Introduction to Christian Ireland

By Dr. Peter Harbison

Christianity has been with us in Ireland since even before the days of St. Patrick in the fifth century, and some of the highlights of its history - ecclesiastical and architectural - are closely associated with the western province of Connacht, which is the focus of this brochure.

 

The gradual and peaceful transition from paganism and its heathen gods to Christianity with Jesus and his saints can be followed at Croagh Patrick in County Mayo. There the heathen festival in honour of Lug, the good god of the prehistoric Celts, which marked the start of harvesttime around the beginning of August, was transformed peacefully into a Christian pilgrimage on the last Sunday in July to honour St. Patrick, Ireland’s national apostle, who – according to tradition – mounted the summit, as modern pilgrims do, and spent forty days fasting there.

 

A most important development that took place only decades after his death was the growth and spread of monasteries across the country which were, in due course, to become the religious leaders of Ireland for seven centuries to come, and to be the fosterers of Irish arts, crafts and literature, as well as being the recorders of the ancient history and traditions of Ireland. That development apparently started on the Aran Islands, those jewels of Galway Bay, where St. Enda is said to have founded a monastery even before the end of the fifth century, the first swallow that led to a glorious summer. The islands clearly became a magnet for pious pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages, as they are today for their more secular followers.

 

Pilgrimage and its goals are themes which can be followed like a silver thread in the history of Connacht’s Christianity. St Brendan, the great Irish navigator whose name was a byword throughout Christian Europe, was buried close to the Galway bank of the Shannon at Clonfert. Pilgrims venerated his relics there for centuries and, in doing so, passed through the portals of Ireland’s most lavish doorway decorated in the Romanesque style, which was built sometime around 1200. That same style experienced a grand and final expression in the architectural sculpture of masons known as ‘The School of the West’. One of their masterpieces is Ballintubber Abbey in Mayo, founded by a king of Connacht in 1216 for the Augustinian monks to use as a base for organising the pilgrimages to the summit of Croagh Patrick more than twenty miles away which have recently been revived. The apparition of the Virgin Mary to a group of people outside the church of Knock in 1879 has again made Mayo the centre of a different and well-organised kind of pilgrimage – an outpouring of deep-felt faith by those who flock there in their thousands by land, but also by air to the nearby airport created to cater for overseas visitors.

 

The old Irish monasteries, some with Round Towers like that at Kilmacduagh in South Galway, had become lax in their religious practices by the eleventh century and were in need of reform. Many changes were carried out during the following century through church-state cooperation and with the help of new European religious orders such as the Augustinians (already encountered at Ballintubber) and, more particularly, the Cistercians who spearheaded the movement to get back to the more ascetic tradition of early monasticism. Their first major foundation in Connacht was at Boyle in County Roscommon, where the church, which was sixty years a’building. It shows the transition from Romanesque to Gothic style, with architectural sculpture produced partially by masons of ‘The School of the West’.

 

But there were also other new monastic orders who were to play an important role in preaching and practising the Word of God in the West of Ireland during the Later Middle Ages. These include the Dominicans, who founded the ‘Abbey’ at Roscommon, and the Franciscans, whose Third Order foundation at Rosserk in Mayo is a compact example of their buildings which helped to link friars and their faithful flocks in prayer and education of the young, particularly in the Irish countryside. That same spirit still breathes through the magical Connemara landscape at Kylemore, where the Irish Benedictine nuns, who had been founded in 1665, moved to open a convent in 1920 and conduct a school for girls in a romantic lake-side castle.

 

The Suppression of the Monasteries by king Henry VIII around 1540 meant that the medieval religious foundations virtually came to an end, but the new Protestant religion fortunately saved some of the older churches by continuing to use them for divine services. Clonfert Cathedral, already mentioned, is one example. Another is the church of St Nicholas in the centre of Galway city, which is the best preserved of all the urban parish churches of medieval Ireland, and one that shows a high quality of stone carving in its ornamentation.

 

After the Reformation, Catholics lost out politically, though forming the majority of the country’s population, and did not come into their own again until the early nineteenth century when, after attaining their religious freedom, they started to build a myriad of stone churches, often with very tall spires, as can be seen in the Cathedral at Ballaghaderreen.

 

The Galwayman Edward Martyn launched a campaign at the turn of the twentieth century to replace foreign stained glass in these churches with the work of Irish artists and craftsmen, at first at his own church at Labane, and later with greatest success in the Catholic Cathedral of St. Brendan in Loughrea, where the finest fruit of his campaign was evident in the works of the studio known as An Túr Gloine (Tower of Glass), which produced some of Ireland’s best stained-glass artists of the twentieth century. That tradition of high-quality coloured glass has found more recent expression in the windows of the Catholic Cathedral in Galway city, where two waves of creativity in this field, one in the mid- 1960s and the other within the last decade, are arguably the highlights of the Cathedral’s interior. But Martyn’s example was not followed everywhere. A return to Italian-based ornamentation so typical of the nineteenth century was, however, achieved with great effect in the memorial church in Roscommon town, which is among the finest twentieth-century parish churches anywhere in the country.

 

 

Dr. Peter Harbison