to sit uncomfortably, knowing that the objective is not mere inclusivity but to establish a hierarchy of worldviews that disfavours Christianity in Ireland, while at the same time slowly erasing the contributions of a skin-and-bone Irishwoman who did great things in the 5th Century, a time that was not very favourable to women.
The festival and the framing of the national holiday is a lie in itself”
The national holiday – that extra day off we all benefit from now – would not exist without St Brigid and her Christian faith. It is dishonest to pretend that anyone would even be thinking about, talking about, or celebrating, any mythical Celtic goddess called Brigit, if Brigid of Kildare and her memory and legacy was not kept alive by the Church down through the years.
Reality
It may not sit well in the throat of Dublin City Council and their new-age celebrators but that is the reality. Any self-respecting Catholic should avoid the events that peddle the myth that St Brigid was preceded by some mythical Celtic Goddess and that this pseudo-divinity is somehow more deserving of our acknowledgments. The festival and the framing of the national holiday is a lie in itself. But it is a lie that will quickly push out the Christian celebrations.
The space afforded to St Brigid is being quickly reduced. Instead of being front and centre, she is becoming a peripheral figure along with the Christianity that she held dear. The myth – the lie – is already being promoted in schools where the flesh-and-blood Brigid is being conflated with a mythical legend is becoming the new reality. It is being promoted with public funds through bodies like Dublin City Council whose festival Brigit: Dublin City Celebrating Women celebrates few, if any, that are representative of Brigid’s Christian legacy.